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The article focuses on the impact of neoliberalism and managerialism on academia, drawing from the authors' experiences at De Montfort University. Topics include the decline of the academic profession's autonomy, the collaboration between neoliberal managerialism and anti-intellectualism, and the need to resist and explore alternative approaches to academic labor in the face of these challenges.

In the article, the authors examine the possible alternatives to capitalism to achieve transformative social change, particularly in the United Kingdom (UK). Other topics include the need to frame the material criticisms of capitalism within a distinct socialist morality, the brief resurgence of radical leftism in Europe and the U.S. in the 2010s, and the role of moral critique in creating alternatives to capitalism.

This paper examines the sociological importance of expert knowledge in the COVID-19 pandemic. Through this expertise, it is possible to follow patterns of infections, fatalities and recoveries almost in real time, and this knowledge is crucial for countries when deciding on relevant governmental strategies to control the spread. The paper stresses that there was a strong institutional machinery of expertise for data production and dissemination, and despite rather different national ambitions in detection strategies (both concerning infections and mortalities), this machinery produced facts and figures as though they were measured uniformly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the margin of manoeuvre of Portuguese executives after the onset of the sovereign debt crisis in 2010-2015. To obtain a full understanding of what happened behind the closed doors of international meetings, different types of data are triangulated: face-to-face interviews; investigations by journalists; and International Monetary Fund and European Union official documents. The findings are compared to the public discourse of Prime Ministers José Sócrates and Pedro Passos-Coelho. It is shown that while the sovereign debt crisis and the bail-out limited the executive's autonomy, they also made them stronger in relation to other domestic actors. The perceived need for 'credibility' in order to avoid a 'negative' reaction from the markets - later associated with the conditions of the bail-out - concurrently gave the executives a legitimate justification to concentrate power in their hands and a strong argument to counter the opponents of their proposed reforms. Consequently, when Portuguese ministers favoured policies that were in congruence with those supported by international actors, they were able to use the crisis to advance their own agenda. Disagreement with Troika representatives implied the start of a negotiation process between the ministers and international lenders, the final outcome of which depended on the actors' bargaining powers. These strategies, it is argued, constitute a tactic of depoliticisation in which both the material constraints and the discourse used to frame them are employed to construct imperatives around a narrow selection of policy alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]