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Many observers have noticed a sharp divergence of household incomes in the last few decades that seems unrelated to the traditional explanations of inequality like economic development. My dissertation examines the question of how the rise of neoliberalism—or the market über alles—impacts this inequality in countries around the world. High inequality is known to hinder economic growth, social mobility, democratic functioning, social capital, and to adversely affect health and education outcomes, as well as to exacerbate racial and residential inequality. Equality, meanwhile, is seen as desirable in its own right as a matter of social justice. Neoliberalism is a likely suspect because it emerged at the same time and in the same places that inequality began to rise after three postwar decades of decline. It is also a particularly competitive form of capitalism, and thus produces more winners and losers at both ends of the income distribution. With its focus on profits, it is much more beneficial to income derived from capital gains at the expense of wages, deepening the typical class divide under capitalism. Finally, neoliberalism is an elite consensus formed without any public participation, and these special interests shape the economy and society to the benefit of this privileged minority. I find four major shortcomings of existing research related to my research question. First, all but the most recent research has had to rely on sub-standard data for cross-national comparisons, which I address using Frederick Solt’s (2009) Standardized World Income Inequality Database (SWIID). Second, past analyses of cross-national data have improperly handled between-country variation, which I address using a dual fixed-effects modelling approach. Third, there are operationalization problems with neoliberalism, in which past research has failed to capture the phenomenon in its entirety. I address this by developing a new multi-dimensional measurement approach. Moreover, there is a determined failure by many to fully consider neoliberalism as a likely explanation because it contradicts the myth of liberal democracy and capitalist benevolence. Along these lines, the fourth shortcoming is that most popular explanations of rising inequality blame otherwise benign trends such as globalization and technological advancement. This obscures the political nature of neoliberalism, especially how the rich are able to dominate political economy at the expense of the masses. In doing so, it makes it appear that inequality is just a byproduct of progress, that we must accept it as inevitable, and that only palliatives are available. The reality, however, is that neoliberalism is neither inevitable nor progressive and requires systemic change to rectify. I address the research question with three research components. First, I develop a definition of neoliberalism in contrast to existing theoretical narratives, namely globalization, neo-Keynesianism, dependency theory, and economic freedom. I argue neoliberalism is a social and political project that emerged in the economic stagnation of the 1970s—a way for corporate elites to revitalize profits by whatever means necessary, regardless of the consequences. These means have included tax cuts, social spending cuts, deregulation, neoliberal monetary policy, corporate and industrial restructuring, free trade agreements and increased foreign investment, export-led growth, and the growing power of global economic institutions. I operationalize this definition using the Economic Freedom for the World Index (42 variables) and other World Bank data. Empirically, I show that many neoliberal variables correlate and thus may embody a wider phenomenon, but they also show moderate independence which supports the multi-dimensional approach rather than a single neoliberal metric. In the second part of the dissertation, I use the measurement developed in part one to analyze neoliberalism’s relationship with inequality. I find a relatively robust relationship in the expected direction, with some exceptions, and the dual-model approach underscores the importance of analyzing both between- and within-country variation. The latter is useful because it inherently controls for cross-country heterogeneity, but it comes at a substantial loss of variability. The former has regrettably been derogated, but it provides much explanatory power and complements within-country analysis well. In other words, between-country variation captures deep institutional and cultural differences across countries, while the other captures more superficial but flexible policy shifts and trends within countries at various points in time. I also explore the nonlinear effects of neoliberalism on inequality. Generally, the analysis showed that more developed countries had a stronger association between various neoliberal dimensions and greater inequality. I speculated this was because more developed countries historically have more institutional protection from the adverse effects of markets, and by weakening these, neoliberalism generates more inequality than in countries whose public intervention is already less robust, especially in unmeasurable ways. The analysis also generally showed that at low levels of neoliberalism the relationship sometimes reversed, creating a U-shaped curve that was typically centered left of the mean. I speculated this was due to the fact that very low scores of neoliberalism occur in underdeveloped countries usually suffering from serious state corruption, which translates into greater inequality. In such cases, moving away from a corrupt state and toward market institutions generates relatively less inequality. In the third part, I expand on the above model to establish competitive testing of alternative explanations of rising inequality using contingency effects. The alternatives include globalization, technological advancement, industrial restructuring, human capital/skills, and female employment. The test asks whether the effects of these alternatives are actually contingent on above average levels of neoliberalism, and thus not responsible for inequality per se. Instead neoliberalism makes globalization, technology, and the other trends more inegalitarian than they would have otherwise been. In general, the analysis showed that the alternatives are robustly contingent in the expected direction. Greater levels of neoliberalism drive many ordinarily benign trends and processes toward greater inequality. Remarkably, even basic education, long thought to be the great equalizer, can actually exacerbate inequality at high levels of neoliberalism. In fact, at average levels of neoliberalism, the alternatives mostly had weak relationships to inequality. And below the average, many alternatives actually appeared to generate less inequality—that is, inequality was lower where and when neoliberalism was less embedded. Overall, the findings demonstrate that neoliberalism is an important if not predominant explanation for rising income inequality that many countries have experienced in the last several decades. It suggests that superficial solutions like more education spending or job creation may be insufficient without addressing, at least to some extent, the deeper issue of neoliberal capitalism. I provide suggestions for this, but ultimately it means shifting our major institutions away from market logic toward public interests, control, and orientation. A future economic crisis more severe than the Great Recession could advance such systemic change, but popular protest will likely also be needed to ensure that addressing today’s challenges becomes more egalitarian. / Sociology

Amplifications in photographic production and the increased access to images in the 21st century uniquely position photography to articulate and intervene in social structures of power and provide new opportunities for civic engagement. In particular, photography has the potential to articulate and resist what can be understood as a politics of disposability, or the ways in which particular populations are rendered superfluous to the economic and social logic of neoliberalism and channeled out of society. I assert that neoliberal violence must be understood, in part, as a visual problem: the particularities of representation and visibility must be examined in light of the need to consider neoliberal social and economic policies as something other than an inevitability. This dissertation explores the ways that photography can serve to make visible not only the people and discourses that have been marginalized and suppressed, but the structures of disposability itself. Developments in artistic practices and departures from traditional documentary genres converge with precarious labor conditions for cultural workers to widen the parameters for photographic production. The resulting work engages both with the ontological questions of what documentary photography has become as well as with its ability to operate as a potential site of activism—rather than mere representation—through new modes of mediation. This dissertation examines new photographic work that addresses the multiple facets of a neoliberal politics of disposability, the effects of which are compounded by race, class, and gender: police violence and domestic militarization, the skyrocketing rate of women’s incarceration, and the institutional threats to youth and activism in the public sphere. These emergent photographic practices employ new strategies of visualization in order to complicate the viewer’s relationship to representations of violence, contributing to a discourse that broadens the possibility for a critical and productive use of photographs, and imagining alternatives to the material and ideological conditions of neoliberal disposability. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation examines the ability of emergent modes of documentary photography to articulate and resist social and political violence that is characteristic of neoliberalism, for example the domestic militarization and increased incarceration rates, the shrinking of access to the public sphere, and the particular ways in which certain populations become especially vulnerable to such violence. Shifts in photographic production thanks to new media platforms and the reconfigurations of traditional photography genres have produced photographic strategies that are crucially poised to address such issues. The photographers and projects explored in this dissertation employ new ways of visualizing violence, speaking back to the ways that photography can be used to stultify discourse and misrepresent populations, and harnessing innovative modes of proliferating their work to produce new photographic and political communities.

This dissertation contributes to an understanding of the relationship between the new politicaleconomic configuration of neoliberalism and the commercialization of Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) cotton in India. Situated against an intensified agrarian crisis in India, it explores the dynamic relationship among the triad of a neoliberlizing Indian State, global neoliberal regimes and transnational corporations. This study shows that Bt technology and the neoliberal order were internally connected in a system of power relations that I call 'bioempire'. Examining the dynamic of the making of a bioempire—how it emerged, how it was contested, and how it was stabilized—I focus on four processes involved in the formation of the bioempire in India. It is through these interconnected, mutually reinforcing processes—rationalization, standardization, privatization and mobilization—that we understand the dynamic—the foundation, introduction, extension and reconfiguration—of the bioempire. Using an approach that combines the idiom of co-production, discourse analysis, and a sociotechnical network perspective, the study explores the dynamics of the introduction of Bt technology into India from the time the Indian state embarked on a path of liberalizing its economy in the early 1990s through 2002, when the Indian government first gave approval to this transgenic crop. I focus on Bt technology as operating politically in several different registers—as a material technology, as a metaphysical device, as a discourse, and as an institution of governance—in order to show how this technology activated, and was activated by, a new political economy, new governance regimes and new forms of political struggle. The mutually reinforcing relations among varied elements—including technologies, institutions, policy instruments, regulatory regimes, and activist networks—form the heterogeneous network constituting a bioempire. The dissertation highlights that the conflicts and contradictions emerging at the interfaces of various political arenas were negotiated and reconciled in order to create a hospitable technological, institutional, political-economic and discursive space for the bioempire to emerge within India. / Ph. D.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2008. Graduate Programme in Political Science. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR46010

In recent years, cities worldwide have employed various tactics to control homeless people's use of urban space. Yet such measures never fully accomplish their goal, because homeless people develop ways to adapt the hostile landscape. In so doing, they not only respond to tactics of spatial control but they also create their own conceptions of urban space that serve to compensate for the structural systems that fail or even punish them. Thus, just as legal categories of property ownership leave homeless people without access to private spaces, they in turn create their own concepts of ownership and continually seek to privatize public space. Whereas legal restrictions are passed that criminalize homelessness in order to protect housed urban residents' "quality-of-life," homeless people develop tactics to protect themselves from the dangers of street life. Just as municipal authorities remove various amenities and add deterrents to try to prevent the use of certain locations, homeless people are attracted and repelled by features that are often beyond the control of authorities. While social services are relocated to encourage either spatial dispersion or concentration, homeless people build internal support networks that often serve their short-term needs better than social services. In short, homeless people not only respond to spatial control tactics in a variety of ways but also create their own landscape that often frustrates attempts to control their use of space. Drawing on interviews with 60 homeless people in Tucson, Arizona, this dissertation attempts to shed light on both these facets of street life, revealing that homeless people constantly strategize to find or make private, safe, functional, comfortable, and supportive places for themselves in a landscape designed to exclude them. Findings indicate that restrictive urban polices aimed at controlling the movements and actions of street people are not only ineffective but also exacerbate the problem of homelessness. These policies have the greatest impact on newly homeless individuals, pushing them toward existing street community in order to access vital information and support networks.

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This thesis examines the relationship between young children's emerging political attitudes towards climate change and the possible effect that the political project of neoliberalism could have on these attitudes. The research asks, in what ways and to what extent do neoliberal attitudes and beliefs influence young New Zealand children's views on climate change mitigation? Drawing from five focus group interviews with Christchurch children aged between 9 and 11, I compare and contrast the results in order to gauge their opinions, thoughts and beliefs about climate change. In doing this I ask how neoliberalism formed in New Zealand and if the neoliberal project has become so dominant in the macro and micro level policy contexts as to influence the attitudes of our youngest citizens. What the thesis argues is that neoliberal discourse appears to have influenced how the participants view climate change, most specifically in their willingness to select individualized mitigation techniques to respond to climate change as opposed to collective actions. These findings are tentative, they require a robust larger sample, beyond the scope of a masters, and may be influenced by other factors such as the developmental stage of the children, however, the emphasis all children placed on voluntary action by individuals was striking. My findings also suggest that those who selected these individual mitigation techniques were more likely to have higher efficacy than those who were critical of such practices. The thesis argues that individualized techniques to combat climate change are by themselves not effective to bring about significant change in order to alleviate further damage being caused to the climate system. In order to reach Helen Clark's goal of being "the world's first truly sustainable nation," collective, as well as individual mitigation must occur.

A new phase of higher education in Bangladesh begun in the 1990s in which a remarkable transformation took place in the higher education system, largely based on market-driven economic forces. The government promulgated the Private University Act in 1992, which has been recently repealed in order to enact the new Private University Act 2010. It formulated a twenty-year Strategic Plan for Higher Education 2006-2026 (SPHE) in 2006. Consequently economic as well as political goals became drivers of the higher education system. This transformation informs a set of changes in the higher education sector. Often higher education institutions rely on private investment and the education they offer is shaped in line with the demands of global markets. This thesis explores the degree to which neoliberalism is a prominent feature of the higher education sector in Bangladesh, and the perception of key stakeholders about the influence of hegemonic neoliberal policy on their academic goals. This research is analytic and qualitative in nature. The overall approach is one of critical analysis, applying what is discussed in the international literature about neolibralisism to the higher education sector in Bangladesh. In the first instance I analysed documents from policy makers, commentators and news reporters in Bangladesh and related these to concepts in the internationals discussion of monetarism, global market economy and neolibralism. I then turned to a range of key participants in the sector itself and sought their perceptions through interview in order to fill out the initial document analysis and to ground this discussion in the experiences and understandings of people involved in the sector. The data from these interviews is accompanied by an analysis of further documents relating to the participants’ specific workplaces and once again aligned to the international discourse. The views of participants were sought through interview. A total of twenty-one participants were interviewed under six categories: the University Grant Commission (UGC) and government officials, owners of private universities, politicians and student activists, public and private university authorities and faculty members, education expert and sociologists, and public and private university students. In addition, I searched and analysed a range of documents as further tools for examining the context of the neoliberal agenda within higher education. The findings are structured into four subsections: neoliberal hegemony and ideological transformation of higher education, neoliberalism and knowledge-based economy, neoliberalism in the higher education sector and its structural consequences, and neoliberalism and resistance. The findings suggested that the neoliberal shift in the higher education sector in Bangladesh explicitly changes the overall socio-cultural, political and economical patterns of society. Not only are philosophical and pedagogical aspects of higher education changed through neoliberal policy agenda, but higher education also becomes a most expensive commodity in contemporary Bangladesh. Private universities have evolved with an underlying notion of privatisation of higher education, and the process of marketisation of higher education leads to a vocationalisation of higher education. The notion of 'academic entrepreneur' contributes to the development of discriminatory attitudes between students, and between teachers. Profit motivated higher education is adversely impacting on the critical insight of the young generation. The neoliberal policy shift within higher education sector is also leading to large-scale violence in higher education institutions.