Social Work and Neoliberalism

Edgar Marthinsen, Nina Skjefstad, Anne Juberg, Paul Michael Garrett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367695484
• eBook ISBN: 9781000460797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Social Work

Social work educators and practitioners are grappling with many difficulties confronting the profession in the context of an increasingly neoliberal world.

The contributors of this book examine how neoliberalism — and the modes with which it structures the world — has an impact on, and shapes, social work as a disciplinary 'field'. Drawing on new empirical work, the chapters in this book highlight how neoliberalism is affecting social work practices 'on the ground'. The book seeks to stimulate international debate on the totalizing effects of neoliberalism, and in so doing, also identify various ways through which it can be resisted both locally and globally.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Social Work.

What are we talking about when we talk about ‘Neoliberalism’?

Paul Michael Garrett

ABSTRACT

Based on a review of the critical literature, the article provides readers with an overview of neoliberalism’s main dimensions. In this sense, it furnishes an accessible conceptual foundation for a number of the articles in the themed issue. It is suggested that those seeking to comprehend neoliberalism should take into account six intermeshed facets: the overturning of ‘embedded liberalism’; the re-configuration of the state in order to better serve the interests of capital; new patterns of income and wealth distribution to benefit the rich and super-rich; insecurity and precariousness; the rise in mass incarceration; a strategic pragmatism. The article briefly dwells on the capitalist crisis which began in 2007 and goes on to suggest that we may be witnessing the emergence of what is termed ‘rhetorically recalibrated neoliberalism’ (RRN).

Introduction

The word ‘neoliberalism’ is frequently used in a casual way as ‘shorthand for a prevailing dystopian zeitgeist’ (Venugopal, 2015, p. 168; see also Gray, Dean, Agllias, Howard, & Schubert, 2015). However, underpinning the exploration in this article is the understanding that neoliberalism is an historically specific form of capital accumulation deliberately conceived as a ‘counter-revolution against welfare capitalism’ (Fairclough & Graham, 2002, p. 221). What follows aims, therefore, to furnish readers with an accessible synthesis of some of neoliberalism’s main dimensions. Drawing on mostly Anglo-American and critical sources, it provides an introductory resource for social work educators, practitioners and students keen to bring into view the ‘bigger picture’ which, on occasions, risks being elided or obscured in social work and associated fields. The article also briefly refers to the economic crisis which began in 2007 and identifies what I refer to as the emergence of ‘rhetorically recalibrated neoliberalism’ (RRN).

Those seeking to grasp the meaning of neoliberalism should be attentive to six overlapping dimensions: the overturning of ‘embedded liberalism’ (Harvey, 2005); the re-configuration of the state in order to better serve the interests of capital; new patterns of income and wealth distribution to benefit the rich and super-rich; insecurity and precariousness; the rise in mass incarceration; a strategic pragmatism. Each of these dimensions will now be briefly examined.

Six dimensions of neoliberalism

Overturning ‘embedded liberalism’

Neoliberalism, for Bourdieu (2001, p. 35), is best perceived as a ‘conservative revolution’ that ‘ratifies and glorifies the reign of … the financial markets, in other words the return of the kind of radical capitalism, with no other law than the return of maximum profit, an unfettered capitalism … pushed to the limits’. More theoretically, we can perhaps comprehend neoliberalism as seeking to succeed the type of ‘embedded liberalism’ largely dominant in most of the industrial West from the end of the Second World War into the 1970s. During this period ‘market processes and entrepreneurial and corporate activities were surrounded by a web of social and political constraints and a regulatory environment that sometimes restrained … economic and industrial strategy’. In contrast, the neoliberal project seeks to ‘disembed capital from these constraints’ (Harvey, 2005, p. 11). Thus, to different degrees, depending on the specific cultural and national context, neoliberalism endeavours to ‘strip away the protective coverings that embedded liberalism allowed and occasionally nurtured’ (Harvey, 2005, p. 168).

This process is illustrated by circumstances surrounding the major fire occurring at Grenfell Tower, on 14 June 2017, which resulted in the deaths over seventy people. Completed in 1974, Grenfell Tower was a 24-storey residential tower block in North Kensington, London, England. It was often referred to as the ‘Moroccan tower’ because many residents came from the local Moroccan immigrant community. Prior to the catastrophic fire, a residents’ organisation, the Grenfell Action Group (GAG), had highlighted fire safety issues and poor maintenance (GAG, 2016). In The Guardian, passionately castigating the ‘violence of neoliberal “austerity”’, Chakrabortty (2017, p. 25) drew comparisons between contemporary social and economic conditions and the not entirely dissimilar circumstances concerning Marx and Engels in Victorian Britain (Garrett, 2018a). This was period, of course, before liberalism had been partly ‘embedded’ within a constraining network of relationships aiming to promote values at odds with, or existing in tension with, those of market rationality. Nevertheless, over

170 years later, Britain remains a country that murders its poor … What happened last week [at Grenfell Tower] wasn’t a ‘terrible tragedy’ or some other studio-sofa platitude: it was social murder … Spectacular examples of social violence, such as Grenfell, are thankfully rare. They usually occur out of public sight. This decade of austerity has been a decade of social violence … Austerity is at the heart of the Grenfell story … Spending cuts, deregulation, outsourcing: between them they have turned a state supposedly there to protect and support citizens into a machine to make money for the rich while punishing the poor. It’s never described like that, of course. Class warfare is passed off as book-keeping. Accountability is tossed aside for ‘commercial confidentiality’, while profiteering is dressed up as economic dynamism.

Appropriately seeking to make the connections to social work, the Social Work Action Network (SWAN, 2017) concluded

The fire at Grenfell was not a random event; it was a disaster waiting to happen. It was the result of cuts, of austerity, of privatisation of council housing, of deregulation, of out-sourcing and of inequality … The fire, and the deaths, stand as a symbol of all that is wrong with new-liberal social policy … [The] unnecessary deaths of ordinary working people by a system skewed to meet the interests of the wealthy … SWAN denounces the system of cuts, privatisation and deregulation that led to the catastrophe.

Although the inquiry announced by Prime Minister Theresa May in late June 2017 is still to produce findings and all relevant details are not – and probably will never be – known, sufficient evidence is already available to suggest that the process of eroding ‘embedded liberalism’ by incrementally stripping away solidaristic forms of ‘protective coverings’ contributed to the fire and the ensuing fatalities at Grenfell Tower.

This dis-embedding of liberalism can also be associated with a fresh and reinvigorated emphasis on competition across all areas of society, including those previously perceived as outside the parameters of commodification (Brown, 2015). For example, within the university sector, tuition fees of up to £9,000 a year in the UK have, of course, also created immense financial difficulties for students and their families. Similarly, the ‘de-funding of “public” US colleges and universities means that, as of 2015, students pay nearly 50% of the costs of their education at these institutions, up from 20% just 25 years ago’ (Myers, 2017, p. 304).

As Therborn (2007, p. 75) put it, the ‘survival of the fittest and Social Darwinism have been given a new impetus by neoliberal globalization, after their post-Fascist quarantine’. Relatedly, neoliberalisation is a process entailing much ‘creative destruction’ (Harvey, 2005, p. 3). Moreover, the aim has been to install a new ‘common sense’ to try and ensure that people are led to think and act in a manner conducive to neoliberalism. Indeed, it has been argued that neoliberalism

has been ingested into the body politic so successfully that it has become the prevailing commonsense of everyday life … Just as in the aftermath of the Second World War we all became ‘social democratic subjects’ in one way or another, we may have now become similarly constituted as “neoliberal subjects”, in ways that we do not fully recognise. (Thompson, 2008, p. 68)

In this way, neoliberalisation can be perceived as bound up with an individual’s sense of self, setting in motion and sustaining a multiplicity of ‘identity projects’ that are compatible with capitalism. Related to this, in terms of working practices, neoliberalism favours ‘flexibility’ and is hostile to all forms of social solidarity and identification that can potentially restrain capital accumulation.

Neoliberals endeavour to remake work and workscapes and alter the aims, aspirations and affiliations of a range of professional groups (Garrett, 2005, 2009, 2014a). However, across different fields, this project is likely to prompt resistance. For example, people involved in social work – be they the providers or users (and these categories are, moreover, fluid) – are apt to ‘find ways of surviving, negotiating, accommodating, refusing and resisting’ and do not merely ‘act like automatons envisaged in the governmental plans and strategies of the powerful’ (Clarke, 2005, p. 159).

Putting the state to work for capital

The core function of the neoliberal state is to furnish an ‘apparatus whose fundamental mission [is to] facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation on the part of both domestic and foreign capital’ (Harvey, 2005, p. 7). Pervasively, the remaking of state apparatuses involves a ‘dramatic shift in government commitments from securing the welfare of citizens to facilitating the flow of global capital’ with this ‘accomplished through a depoliticizing discourse of deficits, competitiveness, and balanced budgets, surrounded by an aura of technocratic neutrality’ (Baker, 2009, p. 70). Significant in this respect is the drive toward corporatisation, commodification, and privatisation of hitherto public assets. This entails the opening up of ‘new fields for capital accumulation in domains hitherto regarded off-limits to the calculus of profitability’ (Harvey, 2005, p. 160). Moreover, the state

once neoliberalized, becomes a prime agent of retributive policies, reversing the flow from the upper classes that had occurred during the era of embedded liberalism. It does this in the first instance through the pursuit of privatization schemes and cutbacks in those state expenditures that support the social wage. (Harvey, 2005, p. 163, emphasis added)

A misguided perspective maintains that neoliberalism heralds an irrepressible ‘rolling back’ of the state with the ‘market’ and ‘market mechanisms’ being entirely left to ‘take over’ society. However, within the neoliberal paradigm, the state continues to play an active role in that it creates and preserves an ‘institutional framework’ for capital (Brenner & Theodore, 2002). Writing in a US context, Myers (2017, p. 307) observ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: social work and neoliberalism
• 1 What are we talking about when we talk about ‘Neoliberalism’?
• 2 Neoliberalism as an art of governance: reflecting on techniques for securing life through direct social work practice
• 3 Servants of a ‘sinking Titanic’ or actors of change? Contested identities of social workers in Sweden
• 4 Human rights and social justice in social work education: a critical realist comparative study of England and Spain
• 5 Clients and case managers as neoliberal subjects? Shaping session tasks and everyday interactions with severely mentally ill (SMI) clients
• 6 ‘NEET’ to work? – substance use disorder and youth unemployment in Norwegian public documents
• 7 Responsibilisation, social work and inclusive social security in Finland
• 8 Impact of neo-liberalism in Spain: research from social work in relation to the public system of social services
• 9 The neoliberal turn in Chilean social work: frontline struggles against individualism and fragmentation
• 10 Social workers: a new precariat? Precarity conditions of mental health social workers working in the non-profit sector in Greece
• 11 Social work’s ‘black hole’ or ‘Phoenix moment’? Impacts of the neoliberal path in social work profession in Portugal
• 12 Romanian social workers facing the challenges of neo-liberalism
• 13 Mind your own business: technologies for governing social worker subjects
• 14 Neoliberalisation, the social investment state and social work
• Index