Browsing by Subject "Neoliberalism"

Now showing 1 - 18 of 18

Open Access
Causes and consequences of crisis in the eurozone periphery
(Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2018) Parker, O.; Tsarouhas, Dimitris
This volume considers the political economy dynamics that both caused and were precipitated by the Eurozone crisis in four of the hardest-hit so-called periphery country cases—Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece. This introduction focuses on the broader structures that underpinned the Eurozone crisis, whereas the chapters that follow zoom in on domestic cases. It argues that a single currency designed in accordance with neoliberal ‘efficient market’ ideas was at the heart of the crisis, exacerbating dangerous economic divergences between a so-called core of creditor states and periphery of debtor states. Responses to the crisis were, it is suggested, premised on the very same neoliberal ideas and made matters worse for a struggling ‘periphery’. More effective responses exist in theory, but are politically difficult in practice.
Open Access
Development and quality of life in Turkey: how globalization, religion, and economic growth influence individual well-being
(SAGE Publications Inc., 2016) Sandıkcı, Ö.; Peterson M.; Ekici, A.; Simkins, T.
Recently, scholars have been calling attention to the macro-social and institutional structures shaping development and welfare. In this study we offer a socio-temporally situated understanding of quality of life (QOL) in a developing country setting and investigate the effects of macro structures on consumer well-being. Specifically, we focus on neoliberal development (led by the business sector, rather than led or directed by the government) and examine how a neoliberal transformation of the marketplace affects consumers’ QOL perceptions. The context of our research is Turkey, a developing country that has been an avid follower of neoliberal policies since the 1990s. We focus on three key macro-social developments that have been shaping Turkish society in the past decades – globalization, religion, and economic growth – and seek to understand how these forces influence consumers’ satisfaction with life. Our study contributes to the literature on development and QOL by first, showing the moderating effect of income, and second, introducing faith and global brands as important variables in conceptualizing QOL.
Open Access
The discourses of marketing and development: towards 'critical transformative marketing research'
(Taylor and Francis, 2014-09) Tadajewski, M.; Chelekis, J.; DeBerry-Spence, B.; Figueiredo, B.; Kravets, O.; Nuttavuthisit, K.; Peñaloza, L.; Moisander, J.
In order to understand the connection between development, marketing and transformative consumer research (TCR), with its attendant interest in promoting human well-being, this article begins by charting the links between US ‘exceptionalism’, ‘Manifest Destiny’ and modernisation theory, demonstrating the confluence of US perspectives and experiences in articulations and understandings of the contributions of marketing practice and consumer research to society. Our narrative subsequently engages with the rise of social marketing (1960s-) and finally TCR (2006-). We move beyond calls for an appreciation of paradigm plurality to encourage TCR scholars to adopt a multiple paradigmatic approach as part of a three-pronged strategy that encompasses an initial ‘provisional moral agnosticism’. As part of this stance, we argue that scholars should value the insights provided by multiple paradigms, turning each paradigmatic lens sequentially on to the issue of the relationship between marketing, development and consumer well-being. After having scrutinised these issues using multiple perspectives, scholars can then decide whether to pursue TCR-led activism. The final strategy that we identify is termed ‘critical intolerance’.
Open Access
Energy policies of Turkey in triangle of the USA, the EU, and Russia
(2010) Kumaş, Gizem
This thesis aims to understand what motivates energy policies of Turkey with respect to three main actors in the world system, the USA, the EU and Russia in the light of two international relations theories; neorealism and neoliberalism. After giving detailed energy profile of Turkey, in the thesis, neorealism is utilized or energy relations between Turkey and the US, whereas neoliberalism is used to analyze energy relations of Turkey with the EU and Russia. The study reaches to a conclusion that energy politics compose a significant share for relations between states and in this context according neorealism the result would come up as little cooperation and according to neoliberalism, as middle cooperation considering gains and interests of the actors.
Open Access
From informal housing to apartment housing: exploring the ‘new social’ in a gecekondu rehousing project, Turkey
(Routledge, 2019) Erman, Tahire
This article engages with the question of the ‘new social’ that emerges in the relocation of the poor in slum renewal projects. Drawing upon both Lefebvre’s theorization of abstract space of capital and social space of people, and the neoliberal framework in which the economic dominates the social, the complex relationship between the spatial and the social embedded in political economy is demonstrated. In the Turkish context, the ‘new social’ is situated at the intersection of spatial transformations, housing representations, neoliberalism and Islam. In the housing estate of the case study, the abstract space was challenged by the bottom-up responses of some residents who tried to create their social space rooted in their previous experiences in the gecekondu; it was reacted by other residents who embraced the higher status of apartment living. The void produced by destroying the gecekondu habitus was filled by religious activities and consumption-inspired everyday practices.
Open Access
The imperfect balance: populists between economic nationalism and neoliberalism
(2021-07) Kuleli, Anıl
The recent surge of populism around the world has been accompanied by a rise in economic nationalism, mostly pursued by populists in government. Despite changes in the global economy, neoliberalism still remains the dominant paradigm, and therefore creates constraints on governments which follow unorthodox economic approaches. This thesis questions how populist governments pursue economic nationalism in a neoliberal world. It argues that populists seek to maintain an imperfect balance between economic nationalist and neoliberal policies, in an attempt to satisfy different audiences at the same time, including the electorate, the domestic private sector, and international markets. In order to analyze populist governments’ attempts at maintaining the imperfect balance, the thesis explores the policies of the Fidesz government in Hungary and the AKP government in Turkey, by looking at how they have been trying to reconcile economic nationalism with neoliberalism over the past decade. The ability of Fidesz to sustain a relative macroeconomic stability and continued foreign investment demonstrate the determining role played by audience constraints in the success or failure of populists’ attempts to maintain the balance.
Open Access
Literature, economics, and a turn to content
(Duke University Press, 2021-05) Fessenbecker, Patrick; Yazell, Bryan
In much of the recent scholarship on economics and literature, the depth of insight is inversely proportional to the status claimed for literature as such. For example, Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro’s Cents and Sensibility argues that economists need to read literary works for their great moral wisdom, and they fault literary scholars for ignoring this appeal and for failing to understand basic economics. But as this survey of recent publications demonstrates, the conjunction of these critiques is odd: literary critics have been skeptical of claims about genuine value precisely because they have attended so closely to the markets structuring cultural production. What ultimately stands out in recent scholarship on economics and literature is its turn away from complex accounts of the nature of literary form and its turn toward considerations of the representation of economic life.
Open Access
Negotiating backpacking experience: The role of digital media in a neoliberalizing world
(2023-08) Kulaklı, Mirac
This thesis is about the relationship between the backpacking experience and digital media in the context of neoliberalism. It investigates those backpackers who reject the working conditions and life style imposed on them by the neoliberal system and become backpackers. It explores the dynamics created by digital media in the backpacking experience. Specifically, it aims to understand how digital media transforms the backpacking experience, what tensions, if any, it creates, how they challenge the ideal backpacker image, and how backpackers negotiate these tensions. A qualitative research design is adopted to explore them, and purposive sampling is applied to investigate the research questions. Participants are self-identified backpackers who resign from work or refuse to start working under neoliberal conditions based on competitive, long working hours and individual interest-based mentality. They aim to travel around the world freely by sharing their memoirs and daily life on their YouTube and Instagram accounts. The findings, obtained from videos, pictures, titles, texts, and cover photos on YouTube and Instagram profiles between 2012 and 2023, are analyzed through thematic analysis. Neoliberalism is used as the analytical lens to interpret the thematized data by focusing on the neoliberal subject. The three pillars of the study can be expressed as 1. the experience of being a backpacker, 2. being a prosumer concerning the working principles of YouTube and Instagram, accepted as a part of personalized media economies, and 3. neoliberalism. As a result of the research, the paradoxes of low-budget backpackers who want to stay away from neoliberal working conditions and neoliberal market conditions have been identified, which are located mainly between their purpose to start the journey as a backpacker and the conditions that arise with the integration of digital media to this experience. Accordingly, the main argument of the thesis is that those backpackers who started their journey as a backpacker to resist the neoliberal system are pulled into it by their interaction with the digital media. In conclusion, digital media transforms the backpacking experience, producing paradoxes.
Open Access
Neoliberal globalization, citizenship and subject constitution in Turkey
(2012-09) Yedekçi, Ayşe
This thesis discusses the extent to which neoliberal globalization has had an impact on citizenship in general, and citizenship in Turkey in particular. Academic debates on citizenship usually revolve around the question of identity rights, overlooking political-economy dimensions that significantly influence the scope of rights enjoyed. By defining neoliberalism in a twofold way as policy framework and governmentality, the study shows both the ways through which neoliberalism has affected the practice of social rights, and how individuals are constituted as neoliberal subjects through different governmental techniques. The thesis aims to adapt the conceptual-theoretical framework by analyzing how the neoliberalization process is experienced in Turkey.
Open Access
Neoliberalism and surveillance in Turkey: the international political economy of banking sector reform in the 1980s
(2022-07) Kaptan, Deniz
This thesis analyzes the impact of various banking sector policy reforms in Turkey in the 1980s from the critical perspective offered by surveillance studies. I argue that, with the proliferation of retail banking services, data on the economic assets of individuals in Turkey became increasingly transmitted to the national and international data vortex, creating advantages for power centers that had access to this data. I show the power hierarchies at the bank, state, and international levels through a wide range of qualitative sources. Neoliberal reforms were leading society to consume more, as well as enabling the collection of data on an individual basis. At all levels of analysis, I have found that surveillance mechanisms were mainly used for two purposes: to ensure transparency necessary for the functioning of the economy and to reinforce existing hierarchies. While the latter target is less visible at the corporate level, I have observed that information is collected and disseminated at the state level to remind people of their consumer identity and at the international level to position Turkey within the global economic system.
Open Access
“The (not so) queer art of flopping”: makeover shows and the formation of neoliberal subjectivity
(2020-12) Turan, Orçun
This thesis examines the integral part makeover shows play in the formation of neoliberal subjectivity. The hegemonic neoliberal ideology demands citizens to claim responsibility for the social welfare services and offerings that the states cease to provide. The idealized citizenship in this system is a self-enterprising, responsible, and autonomous one who has or strives to have self-esteem in order to become and remain the best version of oneself. The subjectivity neoliberalism (re)constructs and promotes can be seen in cultural products, too. Television, particularly makeover reality television, has an informative part in the formation of this subjectivity. The experts makeover shows employ portray and eventually teach the audience how to conduct themselves without the help -social welfare- the states are supposed to offer. Borrowing Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of “governmentality”, the conduct of conduct for the citizen, this research aims to reveal the neoliberal governmentality displayed in makeover shows through experts’ tutorials of the idealized neoliberal lifestyle and consumership. While doing so, this thesis uses the American makeover reality show, Queer Eye as its context. In addition to drawing from the critical governmentality literature, the thesis uses Halberstam’s low theory in order to provide an alternative understanding of success/failure that is beyond the binary neoliberal definition of these terms, and questions the possibility for a (queer) alternative way of being.
Open Access
Ottomentality : neoliberal governance of culture and neo-ottoman management of diversity
(Routledge, 2017) Erdem, Chien Yang
This essay proposes an alternative concept–Ottomentality–in order to more adequately assess Turkey’s growing neo-Ottoman cultural ensemble. This concept is deployed here to underscore the convergence of neoliberal and neo-Ottoman rationalities and the discursive practices that are developed around them for governing culture and managing a diverse society. The essay contends that the convergence of these two rationalities has significantly transformed the state’s approach to culture as a way of governing the social, constituted a particular knowledge of multiculturalism, and a subject of citizenry increasingly subjected to exclusion and discipline for expressing critical views of this knowledge.
Open Access
Ottomentality: neoliberal governance of culture and neo-Ottoman management of diversity
(2017-09) Yang Erdem, Chien
Since the 2000s Turkey has witnessed a growing array of cultural productions and sites ranging from television series to history museums featuring the magnificence of the Ottoman legacy. Contemporary cultural analyses often interpret this phenomenon as cultural expressions of the Justice and Development Party’s (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) Islamist ideology and foreign policy known as neo-Ottomanism. Nonetheless, this interpretation tends to overlook the complexity and underestimate its socio-political implications. This study draws attention to the analytical limitations of neo-Ottomanism and develops an alternative concept—Ottomentality—in order to more adequately assess Turkey’s renewed Ottoman motto. By incorporating the Foucauldian perspective of governmentality, the study proposes to look beyond the “ideology” and “foreign policy” interpretations and reconceptualize neo-Ottomanism not only as a distinct form of governmentality, but also in collaborative terms with neoliberal governmentality. Ottomentality is deployed here to underscore the discursive governing practices that are generated by the convergence of neoliberalism and neo-Ottomanism as a means of cultural intervention. By critically engaging with the areas of history museums, television, and cinema, this study aims to examine the AKP’s neoliberal approach to culture and neo-Ottoman management of diversity. The study contends that the convergence of these two rationalities has significantly transformed the state’s approach to culture as a way of governing the social, produced a particular knowledge of Ottoman-Islamic multiculturalism, and constituted a citizen-subject who is increasingly subjected to exclusion and discipline for expressing critical views of this knowledge.
Open Access
Rendering responsible, provoking desire: women and home in squatter/slum renewal projects in the Turkish context
(Routledge, 2017) Erman, T.; Hatiboğlu, B.
This article is situated at the intersection of urban restructuring, cultural conservatism and neoliberalism in the Turkish context to understand the new subject formations of poor women as they are relocated to high-rise apartment blocks in slum/squatter renewal projects by the prospect of homeownership via long-term mortgage loans. It contributes by showing the gendered effects of urban transformation on poor women as neoliberalism and conservatism interact. It draws upon two ethnographic studies that reveal women’s experiences embedded both in neoliberalism and patriarchy. In neoliberalism, women’s participation in the informal job market was promoted as they were made responsible for contributing to mortgage payments, and they were brought into consumption as they were provoked the desire for good homes via furnishing, and in patriarchy, women’s traditional roles in social reproduction were demanded in spite of their new roles and responsibilities. The study ponders women’s differentiated negotiations with patriarchy which resisted radical challenges when the family and the home framed women’s new responsibilities and desires. The rising conservatism rooted in Islam in Turkey, which prioritizes the family over individual women, created the conditions for it. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Open Access
The state, international competitiveness and neoliberal globalisation: is there a future beyond 'the competition state'?
(Cambridge University Press, 2006-01) Fougner, T.
This article seeks to contribute to opening up a space of possibility for the state to become something other than a competitive entity in and through a critical (re)problematisation of 'international competitiveness' as a governmental problem. In more specific terms, it inquires into how international competitiveness was constituted as such a problem in the first place; how both the meaning of international competitiveness and the terms of the 'competitiveness problem' have been transformed by globalisation talk and multilateral efforts at neoliberal global governance; and how the discourse of international competitiveness works to (re)produce the state as a competitive entity on a continuous basis.
Open Access
A study on political economy of peripheral and advanced capitalism : a simultaneous transformation with different results in the post-1980 United States, United Kingdom and Turkey
(2005) Kalkan, Kerem Ozan
This thesis focuses on the post-1980 neo-liberal transformation experienced in the United States, the United Kingdom and Turkey. These are the countries which started to implement neo-liberal policies simultaneously under Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Turgut Özal administrations. I developed a political economy outlook on these countries in such a fashion that compares welfare state implementations to neo-liberal policies. After having analyzed four main macroeconomic indicators which are real GDP growth, inflation rates, real interest rates and real wage rates in three countries, we see that the outcomes of the transformation were sharply different in the advanced capitalist countries, namely the United States and the United Kingdom, from those of in peripheral countries like Turkey.
Open Access
The politics of (non) retrenchment in two most different cases: a comparative analysis of societal response in France and Türkiye between 1980-2018
(2024-09) Uslu, Sıla
The neoliberalism brings the notion of welfare state retrenchment into discussion that is followed by welfare state transformation. This thesis compares France and Türkiye’s welfare states after the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s. It argues that both states avoided retrenchment because of the existence of a causal mechanism that is societal response thar also has a root cause that is familization. The thesis adopts most different systems design (MDSD). It identifies similarities in two dissimilar cases to establish the causal mechanism that produces similar outcomes, namely, non-retrenchment. France is a continental-European welfare state that had a developed welfare state at the time and is regarded as most resilient to change, whereas Türkiye is a Southern European welfare that is not developed but emerging. Therefore, the thesis analyzes France and Türkiye’s as most different cases’ responses to neoliberal pressures for fiscal retrenchment to determine the common characteristics that produce similar outcomes. Causal analysis is used to investigate the relationship between cause and outcome. The empirical analysis uses social expenditure (SOCX) as the quantitative data source and analyzes policy paradigms between 1980- 2018. The thesis identifies that even though France and Türkiye are significantly different cases, the legitimacy of the incumbent party for citizens is quintessential in policymaking, which is the causal mechanism. The role of the family as a structural constraint is seen through familization and its resistance to the changes that would weaken the family. The established gender and intergenerational roles within a family create the societal response to the retrenchment in social welfare. The trilemma of state-family-market is visible in both cases, with the mere strong state and family that retains family as a structural constraint.
Open Access
Turkey’s employment subsidy program under the great recession: a general equilibrium assessment
(Routledge, 2017) Yeldan, A. E.
The objective of this paper is to provide an impact analysis of the macroeconomic consequences of the employment subsidization programs in Turkey implemented under the post-2008 crisis period. To this end, an applied general equilibrium model (of the computable general equilibrium–CGE variety) is utilized to investigate the production, incomes generation, and aggregate demand components of the domestic economy. The analysis highlights the rather limited returns to the subsidization package, and argues that much of this was due to the dis-equilibriating and fragile macroeconomic environment under the neoliberal policy framework. The massive drop of domestic savings; a severe mis-alignment in the real exchange rate causing significant appreciation of the domestic currency; rise of the external deficit and of foreign indebtedness along with a severe fall in the total productivity effort were different facets of this poor macroeconomic performance. Thus, an important message of the study is that, had the macroeconomic balances were maintained at their historical averages, and a more competitive exchange rate could have been pursued, as much as threefolds of a gain in aggregate employment could have been generated with the same intensity of the employment subsidization package, in comparison to the historically realized levels. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.