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This article conceptualizes the market as a concept to ask 'how is neoliberalism able to go on?' A question that was raised in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis and the persistence of market-based policies. It argues that one of the reasons is to be found in the performance of failure. Recent contributions have started to point to the cultural and ideological preconditions of failures. The following discussion seeks to contribute to this debate by identifying three distinct notions of failure: as empirical fact, as communication and as institutional fact. These three notions give rise to technological, reflexive and critical debates respectively. This article argues that market-based problematizations of failure translate communicative and institutional failures into empirical ones with the consequence that reflective and critical debates morph into technocratic ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Calls for educators to promote student voice and agency in classrooms often overlook the importance of the policy milieu in which teaching and learning is performed. In this article we interrogate the constitution of student, teacher and researcher subjectivities within student voice research. Working with Stephen Ball's neoliberal technologies of reform (technologies of the market and performativity (including technologies of the self); implemented through acculturation), we take up the notion that those of us working in education are complicit in the reforms we work to disrupt and conceptualise research as a technology of reform. We analyse performativity mechanisms at play in our student voice research that produced students, teachers and researchers as neoliberal policy subjects even whilst working toward the democratic intent of student voice. We contribute a heuristic with which scholars and educators can interrogate technologies of reform at work in their student voice work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article concerns the concept of history of the market and the concept of theft (perceived in the broad sense), earlier presented and related to each other in the P. Prodi's book Settimo non rubare. Furto e mercato nella storia dell'Occidente. The article recalls the sources and main points of reference of Prodi's ideas: the concept of the specificity of Western civilization as defined by M. Weber, H. Berman's concept of the „papal revolution", the notions furtum and restitutio in canon law. The perspectives for the continuation of Prodi's thoughts in the field of the history of ideas, the history of philosophy and the history of law are discussed. Prodi's comments on contemporary social changes in the light of the discussed ideas. are also referred to. The significance of different meanings of the term forum is underlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors explore why academics tend to oppose the market. To this intent the article uses normative political theory as an explanatory mechanism, starting with a conjecture originally suggested by Robert Nozick. Academics are over-represented amongst the best students of their cohort. School achievement engenders high expectations about future economic prospects. Yet markets are only contingently sensitive to school achievement. This misalignment between schools and markets is perceived by academics – and arguably by intellectuals in general – as morally unacceptable. To test this explanation, the article uses an online questionnaire with close to 1500 French academic respondents. The data resulting from this investigation lend support to Nozick's hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China’s socialist market economy is predominated by strong state-owned sectors. In the real estate market, the government further controls land and regulates social services based on property ownership. But how do ordinary market actors perceive this configuration and strategise their economic practice accordingly? Based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores buyers’ and estate agents’ imagination of and practice in the housing market with a focus on the folk concept of rigid demand. Rigid demand (gangxu) refers to the belief that people have to buy a home regardless of price. Presenting how people invoke a range of referents and contexts when talking about rigid demand, I show that common Chinese market actors understand and approach the housing market not as an end in itself but as a mechanism devised and maneuvered by big market players such as the government and developers. Furthermore, actors believe that the market has a social purpose and is susceptible to agentive interventions. Ultimately, I argue that the social representation of the socialist housing market constructs and contests the legitimacy of certain economic practices and influences market performance accordingly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on historical analysis based on two interpretive frameworks of modern law and literature. It informs that the first interpretation reveals that the law and literature provide same conceptual and ideological developments. It discusses the other interpretation, which states that law is associated with rule, reasons and hegemony while literature is associated with plurality, emotion and empathy.

This article examines the limits of law to resolve or transform the contemporary dilemmas provoked by the provision of social care to adults in the UK. It juxtaposes the judgments in two cases, each of which interrogates the legal consequences of the mixed economy of care: the majority and minority opinions of the House of Lords in YL v Birmingham City Council (2007) and the Care Standards Tribunal decision in Alternative Futures v National Care Standards Commission (2002). We read the opinions/decisions as narratives that tell a variety of stories reconciling the different roles of law, the state, the family and the individual in the provision of care. Drawing upon David Scott’s concern with ‘the conceptual problem of political presents and with how reconstructed pasts and anticipated futures are thought out in relation to them’ (2004: 1), we seek to examine legal responses to the contractions and mutations of social welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How can we explain market actors’ desire to use the state as a model for their entrepreneurial efforts? This article examines the varied and uneven ways in which the state is mimicked and appropriated by China’s market actors in the health care sector. A massage franchiser, which doubles as a job-training center in Harbin, serves as an ethnographic instance. By invoking a scene where the persistent appeal to the state is bound up with volatile market activities, this article intends to disrupt the prevailing notions of the state-market binary. The murky encounter between “the state” and “the market” does more than merely reflect the persistent power of the so-called “authoritarian” state. By examining how the state-market complex is made and also severed by market participants who appeared at first to represent “the state,” this article underlines the precarious and patchy nature of state centrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Merrifield is correct in his basic argument that so-called “market reforms” in el/sec schooling are far from being pure market, he is incorrect to suggest that purer market projects are needed together with simulations of pure market reforms. There are two fundamental problems in that thesis. First, it is not clear that school choice in education based on (impure market) co-pay is fundamentally desirable. Co-pay arrangements are best justified as a pragmatic means to get around delays caused by school districts and unions to avoid competition. Some of the best system choices are provided on a no (or fair) pay basis. Second, there are important ethical issues in moving from co-pay (at minimal cost to parents) to purer market systems. Universal school taxes (however bundled) are paid by individuals without children in a transfer to people with children. Reduction or elimination of that transfer would have major social effects with the greatest losers being low income families with numerous children - more specifically on the children in those families who would then receive limited or no schooling to help offset any cultural disadvantage. If the plan were local, such families would soon leave for another jurisdiction. School choice is not, and should not be, incompatible with equality of educational opportunity within a regime of balanced authority of society and parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is one of the attempts to show how each East-Asian regional country’s memory of the war has been related to the post-war literatures and movies restricted by the structure of the Cold War. In particular, this paper takes up the issue of how the structure of Japanese culture after World War II was heavily influenced by the Cold War. When Japan was under the Occupational Forces, Japanese writers and film directors settling on the subject matter of the war were not free from the strain of the systematic censorship by GHQ. Translating into mechanisms of their works using the body or woman (comfort woman) by squarely facing the facts of the East-Asian history, this paper reconsiders the body of post-colonial Japan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central aim of education has to do with the promotion of the pupil’s and other people’s well–being. Recent work by John O’Neill locates the strongest justification of the market in an individualistic preference–satisfaction notion of well–being. His own preference for an objective theory of well–being allows us to make a clear separation of educational values from those of the market. Problems in O’Neill’s account suggest a third notion of well–being which better supports the separation mentioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on democratization have approached the question of time from the perspective of both representation and allocation. They invite political science, and the social sciences in general, to further address the temporal dimension and the issue of time in processes of political change. From this perspective, democratizations can be described as critical moments for the reconfiguration of time perceptions and temporal representations, moments in which the future is both uncertain and temporally limited. In this sense, from the East to the South, we are witnessing a sharp 'fall' into the democratic present and a refocusing of politics on concepts such as 'Democracy' and 'the Market'. What we call the 'fall into the present' refers to the presentist focus of politics and the extraordinary re-evaluation of the present in the modem era: the present becomes omnipresent and overrules both the past and the future as the referential horizon of politics. The changing nature of the perception of time is particularly acute in Latin America, where the future is being replaced by the present as the focal point of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]