Mapping Inequality in an Era of Neoliberalism
Mapping Inequality in an Era of Neoliberalism

Author: Stephen Valocchi

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-09-20

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1040106463

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Offering a unique, comprehensive, and critical introduction to increasingly visible social inequalities, this textbook examines the political and economic causes and cultural consequences of a stratifying system that allocates material resources and human dignity on the basis of private profit and labor exploitation. Mapping Inequality in an Era of Neoliberalism foregrounds capitalism as the major source of the power relations in the United States, as a class system that serves the dominant vector of inequality and sets the parameters of social mobility. The book starts with racialized capitalist power and shows how this power is constituted in structures of opportunity and constraint. It also uses ethnographic accounts to “flip the script” to show how individuals in the class structure construct identities. Providing students with tools for understanding, Valocchi engagingly introduces many of the crucial concepts in this area of sociology – power, opportunity structures, ideology, social and cultural capitals, and intersectional class identities – connecting them as part of a uniquely critical approach.

Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism

Author: Damien Cahill

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-08-31

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0745695566

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For over three decades neoliberalism has been the dominant economic ideology. While it may have emerged relatively unscathed from the global financial crisis of 2007-8, neoliberalism is now - more than ever - under scrutiny from critics who argue that it has failed to live up to its promises, creating instead an increasingly unequal and insecure world. This book offers a nuanced and probing analysis of the meaning and practical application of neoliberalism today, separating myth from reality. Drawing on examples such as the growth of finance, the role of corporate power and the rise of workfare, the book advances a balanced but distinctive perspective on neoliberalism as involving the interaction of ideas, material economic change and political transformations. It interrogates claims about the impending death of neoliberalism and considers the sources of its resilience in the current climate of political disenchantment and economic austerity. Clearly and accessibly written, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars across the social sciences.

Is Inequality in America Irreversible?
Is Inequality in America Irreversible?

Author: Chuck Collins

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2018-05-29

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781509522507

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We are living in a time of extreme inequality: America’s three richest people now own as much wealth as the bottom half of the population. Although most accept that this is grotesque, many politicians accept it as irreversible. In this book, leading US researcher and activist Chuck Collins succinctly diagnoses the drivers of rampant inequality, arguing that such disparities have their roots in 40 years of the powerful rigging the system in their favor. He proposes a far-reaching policy agenda, analyzes the barriers to progress, and shows how transformative local campaigns can become a national movement for change. This book is a powerful analysis of how the plutocracy sold us a toxic lie, and what we can do to reverse inequality.

White Power and American Neoliberal Culture
White Power and American Neoliberal Culture

Author: Patricia Ventura

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-04-11

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 0520392795

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"White Power and American Neoliberal Culture uncovers the intersection of two seemingly separate cultural forces in the US: white power ideology and neoliberalism. Working through artifacts such as utopian fiction, manifestos written by white power terrorists, neoliberal think tank reports, and neoconservative policy statements, the authors analyze the current forms of white supremacy and neoliberal racial capitalism to show how they reinforce each other by fetishizing the white family. Drawing on scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, the book contextualizes the increase of both white ethnonationalism and social and economic inequality that mark the US in the 2020s"--

Solidarity Economics
Solidarity Economics

Author: Manuel Pastor

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2021-10-25

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9781509544073

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Traditional economics is built on the assumption of self-interested individuals seeking to maximize personal gain. This is far from the whole story, however: sharing, caring and a desire to uphold the collective good are also powerful individual motives. In a world wracked by inequality, social divisions, and ecological destruction, can we build an alternative economics based on our mutual co-operation? In this book Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor invite us to imagine and create a new sort of solidarity economics – an approach grounded in our instincts for connection and community – and in so doing, actually build a more robust, sustainable, and equitable economy. They argue that our current economy is already deeply dependent on mutuality, but that the inequality and fragmentation created by the status quo undermines this mutuality and with it our economic wellbeing. They outline the theoretical framing, policy agenda, and social movements we need to revive solidarity and apply it to whole societies. Solidarity Economics is an essential read for anyone who longs for an economy that can generate prosperity, provide for all, and preserve the planet.

Crisis and Inequality
Crisis and Inequality

Author: Mattias Vermeiren

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2021-02-11

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1509537708

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Spiralling inequality since the 1970s and the global financial crisis of 2008 have been the two most important challenges to democratic capitalism since the Great Depression. To understand the political economy of contemporary Europe and America we must, therefore, put inequality and crisis at the heart of the picture. In this innovative new textbook Mattias Vermeiren does just this, demonstrating that both the global financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis resulted from a mutually reinforcing but ultimately unsustainable relationship between countries with debt-led and export-led growth models, models fundamentally shaped by soaring income and wealth inequality. He traces the emergence of these two growth models by giving a comprehensive overview, deeply informed by the comparative and international political economy literature, of recent developments in the four key domains that have shaped the dynamics of crisis and inequality: macroeconomic policy, social policy, corporate governance and financial policy. He goes on to assess the prospects for the emergence of a more egalitarian and sustainable form of democratic capitalism. This fresh and insightful overview of contemporary Western capitalism will be essential reading for all students and scholars of international and comparative political economy.

Why Race Still Matters
Why Race Still Matters

Author: Alana Lentin

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2020-04-22

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 1509535721

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'Why are you making this about race?' This question is repeated daily in public and in the media. Calling someone racist in these times of mounting white supremacy seems to be a worse insult than racism itself. In our supposedly post-racial society, surely it’s time to stop talking about race? This powerful refutation is a call to notice not just when and how race still matters but when, how and why it is said not to matter. Race critical scholar Alana Lentin argues that society is in urgent need of developing the skills of racial literacy, by jettisoning the idea that race is something and unveiling what race does as a key technology of modern rule, hidden in plain sight. Weaving together international examples, she eviscerates misconceptions such as reverse racism and the newfound acceptability of 'race realism', bursts the 'I’m not racist, but' justification, complicates the common criticisms of identity politics and warns against using concerns about antisemitism as a proxy for antiracism. Dominant voices in society suggest we are talking too much about race. Lentin shows why we actually need to talk about it more and how in doing so we can act to make it matter less.

Mapping Geographies of Violence
Mapping Geographies of Violence

Author: Heather A. Kitchin Dahringer

Publisher: Fernwood Publishing

Published: 2021-01-29T00:00:00Z

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 1773634747

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The contributors to Mapping Geographies of Violence explore the multi-layered meaning of violence and the various ways it occupies our daily lives, be they overt, institutional, structural or covert. With an eye towards social justice, each chapter offers a discrete definition of violence and provides readers with a range of theoretical orientations, from social psychology, symbolic interactionism and Marxism to discourse analysis. From these perspectives, several examples of violence are explored: anti-feminism, police raids, gendered violence, mental illness, sex work and poverty. Mapping Geographies of Violence presents readers with a larger understanding and analysis of how violence, far from just an expression of individuals or groups, is rooted in social constructs like class, patriarchy and racism.

Karl Polanyi
Karl Polanyi

Author: Gareth Dale

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2010-06-21

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0745640710

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Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation is generally acclaimed as being among the most influential works of economic history in the twentieth century, and remains as vital in the current historical conjuncture as it was in his own. In its critique of nineteenth-century ‘market fundamentalism’ it reads as a warning to our own neoliberal age, and is widely touted as a prophetic guidebook for those who aspire to understand the causes and dynamics of global economic turbulence at the end of the 2000s. Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market is the first comprehensive introduction to Polanyi’s ideas and legacy. It assesses not only the texts for which he is famous – prepared during his spells in American academia – but also his journalistic articles written in his first exile in Vienna, and lectures and pamphlets from his second exile, in Britain. It provides a detailed critical analysis of The Great Transformation, but also surveys Polanyi’s seminal writings in economic anthropology, the economic history of ancient and archaic societies, and political and economic theory. Its primary source base includes interviews with Polanyi’s daughter, Kari Polanyi-Levitt, as well as the entire compass of his own published and unpublished writings in English and German. This engaging and accessible introduction to Polanyi’s thinking will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences, providing a refreshing perspective on the roots of our current economic crisis.

Foucault and Neoliberalism
Foucault and Neoliberalism

Author: Daniel Zamora

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-01-06

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 1509501800

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Michel Foucault's death in 1984 coincided with the fading away of the hopes for social transformation that characterized the postwar period. In the decades following his death, neoliberalism has triumphed and attacks on social rights have become increasingly bold. If Foucault was not a direct witness of these years, his work on neoliberalism is nonetheless prescient: the question of liberalism occupies an important place in his last works. Since his death, Foucault's conceptual apparatus has acquired a central, even dominant position for a substantial segment of the world's intellectual left. However, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, Foucault's attitude towards neoliberalism was at least equivocal. Far from leading an intellectual struggle against free market orthodoxy, Foucault seems in many ways to endorse it. How is one to understand his radical critique of the welfare state, understood as an instrument of biopower? Or his support for the pandering anti-Marxism of the so-called new philosophers? Is it possible that Foucault was seduced by neoliberalism? This question is not merely of biographical interest: it forces us to confront more generally the mutations of the left since May 1968, the disillusionment of the years that followed and the profound transformations in the French intellectual field over the past thirty years. To understand the 1980s and the neoliberal triumph is to explore the most ambiguous corners of the intellectual left through one of its most important figures.