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Abstract
The global neoliberal era has sparked a burgeoning literature. Most accounts emphasize the political economy of the period, focusing on global markets and privatization. By contrast, we conceptualize neoliberalism as a broad cultural ideology that has reshaped how we think about people and institutions in all arenas of life, not just the economy. We delineate three main assumptions of neoliberalism as a cultural model. First, neoliberal ideology re-envisions society as consisting not of structures but of individual human persons who are attributed immense agency, entitlement, and rationality. Second, the neoliberal model redefines natural and social contexts in a manner that supports such imagined human actorhood, depicting them in terms of abstract rationalistic principles that apply universally. A third assumption, building on the previous two, is that progress is seen as emerging from universalized and abstracted human knowledge, rather than, for instance, from the material capacities of the state. Altogether, these assumptions amount to a dramatic cultural shift with broad consequences that include, but stretch far beyond, free markets. We illustrate these consequences by considering their expansive effects on education, drawing on existing studies and descriptive data. Overall, we expand sociological understandings of the cultural dimensions of neoliberalism.
Notes
1 We thank David John Frank for this useful point.
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Notes on contributors
Julia C. Lerch
Julia C. Lerch is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California-Irvine. She studies the role of global culture and institutions in shaping various domains ranging from education to the humanitarian sector. Recent projects examine cultural understandings of human needs in humanitarian emergencies, shifting portrayals of society in educational curricula, and the rise of resistance to global culture. Her publications have appeared in Sociology of Education, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Comparative Education Review, Gender and Society, Social Forces, International Sociology, Globalization, Societies, and Education, and European Journal of Education, as well as in several edited volumes.
Patricia Bromley
Patricia Bromley is Associate Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Sociology at Stanford University. Tricia’s research spans a range of fields including comparative education, organization theory, the sociology of education, and public administration and policy. Her work focuses on the historical rise and globalization of a (neo)liberal culture emphasizing rational, scientific thinking and expansive forms of rights. Empirically, much of her research focuses on two settings: education systems and organizations. Recent publications examine pushbacks against (neo)liberal culture in the form of growing restrictions on civil society and declining emphases on education reform.
John W. Meyer
John W. Meyer is Professor of Sociology, emeritus, at Stanford. He has contributed to organizational theory, comparative education, and the sociology of education. He has studied the impact of global models of society (World Society: Oxford 2009), of the worldwide expansion of education (Frank and Meyer, The University and the Global Knowledge Society, Princeton 2020), and of science (Drori, et al., Science in the Modern World Polity, Stanford, 2003). Recent projects are on the organizational impact of globalization (Drori et al., Globalization and Organization, Oxford 2006; Bromley and Meyer, Hyper-Organization, Oxford 2015).