See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/337558802

Brains, Media, and Politics: Generating Neoliberal Subjects

Book · November 2019

DOI: 10.4324/9780429019975

CITATIONS READS

0 723

1 author:

Rodolfo Leyva
The London School of Economics and Political Science
17 PUBLICATIONS   95 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Pornography and Young People View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Rodolfo Leyva on 29 November 2019.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

“Rudy Leyva shows, in a model of cumulative scholarship, that watching
programmes glorifying materialism and the rich makes people more selfish, less
critical of inequality, more punitive in their attitudes to welfare and less concerned
with hyper-consumption. A fearless, crucially important and scary book – lucid
and engagingly written too.”
– Ian Gough, Visiting Professor, CASE, LSE, UK;
author of  Heat, Greed and Human Need
Brains, Media, and Politics

Following the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, a number of prominent

academics, journalists, and activists were quick to pronounce the demise of
neoliberal capitalism and governance. This rather optimistic prediction, however,
underestimated the extent to which neoliberalism has shaped the 21st-century
world order and become entrenched in our sociopolitical and cognitive fabric.
Indeed, 11 years after the crisis, and in spite of the significant levels of socio-
economic inequality, psychological distress, and environmental destruction
generated by neoliberal policies and corresponding business and cultural practices,
the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism has not been supplanted, nor has it
really faced any serious unsettling. How, then, has neoliberalism inflected and
shaped our “common-sense” understandings of what is politically, economically,
and culturally viable? To help answer this question, this book combines leading
theories from sociology, media-communication research, developmental psycho­
logy, and cognitive science, and draws on primary evidence from a unique mix
of ethnographic, survey, and experimental studies – of young people’s leisure
practices and educational experiences, of young adults’ political socialisation
processes in relation to exposure to social networking sites, and of the effects of
commercial media viewing on material values and support for social welfare. In
doing so, it provides a nuanced and robustly empirically tested account of how
the conscious and non-conscious cognitive dimensions of people’s subjectivities
and everyday social practices become interpellated through and reproductive of
neoliberal ideology. As such, this book will appeal to scholars across the social
and behavioural sciences with interests in neoliberalism, political engagement,
enculturation, social reproduction, and media effects.

Rodolfo Leyva is a fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at

the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK.
Routledge Studies in Political Sociology

Performance Action
The Politics of Art Activism
Paula Serafini
Agonistic Articulations in the ‘Creative’ City
On New Actors and Activism in Berlin’s Cultural Politics
Friederike Landau
Talking Collective Action
A Sequential Analysis of Strategic Planning in Anti-Nuclear Groups
Ole Pütz
Brains, Media and Politics
Generating Neoliberal Subjects
Rodolfo Leyva

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/

sociology/series/RSPS
Brains, Media, and Politics
Generating Neoliberal Subjects

Rodolfo Leyva
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Rodolfo Leyva
The right of Rodolfo Leyva to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Leyva, Rodolfo, author.
Title: Brains, media and politics: generating neoliberal subjects /
Rodolfo Leyva.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020. |
Series: Routledge studies in political sociology | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019033581 (print) | LCCN 2019033582 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367030339 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429019975 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Neoliberalism–Social aspects. |
Neoliberalism–Psychological aspects. | Youth–Political activity. |
Mass media and youth.
Classification: LCC HB95 .L49 2020 (print) | LCC HB95 (ebook) |
DDC 320.51/3–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033581
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033582
ISBN: 978-0-367-03033-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-01997-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents

Acknowledgements viii
Introduction x

1 Homo economicus and the neoliberal society 1

2 Neoliberal cognition, subjectification, and reproduction 24

3 Reproducing neoliberalism in everyday life: A cross-national

ethnographic study 48

4 How new media help generate neoliberal subjectivities:

A survey study 93

5 Experimental insights into mass media’s cultivation of a

neoliberal habitus 122

6 A cognitive-sociological theory of neoliberal reproduction 152

References 173
Index 194
Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I sincerely thank all my research participants for their time
and insights.
Additionally, this book would not have been completed or likely even started
without the kind support, education, and friendship of the following people and
organisations.
I am very grateful for and fortunate to have had the amazing Professors Sharon
Gewirtz and Meg Maguire supervise my doctoral research. Their wisdom, grace-
ful guidance, stern but constructive criticism, and non-authoritarian pedagogy
along with their exemplary scholarship, have helped me to develop my critical
faculties and research skills, as well as to gain a strong appreciation for nuance,
context, and precision in academic thinking, research, and writing.
Thanks very much to Neil Jordan for taking a chance on this book, and to Alice
Salt, Jayanthi Chander and the Routledge production team for their great editing
and guidance.
Thanks to Dr Jennifer Sheehy-Skeffington, Professor Francesca Carpentier,
and the anonymous peer-reviewers from the journals Media Psychology, the
European Journal of Social Theory, and Social Science Computer Review for
their invaluable reviewing of most of the research in this book, and for helping me
to improve my application of statistical analyses.
Thanks to Professor Tim Kasser, Dr Diana Coben, and Dr Anwar Tlili for
helping me to develop some of the key theoretical constructs and arguments of
this book.
I am also thankful to my Santa Monica Community College professors Guido
Davis Del Piccolo, Christina Preciado, and Robert Massey, and my UC Santa
Cruz professors Dr Fransesca Guerra, Professor Andrew Szasz, and Dr Dard
Neuman for introducing me to the fields of sociology and cultural studies.
To my Santa Monica Community College English professor Shant Shahoian
for teaching me how to use, as well as enlightening me on the importance of,
textual evidence.
To my high-school teachers Jerald Kress, Lee McManus, and Mike Winnie;
my middle-school teachers Mr Hayes and Mr Terastvadsadrian; and my elemen-
tary school teachers Mr Labeck and Mr Ruiz for their kindness, teaching, and
infinite patience.
 Acknowledgements  ix
To Rebecca Atkinson, Yani Malai Abdullah, Jenny Strahler, Rachel Zarate,
Zaheen Chowdhury, and Daniel Vassallo for their invaluable support, friendship,
and much-needed encouragement.
To the A Place Called Home Community Center, California Council of the
Blind, King’s College London, and Middlesex University School of Law for their
generous financial support.
Lastly, I am grateful to the PUBLIC education systems of the University of
London, University of California, California Community Colleges, and the Los
Angeles Unified School District. Despite being constantly underfunded and under
assault from governments and privatisation initiatives; underpaid and overworked
teachers, custodians, librarians, and support staff continue to heroically run these
systems, which provide tens of thousands of marginalised and disadvantaged stu-
dents with quality education. Thank you all for your service.
Introduction

In the aftermath of 2007–2008 global financial crisis, several prominent Western

academics, journalists, and politicians were quick to predict the demise of the
dominant form of capitalism and governance (sc., neoliberalism) that caused it
(Albo et al., 2010; Grantham & Miller, 2010; Mason, 2010; Stiglitz, 2008). Such
prediction turned out to be rather optimistic. To be fair, during the initial post-crash
period, across the world there was considerable popular support and mobilisation
for the enactment of major banking reforms, regulations on derivatives markets,
and demand-side economic policies. Most national governments, however, espe-
cially those that make up the powerful G20 consortium, pretty much ignored these
public calls and have over the last 11 years since the crisis, continued to imple-
ment neoliberal legality and macroeconomic strategies (Ban, 2016; Braedley &
Luxton, 2010).1 Indeed, these governments along with their corporate backers and
servile economists retain an unwavering belief that their pro-market prescriptions
are the most efficient and perhaps the only possible means to achieve long-term
economic development, growth, and prosperity (Davies, 2017; Mirowski, 2014).
This “staying the course” response would be somewhat understandable if the
2007–2008 fiasco was an outlier or relatively anomalous incident in an otherwise
prosperous and harmonious era of neoliberalism. Yet this was only the latest of a
series of similar financial meltdowns that have occurred throughout the past four
decades of neoliberalisation (see e.g., the 1986 US Savings and Loan Crisis, 1994
Tequila Crisis, 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, and 2001 Turkish Economic Crisis).2

1  For example, financial deregulation policies that relaxed, if not effectively eliminated, capital con-
trols such as position limits on financial speculation, leveraging practices, and capital gains taxes
have gone largely unchanged in the UK and the European Union (Prieg et al., 2011; Stiglitz, 2012),
and only cosmetically altered in the US (Taibbi, 2010). I bring this up because these particular types
of neoliberal economic policies are widely believed to be a major proximal cause of the 2007–2008
global financial crisis (Mason, 2010).
2  During this period, scores of national economies, such as those from Mexico, Russia, Argentina,
Thailand to list but a few, crashed one after another due to unsustainable financial speculation,
lapsed capital controls, and contractionary fiscal measures. These economic prescriptions and con-
ditions were encouraged and facilitated by neoliberal ideologically aligned institutions including
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the US Federal Reserve (Ellwood, 2011;
Steger & Roy, 2010).
 Introduction  xi
These crises have at different intervals, and to put it mildly, negatively impacted
most of the developed and developing world.
As if chronic national and international market volatility and deep recessions
were not bad enough, the neoliberal policy package of trade liberalisation, priva-
tisation, deregulation, low taxation, expansionary monetarism, and austerity has,
wherever implemented, generated skyrocketing socioeconomic inequality, living
costs, wealth concentration, and rates of precarious employment, along with per-
sistent wage stagnation for those in the bottom 50th percentile of income distribu-
tions despite their increased productivity (Adler, 2009; Albo et al., 2010; Chang,
2010; Cummins, 2018; Dorling, 2014; Freeman, 2017). As Grantham and Miller
(2010, p. 175) note, neoliberalism’s apogee has seen the “gap between what
labour produces and what it reaps become greater than at any point in recorded
history”. They further add that the resulting “re-concentration of wealth in the
hands of the haute bourgeoisie is unprecedented since the advent of working-class
electoral franchises” (Grantham & Miller, 2010, p. 175). Furthermore, neoliber-
alism has given rise to an unsustainable global political-economic and cultural
system of export-oriented industrialisation and crass consumerism that is under-
mining psychological well-being (Dittmar et al., 2014; Kasser et al., 2007; Leyva,
2018b), and depleting and devastating the natural environment (Ellwood, 2011;
Patel, 2010; Wall, 2010). And just in case you still need convincing on why you
should be perturbed about the continued practice and reproduction of neoliberal-
ism, consider the key takeaway from the latest report by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (2018). In short, according to this report, if we don’t
make significant world-wide systemic and structural changes within the next 12
years (as of 2019), then our current international neoliberal system will potentiate
climate changes that may be irreversible and downright apocalyptic.
Now, of course, it’s not surprising that ruling elites, business leaders, beltway
think tanks, and mainstream media pundits continue to defend and advance neo-
liberal prescriptions (Ban, 2016; Mirowski, 2014). After all, they represent the
interests of and/or are by and large themselves part of the 1% of people who have
substantially benefited from neoliberal policies. As such, they have more than
enough resources to insulate themselves from the economic desperation, social
unrest, food insecurity, pollution, ill health, and mass migration problems that
these policies and concomitant sociocultural practices engender. What is consid-
erably more perplexing, however, is that in much of the world, the neoliberal
paradigm has not been supplanted, nor has it really faced serious unsettling by
the “99%”. To clarify, sporadic outbursts of public protest and social movements
have manifested. However, these have, to all extents and purposes, been relatively
short-lived, quelled, or co-opted, particularly in the United States (US) and the
United Kingdom (UK) – the world harbingers and enforcers of neoliberal doctrine
(Glaser, 2014; Hall & Rustin, 2015; Newman, 2016).3 Reed (2014, p.1) succinctly

3  This contention is not disproven or weakened by the recent rise in the number of far-right nationalist
groups. Their alt-right movement did contribute to the 2016 Presidential election of Donald Trump
and the Brexit outcome, but it does not yet nor is it likely to at some point pose a fundamental threat
to the neoliberal establishment (Bessner & Sparke, 2017; Lawson, 2018).
xii Introduction
sums up this state of acquiescence to neoliberalism in the US, but note that his
observations also fairly describe the UK context.

Today, the labour movement has been largely subdued, and social activists
have made their peace with neoliberalism and adjusted their horizons accord-
ingly. Within the women’s movement, goals have shifted from practical
objectives such as comparable worth and universal childcare in the 1980s to
celebrating appointments of individual women to public office and challeng-
ing the corporate glass ceiling. Dominant figures in the anti-war movement
have long since accepted the framework of American military intervention-
ism. The movement for racial justice has shifted its focus from inequality to
“disparity”, while neatly evading any critique of the structures that produce
inequality.

But why is it that the majority of the American and British populations are
seemingly indifferent to, or accepting of, the grotesque inequalities and psycho-
logical and environmental harms that neoliberalism is exponentially perpetrating?
Or more to the point, how exactly has and does neoliberalism inflect and shape
their “common-sense” understandings of what is politically, economically, and
culturally viable? These are the questions that have guided the past ten years of
my debilitating Ph.D. and post-doctoral research, and that this resulting mono-
graph is designed to help address. In hindsight, rather than such an extremely
weighty, immensely complicated, and ultimately depressing topic, I should have
definitely researched anything else, like perhaps, cats and the Internet. Alas, it is
much too late for that now, but before I regale and possibly depress you with my
academic life’s work, I’ll briefly discuss how the extant scholarship more or less
answers the aforementioned questions, and then outline how my work differs and
what it offers.
The collection of empirical and theoretical accounts concerned with explain-
ing the resilience and embeddedness of neoliberalism can be broadly broken up
into two major branches. The first branch is composed of political-economy and
neo-Gramscian sociological works that focus on analyses of the various inter-
locked policy, discursive, economic, and civil society factors, conditions, and
mechanisms that enable the structural manifestation of neoliberalism (see e.g.,
Ban, 2016; Cerny, 2014; Hall, 2011; Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009; Steger & Roy,
2010). The second branch comprises accounts of youth subjectivity formations.
These focus on examining the ways that neoliberal institutional and cultural con-
ditions shape the developmental processes of subjectification, and on how this
then contributes to the broader processes of neoliberal social reproduction (see
e.g., Binkley, 2011; Coakley, 2011; Gill, 2008; Lloyd, 2012).4

4  Subjectification refers to the formative process of becoming a knowing subject i.e., formations
of the self. Social reproduction is defined and used somewhat differently across social science
disciplines. This is not the appropriate space to review these differences but broadly speaking, in
 Introduction  xiii
There are other delineations and differences between these two branches.
Nevertheless, there is a lot of theoretical overlap between them such that what
can be reasonably considered or inferred as their most approximate answers to the
research questions posed earlier are quite similar and complementary. For exam-
ple, works from the first branch tend to explicitly or implicitly suggest the follow-
ing. Existing power structures, along with the systemic and policy imperatives
of global capitalism and the circulation of free market, consumer sovereignty,
individualism, and responsibilisation discourses via civil society institutions (e.g.,
mass media, churches, universities), have made it so that the majority of the “99%”
misguidedly, although at times begrudgingly, accept and adopt accordant socio-
cultural norms, values, and practices. In doing so, these subjects consent, sub-
mit, and contribute to the everyday production and maintenance of the neoliberal
social order even though they are to varying degrees subordinated, marginalised,
and detrimentally impacted by it (Braedley & Luxton, 2010; Chomsky, 2011; Hall
& Rustin, 2015; Harvey, 2005; Gill, 2003). On the other hand, accounts from the
second branch generally argue that Western youth from the millennial generation
(i.e., post-1980 birth cohorts) do actively construct and negotiate their selfhoods
and practices around the competing discursive systems of culture and value avail-
able to them. However, these self-constructions are very often, as Harvey et al.
(2013, p. 9) put it, substantially influenced by and reflective of “the circulation
of global tropes of consumption and idealised neoliberal subjectivities” (see also
e.g., O’Flynn & Petersen, 2007; Stahl et al., 2017; Weidner, 2009).
The synopsis outlined is certainly a gross simplification of a highly insight-
ful and compelling literature that describes and explains many of the structural,
organisational, and interactional components underpinning the durability and
continuity of neoliberalism. That said, I have to make what will hopefully be the
uncontroversial proposition that the scholastic outputs from this literature are for
the most part, and irrespective of their nuances, sophistication, and contextual
differences, essentially premised on or positing theories of cultural hegemony.
As such, they are mired in, tied to, or at least very much reflect or insinuate the
dated Marxist notion of false consciousness, i.e., “the holding of false beliefs
that are contrary to one’s social interest and which thereby contribute to the dis-
advantaged position of the self or the group” (Jost, 1995, p. 397). To reiterate,
and no matter how sensitively applied, updated, or tacitly alluded to in the extant
literature, these false-consciousness types of explanations suggest that subjects
hold a cognisant but misguided awareness of their consent, contribution, and sub-
mission to the existing social order. Additionally, newer versions of this thesis,

macro-level sociological and political-economy research, social reproduction refers to the struc-
tural and institutional conditions that breed capitalist social formations (Gill, 2003). However,
the broader conception used here is the one widely used in micro-level sociological, education,
anthropological, and cultural studies research. This conception of social reproduction generally
pertains to “all the mechanisms, processes, and practices by which multiple social hierarchies,
divisions and relations of wealth, power, and influence are sustained and re-created over time”
(Gewirtz & Cribb, 2009, p. 86).
xiv Introduction
especially those from the second branch of the literature, also imply that subjects
are perpetually and consciously aware of, reflecting on, adopting, and negotiating
between the neoliberal discourses and practices that they are institutionally and
culturally presented with. The problem with all these explanations is that they do
not quite capture how human cognition works or facilitates social reproduction
as I will elaborate on throughout the book. But, a more pressing limitation of this
scholarship is that it doesn’t specify what constitutes a neoliberal false conscious-
ness or subjectivity, nor provides a testable conceptualisation of what causes
these social-psychological phenomena or how they are behaviourally expressed.
Even if it did – and although I agree with its assertion that systemic imperatives,
unequal material conditions, coercive power relations, ideological mystification,
and agentic consent are important contributing factors – this still would not suf-
ficiently explain how capitalist systems continue to endure and evolve. Nor how
these become accepted and reproduced by a critical mass of people – including
those that are the most systemically disadvantaged and exploited (Bourdieu,
2000b). What is required to make fuller sense of this perplexity is, as Bourdieu
(2000a) argues, a theory of how agents’ embodied sociocultural dispositions can
direct them to non-consciously and routinely enact social discourses and practices
that ultimately perpetuate and enable the recreation of the status quo.

Book attributes, objectives, and structure

So while certainly informed by and indebted to the literature previously described,
this monograph differs from it in at least four ways. First, it presents a hitherto
absent specific conceptualisation of a) both the socio-structural and cognitive-
affective mechanisms through which subjects consciously and non-consciously
acquire and reproduce neoliberal ideology, and b) the distinct dispositional men-
tal representations and corresponding behaviours that are held and enacted by
a typical neoliberal subject. Thus, this book provides a new and testable theory
of how neoliberal subjects develop, think, feel, and act, which can supplement
and advance understandings of the processes of neoliberal hegemony and repro-
duction. Second, this new theory incorporates leading paradigmatic tenets from
the cognitive sciences, and is in this way a response to longstanding calls for
sociologists to engage with these fields in order to help clarify the psychologi-
cal assumptions that are implicit in all sociological accounts of culture and sub-
jectivity (Cerulo, 2010; Srivastava & Banaji, 2011; Turner, 2007). Further, this
incorporation is a sincere effort to promote cross-disciplinary fertilisation, as well
as to heed Turner’s (2007) warning that if sociologists continue to minimise the
cognitive instead of actually engaging with cognitive science, they will then end
up pushing “social theory to the far periphery of knowledge, into a ghetto of its
own making” (p. 359).
Third, to empirically support my theory, I present findings from three sepa-
rate but complementary studies that I conducted over the last ten years. These
include, in chronological order, 1) a 2010–2013 cross-national critical ethno-
graphic study that explored how in London and Los Angeles, young people’s
 Introduction  xv
cultural and political dispositions and practices reflected the prevailing neo-
liberal congruent discourses of their respective societal environments (N = 41,
ages 16–19). 2) A 2015 UK-based web-survey study that examined associations
between new media usages and the formation of neoliberal subjectivities (N =
271, ages 18–29). And, 3) a 2017 UK-based experiment that tested the effects of
exposure to materialistic media on the cultivation and expression of neoliberal-
congruent dispositional attitudinal, value, and behavioural orientations (N = 487,
ages 18–45). In other words, I support my theory with extensive multimodal data
that has been collected through primary qualitative, quantitative, and experimen-
tal research, which is, to my knowledge, fairly rare. Fourth, to further bolster
my theory, I also incorporate within it leading theoretical tenets, concepts, and
empirical insights from relevant subfields in political economy, political com-
munications, and social psychology. Accordingly, the main objectives of this
monograph are to

•• Put forth an interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework that

can be used to explain and examine how socialisation, enculturation, and
social reproduction might be interpreted in neoliberal contexts.
•• Inform the development and application of systematic social and digital
research methods that can help improve the transparency, precision, replica-
bility, and scientific validity of social science research.
•• Contribute new understandings on how the Internet and media-culture can
hinder or potentiate individual and collective action needed to address the
growing rates of socioeconomic and political participatory inequalities that
are rampant in advanced market democracies.
•• Provide non-specialist readers with an overview of some of the key para-
digms, terms, and latest findings from major subfields of political sociology,
cultural studies, media-communication, developmental psychology, and cog-
nitive neuroscience.

Admittedly, what I am pitching here does at first glance seem conceptually

and epistemologically incompatible, if not straight up incoherent, but if you bear
with me, I will make a cogent connection between everything I discussed so far.
To do so, I start Chapter 1 by mapping the historical and intellectual develop-
ment and structural consequences and effects of neoliberal theories, policies, and
discourses from the mid-1940s onwards as they apply to UK and US societies.
This sets the political-economic context that this book and research are situated
in, and describes the socio-institutional and organisational factors that my theory
draws on. In Chapter 2, I review key tenets from major neurocognitive develop-
ment and social cognition theories. I then synthesise these tenets within a modi-
fied formulation of Bourdieu’s (2000a) “habitus” construct, to sketch a model for
explaining and empirically exploring core socio-cultural values, attitudes, and
behaviours that individuals raised in neoliberal societies may potentially culti-
vate and enact. Next I test this model across each of my three aforementioned
studies in Chapters 3, 4, and 5, respectively. In these chapters, I review relevant
xvi Introduction
cultural studies, media-communication, and developmental psychology litera-
tures, and detail my methodological designs and analyses procedures. I should
warn you that this includes some statistics, but before you close the book, keep
in mind that I have attempted to make the stats sections accessible to math-pho-
bic readers. Finally, in Chapter 6, I combine all of the disparate theoretical and
empirical insights that I reviewed and examined in each of the previous chapters
into a unified macro-, meso-, and micro-level cognitive-sociological theory of
neoliberal reproduction.

Why millennial youth?

Before proceeding to Chapter 1, I need to mention that the main arguments and
theoretical framework that I lay out in this monograph apply to people who have
spent a considerable amount of their lives residing in neoliberal or neoliberalising
societies. However, the empirical studies from which they are derived, mostly
focus on UK and US millennials, and so will much of this book.5 The reasons for
this are firstly, because UK and US millennials have been directly bombarded and
surrounded by neoliberalism more than any other previous generation (Coakley,
2011; Harvey et al., 2013; Stahl et al., 2017). They also represent the most imme-
diate generation of emerging and young adults who recently became or will be
eligible to participate in the electoral process. Therefore, they offer a unique
vantage point from which to examine the effects of everyday exposure to social
institutional promoted neoliberal congruent discourses and practices on cultural
and political subjectivity formations. Secondly, millennials are and will have to
face the most severe consequences of neoliberal policy inputs and outputs. These
include, for example, higher university tuition fees; disappearing social safety
nets; decreases in employment security, benefits, wages, pensions; and increasing
privatisation and militarisation of public spaces. Thirdly, individual and organised
groups of millennials have consistently fuelled, established, and participated in
global movements against neoliberalism. At the same time, it is also millenni-
als, through for instance their consumption practices, that significantly help to
maintain and reproduce the system and consequently fuel the processes of neo-
liberal economic and cultural “globalization” (Miles, 2015). Fourthly, according
to extensive developmental research, durable and usually lifelong cultural and
political values and attitudes begin to crystallise during late adolescence and early
adulthood (Döring et al., 2016; Eckstein et al., 2011; Krosnick & Alwin, 1991;
Loughlin & Barling, 2001; Sears & Levy, 2003).

5  Full disclosure, I am a millennial. Moreover, this book is not meant to bolster popular depictions
of millennials as self-entitled, unmotivated, and unwilling to commit to steady employment. Such
dispositions maybe in some way a product of neoliberal policy and structural changes, but there is
currently conflicting empirical evidence that millennials exhibit these dispositions more so than
previous birth cohorts (Leyva, 2019).
 Introduction  xvii
Lastly, young people possess the creative capacity to manipulate culture in
indefinite and unpredictable ways that have the potential to generate new modes
of creative, expressive, and practical thought and action, which can impact the
established social arrangements of society. To wit, youth tend to inhabit a vari-
ety of cultural forms  –  some of which are unique to young people. They also,
more often than the rest of the population, tend to strongly identify themselves
in relation to specific cultural forms ranging from mainstream, subcultural, and
countercultural. This coupled with the fact that “the political views of younger
generations are rarely carbon copies of the parents’ views” (Flanagan, 2008,
p. 294), means that youth occupy a privileged position from which to observe
wider processes of social continuity and social change (Furlong & Cartmel, 2007).
Therefore, research on the sociocultural cognitive frameworks and practices of
contemporary young people from the UK and the US can help to illuminate the
barriers to, and the possibilities of, successfully contesting the harmful elements
and growing societal problems of the present neoliberal conjuncture. As Shildrik
and colleagues (2009, p. 457) argue, “if new cultural trends emerge or significant
social developments happen, it is feasible that they will be seen here first or most
obviously, among the coming new generation of young adults”.
1 Homo economicus and the
neoliberal society

This chapter provides a brief documentation and overview of how neoliberalism

came to be, what it entails, and how social discourses and practices consistent
with its ideology are institutionally and culturally presented to and imposed on
Britons and Americans. To facilitate this endeavour, I first review the intellectual
history, ontological presuppositions, evaluative dimensions, and policy implica-
tions and rationale of neoliberalism. Secondly, I describe how neoliberal ideas
have helped form some of the major economic and public policies implemented
by British and American governments since the 1980s. Then, I describe how these
policies have shaped the governance, educational institutions, urban centres, and
media-cultural environments of contemporary UK and US societies.

What is so new about liberalism?

In the influential global bestseller, The End of History and the Last Man, ­political
scientist Francis Fukuyama (1992) famously declared that the neoliberal or what
he referred to as the liberal-democratic model, is the final evolutionary form of
human ideological, governmental, and economic organisation.1 That is, Fukuyama
draws on Karl Marx’s materialist conception of history, and (likely unknowingly) a
pre-Darwinian understanding of evolution derived from the long-discredited ortho-
genetic hypothesis of progressionism. As such, his central thesis positions neolib-
eralism as a natural and historical inevitability, i.e., the ultimate and most optimal
outcome of a presumably impartial and determined process of sociocultural natu-
ral selection. However, numerous anthropological and political-historical works
on imperial, feudal, plutocratic, theocratic, and collectivist societies clearly show
that at any time and in any part of the world where people inhabit, any number of
different economic bases and accompanying superstructures can emerge and take
root (see e.g., Diamond, 2004; Habermas, 1991; Graeber, 2004; Polanyi, 2001;

1  The term “liberal-democracy” can also refer to pre-neoliberal forms of political-economic organisa-
tion that marked early 20th century Western societies. However, from the context of Fukuyama’s
(1992) arguments (which were written as a response to the fall of the Soviet Union), it can be
inferred that he is specifically referring to the neoliberal model of open global markets and repre-
sentative/parliamentarian modes of democratic governance that underpinned the 1980s UK and US
neoliberal revolutions (Hall, 2011; Gill, 2003).
2  Homo economicus and the neoliberal society
Voutsaki, 1997). Most of these societal systems eventually collapsed, but others
have throughout history re-emerged in classic or modified forms. In any case, their
genesis, longevity, and/or reoccurrence have been primarily shaped by the availa-
ble material resources, ideas, customs, histories, and neighbouring sovereign com-
munities that volitional individuals within any given society are exposed to; and
the economic, human, and social capital and practices that they can then choose
to generate from these availabilities. Societies can, therefore, progress, regress,
or completely break down, but their development and endurance – far from being
preordained – are largely the product of indeterminate historical happenstances
and human agency. What all this means is that the neoliberal model represents a
historically coincidental social construction. Its societal manifestation is thus no
more fated, viable, permanent, and independent of political machinations than say
chattel slavery or anarcho-syndicalism. Nevertheless, by appealing to the falsified
Lamarckian view of linear evolution (see Leyva, 2014b), and by understating the
role of human volition in the enactment and maintenance of political-economic
orders, Fukuyama’s (1992) book has helped to serve two ideological functions.
The first is to convince or reassure many readers – and especially those who are
in positions of power – that the global expansion of neoliberalism is a sort of
nouveau and unstoppable manifest destiny. The second is to obscure the fact that
this expansion has, in the first instance, been the result of an ongoing and currently
70-year-long active political project (Harvey, 2005; Mirowski, 2014).
You might now rightfully be thinking, “okay, but what exactly is neoliberal-
ism?” Well, frankly, like “post-modernism” or “Foucauldian”, it is often just an
academic buzzword that is loosely exclaimed but vaguely explained. Moreover,
even when used correctly and discussed seriously, the term “neoliberalism”
applies to a plethora of political-economic assumptions, theories, and geographic
contexts rendering any attempt at an exact definition somewhat problematic. Still,
despite these caveats, a cohesive framework for understanding neoliberalism,
consisting of its key ideological and policy features, can be sketched by reviewing
the genealogy of ideas developed by the group of Western intellectuals who have
been instrumental in creating and enacting neoliberalism. Formed in 1947, this
group is known as the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS). Among other highly promi-
nent economists, historians, and philosophers, original MPS members included
Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Karl Popper, and Ludwig
von Mises (Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009), and their initial convergence and raison
d’être stem from the following historical context.2
After experiencing the failures of laissez-faire economics that led to the 1929
Great Depression, and the devastation of the Second World War that followed,
Western governments implemented a post-war system of robust market regula-
tion. Heavily influenced by the demand-side economic theories of economists
John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White, advocates of the then leading
post-war consensus argued that left to their own devices, markets would create
large-scale unemployment, social inequalities, and volatile and unpredictable

2  The MPS is still around, highly active, and its past and present membership comprise a venerated
who’s who list of predominantly old, rich, white, and male academics and political elites.
 Homo economicus and the neoliberal society  3
business cycles. Therefore, in order to avoid a repeat of the mass unemployment
and discontent that helped cause World War II, Western governments led by Britain
and America implemented the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement. This agreement
created a post-war global monetary system of capital controls supported by fixed
currency exchange rates pegged to the price of gold. The purpose of this system
was to spur international economic development and prevent competitive devalu-
ations, balance of payment deficits, and capital flight (Ellwood, 2011; McNally,
2009). At the domestic level, these governments instituted robust financial, health,
safety, and wage standards and protections; increased funding for and access to
higher and vocational education; and set up a series of anti-poverty welfare insti-
tutions that would guard the less fortunate against extreme poverty and destitu-
tion. Labour were also granted major concessions, such as the rights to organise
and to collective bargaining (Harvey, 2005; Steger & Roy, 2010).
The MPS, however, dismissed Keynesianism and the positive freedom that it
sought to advance as naïve and inherently authoritarian. Founding and present
members of the MPS were and are instead moved by the notions of instrumen-
tal rationality and negative freedom of 18th-century classical liberalism (Davies,
2017).3 According to their reformulation of these notions, human beings are pre-
dominantly possessive and rational individuals who will, primarily and mostly
behave in accordance with their perceived self-interests (Friedman, 2002).
Importantly, the conception of rational/rationality fashioned by the MPS refers
to the making of decisions and choices that garner the most benefit or utility for
the individual regardless of how much this impacts others.4 This differs consider-
ably from the more familiar philosophical and scientific conception, which refers
simply to the ability to reason, viz., to be able to consciously establish and verify
facts, apply logic, and change or justify beliefs and practices based on existing or
new information (Kompridis, 2000). Anyways, from their cynical and essential-
ist understanding of human nature follows their normative position that people’s
self-interested predispositions can and should be channelled for progressive soci-
oeconomic development. But, this must only be done through political economies
that engender the legal protection and appropriation of private capital, relatively
unfettered market forces, and negative freedom (Hartwell, 1995; Hayek, 1994).
In other words, rather than try to hinder or sublimate people’s innate and basi-
cally psychopathic dispositional and behavioural properties, the MPS argues that

3  In political philosophy, negative freedom refers to the capacity to act free from external and unjust
social restraints of any form, not just those of the state. However, the neoliberal reformulation of nega-
tive freedom only refers to the capacity to engage in economic activates free from government interfer-
ence – such as the freedom to choose between competing consumer products and services, or dump
toxic waste into rivers and poor neighbourhoods. This narrower formulation does not entail freedom
from coercive, intrusive, and oppressive corporate authority, nor the freedom to challenge the autocratic
powers and actions of property owners over non-property owners (Chomsky, 2011; Polanyi, 2001).
4  This ontological view of humans as essentially hyper selfish and anti-social agents mirrors John
Stuart Mill’s characterisation of Homo Economicus (Patel, 2010). Interestingly, the only people who
actually behave like this are clinical psychopaths (which make up about 1% of the population), and
kindergarteners – most of which go on to naturally develop pro-social dispositions and behaviours
in late childhood (Geraci & Surian, 2011).
4  Homo economicus and the neoliberal society
political-economic systems should instead let these run free because natural and
unhindered market mechanisms will ensure outputs that are beneficial to both the
individual and society (Friedman, 2002). This may seem like a paradoxical view,
but according to this logic if people are free to pursue their own selfish goals and
desires (e.g., prestige and/or capital accumulation), and if these pursuits are chan-
nelled through unrestricted competitive market endeavours, then positive societal
outcomes will organically manifest themselves. Let me elaborate on this point.
Selfie-sticks, mobile phones, fast-fashion clothing, pumpkin-spice lattes, and sub-
ject-specific academic essays are all examples of commercial products that are
readily available because of self-interested goals and competitive behaviours. For
the businesses that provide these goods do so solely because of their motivations to
accumulate wealth. And, since they are in competition with other businesses that
are also seeking to maximise profits, we as customers benefit by having a variety of
these goods at varying prices and quality that we are free to purchase based on our
calculated needs and means. Businesses unable to provide market-demanded prod-
ucts or services at competitive prices and quality will, therefore, eventually shut
down, whereas those that can, will continue to thrive and improve. Thus the theory
goes that, in aggregate, these micro and organisational economic behaviours will
generate -the most efficient supply chains and manufacturing procedures; -perpet-
ual innovations in services and technologies; and -fair compensation for capable,
risk-taking, and hard-working entrepreneurs and their workers.
Conversely, any attempts to harness the powers of the state to redistribute wealth
and regulate markets for the public good, however benevolent and well intentioned,
will have disastrous social and economic results. This is primarily because these
objectives as traditionally advanced by state socialism and to a lesser extent by
Keynesian forms of regulated capitalism, require excessive government economic
intervention that distorts the natural pricing equilibrium mechanisms of supply and
demand. Invariably, this results in the inefficient and wasteful allocation of finite
resources and services (Friedman, 2002). The long bread lines in the former Soviet
Union are often cited as an example of this economic inefficiency (Chang, 2010).
Further, these political-economic systems necessarily infringe on individuals’ free-
dom to utilise their capital as they choose. This has the consequent effect of stifling
the psychological incentives necessary for entrepreneurial innovation and eco-
nomic growth.5 Coupled, all these cumulative macro and micro effects inevitably
generate high inflation, stagnant economies, and unproductive state-dependent citi-
zenries that in extreme cases can lead to despotism (Hayek, 1994). Polanyi (2001,
p. 260), writing in direct response to these MPS arguments, notes that

Planning and control are being attacked as a denial of freedom. Freedom

and enterprise and private ownership are declared to be essential to freedom.
No society built on other foundations is said to deserve to be called free.

5  So, for example, why bother working for a promotion, or starting a new business that creates jobs if
this is going to increase your marginal income tax, or so this type of thinking goes.
 Homo economicus and the neoliberal society  5
The freedom that regulation creates is denounced as unfreedom; the justice,
liberty and welfare are decried as a camouflage of slavery.

Guided by their homo economicus ontological assumptions and unwavering

faith in the role of the metaphysical “invisible hand” of the free market in correct-
ing economic inefficiencies and externalities, the MPS zoomed, narrowed, and
morphed classical liberalism into a Social Darwinian variant that we now know as
and term “neoliberalism”. To wit, classical liberalism, and Adam Smith’s version
in particular – which is unfortunately often conflated with neoliberalism – are not
just based on the innate selfishness of humanity. Classical liberalism is much more
nuanced than is commonly depicted, and very much coincided with the thinking of
Enlightenment Age that valued reason, creativity, and human freedom over dogma
and all forms of oppressive authority deemed to be an affront to human dignity.
In that context, classical liberalism largely underscored humanist and even radi-
cally leftist values and ideas (Patel, 2010). For instance, Smith (1796) did posit
that humans are selfish, but also noted extensively and eloquently in his less well-
known work The Theory of Moral Sentiments that people are equally compassion-
ate and altruistic. Based on this more complex understanding of human nature, and
predating Karl Marx, Smith even went as far as to rail against corporate privileges,
rent-seeking, greed, the over-commodification of social life, and the concentration
of private wealth (Norman, 2018). He also supported public education and gov-
ernment policies that favoured the working classes. For example, in The Wealth of
Nations, the landmark book that many neoclassical (i.e., neoliberal) economists,6
often cite but likely have never actually read, Smith (1796. p. 93) writes that
“when the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and
equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters”.
Furthermore, much of what Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and most classical
liberals argued for was in many ways a utopian society that can only function if
it met the following key conditions. First, truly free-market nations have to allow
free flow of labour within and across their borders so that workers can find the most
optimal wages and working conditions. Second, these nations’ economies must be
composed of various small enterprises with limited division of labour to, as can
be inferred from Smith’s (1796) observations of a pin factory, avoid or at least
temper the alienation and cognitive decline of workers that can result from over-
specialisation in the form of constant and repetitive monotonous routines. Third,
capital should be anchored in those communities in which the owners themselves
reside so that they can experience first-hand and correct any negative externalities
induced by their industries. Fourth, these enterprises must operate in a state of
“perfect competition” – a hypothetical market condition where no cartel, single
firm, or buyer can control resources and distort prices. (Note that this would require

6  To be fair, for most of its 100-plus-year existence, neoclassical economics was not inherently neolib-
eral. However, and despite political and some ideological differences between MPS type neoliberal
theorists and university neoclassical economists, for over the last 20 years, these two camps have very
much worked in tandem to advance basically the same economic prescriptions (Mirowski, 2014).
6  Homo economicus and the neoliberal society
an abolishment of corporate conglomeration and oligopolies and the enactment of
very stringent anti-trust laws to prevent monopolisation and oligopolisation.) Fifth,
equilibrium under this hypothetical competitive condition can only be engendered
by educated, rational, and sovereign individuals who possess “perfect informa-
tion”. This entails a cognitive condition in which all buyers and sellers know or
have immediate access to undistorted knowledge about all of the retail prices, utili-
ties, cost functions, and externalities of all goods and services. Such condition is
virtually impossible to meet, but an approximation of it would at the minimum
require large government expenditure on education to ensure a literate, critical, and
numerate populace along with laws requiring businesses to be completely transpar-
ent about their pricing, production methods, and product ingredients. Sixth, trade
between nations must be equally balanced so that one does not become dependent
or indebted to another (Ellwood, 2011; Patel, 2010). International trading arrange-
ments and treaties must, therefore, be made to ensure non-zero-sum outcomes.
However, MPS members and intellectual offshoots  –  specifically those from
the Chicago School, disregarded or downplayed the necessity of the six structural
conditions outlined. For example, they give primacy to the maximisation of utility
over perfect competition, and hence argue against anti-trust laws. In fact, they find
monopolisation and price fixing to be acceptable on the basis that these could only
be the result of a given company having greater efficiencies and services or prod-
uct quality than their perished or perishing competition (Davies, 2017). Moreover,
they argue for the unrestricted and transnational movement of capital and wealthy
capitalists, but say little, and when presented, have posed contradictory ideas about
the unregulated transnational mobility of workers and their rights. Mirowski and
Plehwe (2009, p. 26) further point out that “notably absent [from the MPS manifes-
tos] are the range of human and political rights traditionally embraced by liberals
(including the right to form coalitions and freedom of the press)”. This inatten-
tion to propositions on how to cultivate and safeguard humanity’s better angels,
likely stems from their cynical understanding of human nature. To reiterate, the
MPS argues that given our homo economicus makeup, we human beings will, in
most instances, only behave ethically, altruistically, or communally if it directly and
personally benefits us. Society as a whole should, therefore, be transformed into a
competitive market arena that can transubstantiate these dominant self-interested
drives and motivations into a stable equilibrium. In practice, this implies that indi-
viduals should effectively reject humanist and leftist-progressive values, goals, and
practices, e.g., a socially conscious concern for and collective actions to protect the
environment, labour rights, and human rights. Instead, they should embrace their
callous dispositions and adopt instrumentalist and what can, in the present parlance,
be described as right-wing libertarian values, goals, and practices such as competi-
tiveness, entrepreneurialism, and a primary preoccupation with the enhancement of
one’s human, social, and economic capital (Binkley, 2011; Chomsky, 2011; Kasser,
2011; Weidner, 2009). This goes to Braedley and Luxton’s (2010, p. 8) point that

Human rights and equality under neoliberalism are the rights and equality to
compete, but not the rights to start from the same starting line, with the same
 Homo economicus and the neoliberal society  7
equipment, or at the sound of the same gun. It certainly does not include
rights to certain outcomes, such as a certain degree of health or education.
Competition, because it is portrayed as an “impersonal choice” rather than
structured by people’s decisions, is somehow perceived fairer than direct
government action in the distribution of social goods and risks.

Yet, to the extent that neoliberalism is not the same as 18th-century classical
liberalism, likewise it is not the same as the fabled 19th-century laissez-faire capi-
talism, despite their similar ideological positions and ontological presuppositions
(Ban, 2016; Plehwe et al., 2007). To be certain, self-conscious neoliberal intellectu-
als are not calling for a total elimination of the state. On the contrary, they readily
concede that a sound and prosperous economy necessitates a strong state to enforce
contracts, protect property rights, and shore up markets and holders of financial
capital in times of economic crisis (Friedman, 1948; Hayek, 1994).7 Therefore,
it is perhaps more accurate to conceptualise neoliberalism as a kind of “reverse
Keynesianism” that synthesises lessons, insights, and philosophical arguments from
the 18th-, 19th-, and 20th-century history of Western political economy and thought.
Keynesian economists, for instance, argue that macroeconomic strategies
should be concerned with ensuring levels of aggregate demand that are sufficient
to reach full employment. To achieve this, they argue for large government spend-
ing on education, employment training programmes, welfare, health care, infra-
structure, and research and development, and if need be, white-elephant public
works. And, all of these expenditures must be funded through high progressive
taxation. They also generally favour collective bargaining, centralised wage regu-
lations, and certain price controls as added means to spur economic recovery and
curb inequality. In contrast, neoliberal economists argue that inflation, not full
employment, should be the primary concern for macroeconomic policy. Perhaps
tellingly, inflation, so long as it’s kept under extreme hyperinflation levels, pre-
dominantly impacts the wealthy, whereas unemployment is a more prevalent
concern for the middle and working classes (Chang, 2010). Moreover, as Baker
(2006, p. 19) argues, combating inflation depends on “keeping unemployment high
enough to prevent inflation from rising above the [band the US Federal Reserve]
views as acceptable”. This band is usually between 3% and 5% annual inflation
rate that when exceeded, tends to lead to hikes in interest rates and consequent job
loses that disproportionally affect the bottom half of income earners. Neoliberal
economists, however, contend that these are short-term economic costs, and insist

7  For example, the 2007–2008 UK and US government bailouts of troubled banks can be seen as
actually coinciding with, rather than contradicting, neoliberal theory. These bailouts included the
implementation of measures known as “quantitative easing”, i.e., the immediate and heavily dis-
counted injection of massive amounts of digital money into large and state-approved financial firms
via central banks (Taibbi, 2010). Such measures were enacted by Federal Reserve Chair and noted
Milton Friedman disciple Ben Bernanke, who was convinced by Friedman’s argument that the 1929
Great Depression was largely exacerbated by the Federal Reserve’s failure to provide banks with an
emergency influx of liquidity (Mason, 2010).
8  Homo economicus and the neoliberal society
that their monetary and supply-side approaches can help address poverty, wage
stagnation, and long-term unemployment more effectively than statist interven-
tions. A major reason for this is that, as the “Nobel laureates” Milton Friedman,
Edmund Phelps, and Friedrich Hayek argued, there is a natural rate of unem-
ployment that cannot be changed by demand management policies. Government
instruments and programs aiming to reach full employment and ensure fair wages
would hence be ultimately ineffective and slow the necessary elimination of out-
dated, overpaid, and inefficient jobs, which could lead to higher unemployment
levels in the long run. Worse still, they risk triggering uncontrollable inflation that
if realised would have a greater negative impact on middle- and low-income earn-
ers by decreasing their purchasing power. Though it’s worth adding that there is
neither robust evidence for Phelps and Friedman’s natural rate of unemployment
hypothesis, nor for the proposition that one of the major components that make
up this theoretical construct termed “surplus unemployment”, is caused by gov-
ernment- or union-imposed wage controls. All this suggests that concordant and
highly impactful anti-inflationary responses informed by this hypothesis and fol-
lowed by governments and central banks, are basically guesswork. But I digress.
Another neoliberal rationale for favouring monetarist and supply-side policies
is premised on the notion that through a diligent and prudent control of the money
supply that keeps annual inflation under or within a 3–5% range, governments and
central banks can raise and stabilise the real value (as opposed to nominal value)
of financial assets and revenues (Albo et al., 2010; Chang, 2010). This, in consort
with tax cuts and decreased regulations, puts more money into the hands of indi-
vidual investors, chief executive officers, and entrepreneurs, and incentivises them
to increase investments and hiring; thereby resulting in the creation of jobs and
more efficient and lasting economic growth than it is possible to attain by means
of Keynesian fiscal policies (Steger & Roy, 2010). Some neoliberal economists
like the infamous Arthur Laffer (originator of the laughable Laffer Curve thesis),
go as far as to argue that high tax rates actually decrease fiscal revenues since they
apparently cause the wealthy to invest less and to work fewer hours. Fewer invest-
ments mean less hiring, and working fewer hours means lower incomes, all these
supposed decrements thus result in lower marginal income tax contributions.
Conversely, decreasing taxes on the wealthy encourages them to work longer
hours, and should hence increase government tax intakes (Adler, 2009). In short,
and their specious and thoroughly empirically refuted reasoning aside, neoliberal
macroeconomic prescriptions are aimed at incentivising investment, facilitating
entrepreneurship, and engendering continuous economic growth. Their purported
advantage over statist approaches is that they seek to meet such aims while pre-
serving individual freedom by limiting the state’s ability to interfere in how indi-
viduals choose to utilise their earned or inherited wealth and capital.
However, that said, a minimal degree of funding for private enterprises and pub-
lic services through fiscal revenues is actually consistent with neoliberal theory and
prescriptions (e.g., negative income tax), provided that these are not “inimical to
the initiative and functioning of the market” (Hartwell, 1995, p. 42). Although, neo-
liberals contend that the scope of the welfare state has to be drastically reduced and
 Homo economicus and the neoliberal society  9
that its role be redefined vis-à-vis the market by, for example, making welfare ben-
efits means-tested, temporary, and dependent on work requirements. They further
propose that the primary function of welfare and education institutions should be
to condition and train individuals to be self-reliant, entrepreneurial, and responsible
decision-makers. Moreover, public institutions should be made to compete for pub-
lic funds against other public institutions and private-profit and non-profit organisa-
tions. To facilitate this public institutional restructuring, neoliberals advocate for
neo-managerial practices and corporate style accountability metrics and targets to
help eliminate wastefulness, incentivise positive performances, measure outcomes,
and maximise customer satisfaction (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Friedman, 2002).
Throughout the second half of the 20th-century, members and affiliates of the
MPS founded and honed several influential theories which maintain and claim
to mathematically prove that, given a choice, human beings will predominantly
behave in accordance with their perceived self-interests, e.g., public-choice the-
ory, rational-choice theory, and game theory (Davies, 2017; Spies-Butcher, 2002).
They also wrote extensive position papers on subjects varying from welfare and
education reform, to environmental and labour standards. In every instance, they
argued against Keynesian, socialist, and even feminist positions (which, for
example argue that the state should play an active role in securing women’s rights
in the workplace), in favour of ostensibly “scientific” and, therefore, ideology-
free, pro-market solutions (Plehwe et al., 2007). Their theories and studies gained
them enormous prestige and authority in the fields of sociology, political science,
international relations, and especially in economics; with several members win-
ning so-called “Nobel” prizes in economics.8 To spread their ideology, as part
of what Harvey (2005) argues was a conscious and key strategy in their war of
position (i.e., the intellectual and cultural establishment of counter-hegemonic
ideas and institutions), they formed academic strongholds at the London School
of Economics and the University of Chicago. With the help and funding of pow-
erful business lobbying and policy groups like the US Chamber of Commerce,
the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Business
Roundtable to name just a few, they also founded several national and interna-
tional think tanks (Gill, 2003). These include the Institute of Economic Affairs
(UK), the Heritage Foundation (US), the Fraser Institute (Canada), and the Lion
Rock Institute (Hong Kong).9 This now extensive think tank and intellectual net-
work is not entirely homogenous in its views and policy positions, but does more

8  The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is not, as can be
inferred from its official name, a real Nobel prize. Its association with the Nobel prizes was actually
a marketing gimmick spearhead by MPS members and associates to lend their theories unwarranted
prestige and authority. To his credit, Friedrich von Hayek opposed the creation of this prize, but this
did not stop him from accepting one.
9  The MPS has expanded its membership from its original 38 individuals to over 1000, acting as an
umbrella organisation that encompasses a well-organised global network of think tanks that also
includes the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (US), the Liberty Institute (Brazil), and Unir-
ule (Beijing) (Plehwe et al., 2007).
10  Homo economicus and the neoliberal society
or less advocate the same general policy approach for accelerating and maintain-
ing economic growth and market credibility. More specifically, most affiliates of
this network argue that countries should maximise their comparative advantages
in factor endowments, achieve fiscal solvency, and attract foreign direct invest-
ment by implementing policies that allow for the following:

1. Businesses to largely self-regulate; i.e., run their operations relatively free

from having to adhere to, e.g., government-imposed red-tape formalities,
workplace safety mandates, waste disposal rules, quarantine rules, anti-
discrimination laws, minimum wages, price controls, limits on mergers and
acquisitions, and production quality standards. The logic for this being that
market mechanisms will, in theory, ensure punishment for businesses that
commit fraud, deliver poor service, conduct discriminatory hiring or wage
practices, or produce hazardous and dangerous products.
2. Liberalisation of domestic and international trade and commerce via the
implementation of uniform import and export tariffs between nations, along
with deregulation of all financial, retail, manufacturing, telecommunications,
commodity, and labour markets. Note that deregulation is a bit of a misno-
mer since it really only refers to the removal of regulations that stymie profit
margins (for examples see point 1 above). However, neoliberals are typically
fine with imposing regulations that can help firms maximise profits, such as
stricter intellectual property rights and right-to-work laws.
3. Natural resources to be privatised, because the private sector is better suited
to take care of their management than are governments or the commons.
4. Public services such as education, health care, law enforcement, and trans-
portation to be fully or partially privatised.
5. Governmental social insurance institutions to be reduced, dismantled, and
where possible replaced with voluntary private charities.
6. All forms of government taxation, including income, corporate, capital gains,
and property taxes to be reduced or eliminated.
7. The curbing of budget deficits; control of inflation; and guaranteed protection
and enforcement of legal contracts, copyrights, private property rights, and
corporate personhood rights.
8. The opening up of internal markets within government agencies as well as
new international markets, and by overwhelming military force if need be
(e.g., see Klein’s (2008) account of the forced market liberalisation of Chile
in 1973 and Iraq in 2003).
9. The restructuring of public institutions according to neo-managerial forms
of organisation and practice, i.e., the transforming of public institutions into
result-oriented enterprises that prioritise customer satisfaction and regularly
employ performance audits.
10. Key economic policy-making and implementing power to be held by an
appointed and publicly unaccountable market-oriented technocratic elite (e.g.,
central bankers), who can bypass or overturn decisions made by formal dem-
ocratic institutions that impede business operations and profit-maximisation.
 Homo economicus and the neoliberal society  11
Together, the positions discussed in this section form the basic philosophical,
intellectual, and policy foundation of what can at this point be considered classic
neoliberalism.10 So to answer the question posed earlier in this chapter: neoliberal-
ism is a political-economic paradigm consisting of a set of ideological discourses
and policies that call for and facilitate the extension of market-corporate logic
and practices into all forms of government, civic, public, and even private life,
i.e., all forms of human decision-making and organisation (Braedley & Luxton,
2010; Davies, 2017; Hall & Rustin, 2015; Patel, 2010). When taken to its logi-
cal conclusion, neoliberalism is more totalising in scope than any other previ-
ous conception and incarnation of capitalism and liberal governance. Despite this
disturbing imperialistic feature, the MPS and their global network of think tanks
and university business and economics research centres, along with their de facto
allies in network and cable news programmes, continue to insist on the merits of
neoliberalism and posit or rather hypothesise the following. The sufficient soci-
etal adoption and enactment of neoliberal ideology, governance, and policies will
over time generate prosperous and dynamic yet stable and efficient national and
international markets, in addition to the skilled, self-reliant, and flexible workers
needed to maintain and compete in them. Further, although neoliberalism has
induced astronomical wealth disparities that have even surpassed those of the
Gilded Age, and while it may not constitute an ideal or pure free-market system,
neoliberals maintain that its engendering can best approximate the meeting of the
long-term objectives of political freedom, economic efficiency, and equality of
economic power (Friedman, 2002; Hartwell, 1995; Hayek, 1994).

Neoliberal globalisation: the end of history

The second half of the 20th-century world order was characterised by a series of
global crises and transformations that brought about the end of Keynesianism and
its system of global capital controls. Of note, in 1971, US President Nixon took
the dollar of the gold standard. This effectively abolished the Bretton Woods sys-
tem of fixed exchange rates, and ushered in the current era of floating exchange
rates and accelerated financialisation (Albo et al., 2010; McNally, 2009).11 By
the 1980s, members of the MPS had gained momentum in their war of manoeu-
vre, i.e., the move from ideological struggle to political power (Gramsci, 1971).

10  The neoliberal paradigm has been influenced by several Western epistemic communities (e.g.,
Austrian and Frieburg Schools of Economics). Resultantly, various provincial strands of neolib-
eralism have sprouted, e.g., Brazilian New Capitalism, German Ordoliberalism (Mirowski & Ple-
hwe, 2009). This section and book only cover what I refer to as classic neoliberalism, as this is the
most prominent strand and the one most applicable to the UK and US.
11  Financialisation refers to the economic process that leads to “the increasing role of financial
motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domes-
tic and international economies” (Epstein, 2005, p. 3). Two of the key features of financialisation
are an increase in debt-to-equity ratios as a share of national income, and the separation of finance
from the “real” material economy.
12  Homo economicus and the neoliberal society
Specifically, they helped form the political platforms and administrations of
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and American President Ronald
Reagan (Steger & Roy, 2010). Once in office, and at the urging of their MPS
connected economic advisors, Thatcher and Reagan cut taxes on corporations and
the wealthy; shrank the power and size of regulatory state agencies; and loosened
or lifted financial, safety, labour, anti-trust, and environmental regulations. These
reforms, in conjunction with the global trade policies and multilateral agreements
spearheaded by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade
Organization, initiated and accelerated the processes of neoliberal globalisation.
This form of globalisation is characterised by the free-flow of capital within and
across nation-states; the increasing interconnectedness and interdependence of
national economies; and the rise and dominance of transnational corporations and
financial institutions (Cerny, 2014; Davies, 2017).
Successive UK and US administrations, regardless of their traditional political
positions, whether left, right, or centre, continued with similar business-friendly
policies, and spread similar prescriptions across the globe through their con-
trol of the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO. Coincidentally I am sure, all
these organisations have close ties with the MPS.12 After the 1991 fall of the
Soviet Union, and throughout the 1990s and 2000s, neoliberal “globalization”
was legally cemented by multilateral international free-trade agreements like
the WTO’s 1994 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights and 2013 Bali Package.13 These along with several WTO, European Union,
and G7 negotiations, have formed what Gill (1998, p. 16) refers to as the “new
constitutionalism”; i.e., sets of

Policies and legal measures that are intended to reinforce the rights and politi-
cal representation of investors, and in so doing to strengthen the power of
capital on a world scale. This process involves dominant state apparatuses in
the Group of Seven, the international financial institutions, and transnational
corporations, and it seeks to reproduce, politically and legally, disciplinary
neo-liberalism and the main discourse and strategy for creating what Karl
Polanyi called the “stark Utopia” of a market society on a world scale.

Consequently, these agreements have substantially contributed to the dein-

dustrialisation of UK and US economies. They have done so by allowing and
encouraging the financial sector to become detached from the real economy, and

12 The imposition of neoliberal policies on developing countries via for example, the IMF’s and
World Bank’s structural adjustments programmes, is also widely referred to as the “Washington
Consensus” (Chomsky, 2011).
13  When the interconnectedness of national economies on a global scale actually occurred is a mat-
ter of ongoing debate with some authors suggesting that it started when Columbus landed in the
Americas (Ellwood, 2011). For the purposes of this book, I am using the term globalisation to refer
to the post-1970s spread of pro-market economic reforms and policies via supranational organisa-
tions like the WTO, World Bank, and IMF.
 Homo economicus and the neoliberal society  13
major corporations to bypass domestic labour markets and outsource their opera-
tions to other nation-states with abundant cheap labour and even fewer regula-
tions (Chang, 2010; Ellwood, 2011). Alas, globalisation is far too complex a
phenomenon to be discussed at any further length in this book. Nevertheless, it
merits mention since it sets the context and justification for the political-economic
restructuring of the UK and the US of the last 40 years; viz., public and economic
policies since the 1980s have been premised on the belief that the liberalisation
of global market forces is inevitable and beyond the control of any one nation
(Davies, 2017; Giddens, 1998; Gill, 2003). Therefore, to survive in the new global
economy, British and American governing, intellectual, and media elites argue
that the major components of their respective state, economy, and civil society
need to facilitate market operations and prepare citizens to better compete in
global labour markets. Indeed, there is no alternative, or so they keep claiming.

Neoliberal governance: we will force you to be free

The 1980s British and American discourses of the minimal state and individual
responsibility marked the beginning of “market governance”, where both indi-
viduals and public and non-profit institutions are encouraged, if not coerced, to
conform to the norms and values of the market (Larner, 2000). Central to this neo-
liberal domestic project was and is the transformation of the welfare state; based
on the argument that welfare is a huge drain on GDP and produces generations
of lazy state-dependent “scroungers”. Accordingly, upon taking office, Thatcher
and Reagan reduced the size and funding for social programmes, and urged citi-
zens to wean off their dependence on the government largesse, get a job, and
invest in the new age property-owning democracy (Hall, 2011). The subsequent
Blair and Clinton administrations took a more moderate “third-way” approach.
This included some progressive policies such as increased funding for the NHS
and implementation of the minimum wage in the UK, and raising of the federal
minimum wage in the US. However, their “third-way” stressed the importance of
economic growth and social entrepreneurship in solving social problems (Ban,
2016; Giddens, 1998), and introduced tight means-tested requirements, workfare
programmes, and the neo-managerial re-structuration of social services. These
policies and programmes are designed to regulate and discipline government aid
recipients and constrain the type and amount of aid social services can offer by
making recipients and welfare organisations adhere to strict and arbitrarily gener-
ated metrics and performance outcomes (Gibson, 2008; Jessop, 1995).
In 1996, for example, promising “to end welfare as we know it”, Clinton
passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Act. This ended welfare as an enti-
tlement programme by requiring recipients to pursue work activity for 30 hours
a week with penalties for non-compliance, and to begin working after two years
of receiving benefits. The Act also placed a lifetime limit of five years on ben-
efits paid by Federal funds, and allowed charitable organisations that offered
social services to apply for Federal funding. The following Bush administration
passed into law the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act. Among other provisions, this Act
14  Homo economicus and the neoliberal society
increased the number of hours that welfare recipients must work to maintain their
benefits eligibility; reduced the annual growth of mandatory spending on enti-
tlement programmes (e.g., Medicaid, Social Security); and allowed faith-based
groups providing social services to receive Federal funding. Across the pond, in
1998, the Blair government passed the New Deal policy, which placed caps on
benefits; provided funding for job training programmes; and introduced employ-
ment-derived tax incentives (Cloward et al., 2001). This policy also increased
funding for and extended the role of the third sector in developing and deliver-
ing jobs training, social work, youth work, and other public policy services. The
subsequent Brown government continued with Blair’s work requirement and tax-
credit incentive schemes, believing that recipients can be financially incentivised
to work and save to lift themselves out of poverty.
Following the 2007–2008 global financial crisis and accompanying deep
recession, welfare policy in the US and UK has been characterised by a mixture
of those outlined above. For example, in the US, Obama and Trump continued
with their predecessors’ employment-based welfare schemes, while also cutting
hundreds of billions in funding from employment benefits and the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Trump is currently proposing consider-
able more cuts to Medicaid and Social Security, and stricter work requirements to
be eligible to receive SNAP benefits – these help around 40 million impoverished
American residents buy food (Jones, 2018). In the UK, Cameron and May car-
ried on with the Working Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit benefits of the previ-
ous Labour administrations. However, they also implemented a now decade-long
series of austerity measures that have slashed billions in funding for housing,
disability, income support, and child benefits among other social insurance pro-
grammes (Cummins, 2018; Hamnett, 2014). As of 2019, there is also an ongoing
benefits freeze on jobseeker’s allowance, tax credits, child benefits, and others
that was initiated in 2016 to save £3 billion in entitlement spending. This keeps
benefits allotments from going up with inflation, resulting in an effective cut in
funds that aid around 27 million (nearly half of the population), including 11 mil-
lion children.
Overall, the traditional Keynesian welfare system of the US and UK, which
allotted rights-based benefits, has been replaced with what Jessop (1995) refers to
as a Schumpeterian workfare-state that purportedly better suits the post-industrial
neoliberal economy. That is, the old Keynesian system was designed to accom-
pany an industrialising economy and was ambiguous about the causes of pov-
erty. The current workfare system is, on the other hand, meant to accompany a
post-industrialised service economy where poverty is explicitly held to be the
fault of the individual – one that can and must be remedied by individual effort
(Cloward et al., 2001). It’s worth stressing that in a neoliberal society, there are
no social problems, only individual hurdles and challenges, or at least that’s what
American and British governments claim. Hence, by placing limits on the dura-
tion and amount of funding beneficiaries can claim, and tying that funding to
mandatory requirements such as active job hunting, new training, community ser-
vice, and sometimes drug testing; neoliberal welfare policies are meant to enable
 Homo economicus and the neoliberal society  15
individuals to become empowered and self-reliant. The rationale being that these
otherwise callous policies will motivate destitute subjects to take responsibility
and accountability for their own life choices and actions, and help equip them
with the skills, dispositions, and work ethic needed to successfully enter modern
labour markets. As Gibson (2008, p. 12) puts it:

The Keynesian welfare state was to be dismantled and replaced by a

Schumpeterian workfare one where the state’s role is to create the structures
for the successful operation of the market in which individuals will increas-
ingly need to compete and plan for themselves as individuals, or as individual
family units.

Neoliberal education: Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!

Along with social services, public education – essentially a subcomponent of the
welfare state, has become one of the primary focal points of the neoliberal project
(Gibson, 2008; Slater, 2015). Since Thatcher and Reagan government leaders and
influential conservative think tanks and news media have presented public spending
in education as a threat to national competitiveness and GDP growth; arguing that
schools are failing to adequately equip students with the skills needed to compete
in the globalizing economy (Cribb & Gewirtz, 2013; McDonald, 2014). To remedy
this, neoliberal education reformers argue that schools must be essentially turned into
fiscally solvent commercial entities whose primary function is to condition and train
a professionally skilled and extrinsic-value-orientated workforce. They also contend
that a school’s viability, pedagogic efficacy, curriculum, and funding can be more
efficiently and accurately determined by making schools adopt and adhere to market-
corporate measures and practices of accountability, productivity, cost-effectiveness,
and consumer demand (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Friedman, 2002). From the late 1980s
onward, British and American governments passed education policies that are largely
in accordance with these arguments. For example, the UK’s 1988 Education Reform
Act and the US’s 2001 No Child Left Behind Act began the ranking and public list-
ing of schools’ performance measured primarily on completion rates (in the US) and
by how well students perform on standardised tests (in the UK and the US). Later
policies (e.g., the UK’s Education Act 2011, and the US’ 2009 Common Core State
Standards Initiative), extended the use of standardised test scores to measure schools’
competence and rank, and to, in some instances, condition their funding.
The objective measures produced by standardised testing are meant to provide
parents with the necessary information to make a sound and rational choice on
which schools can best provide quality education to their children. Resultantly,
teachers have been increasingly trained in and pressured to focus on, “teaching
to the test” classroom practices (Brown, 2015; Brown, 2010; Sloan, 2008). These
practices vary across national and local levels, but are normally modelled on rote
learning and behaviourist approaches in that they are specifically designed to
train students to attain an automated and uncritical acceptance of predetermined
answers. As an aside, while perhaps suitable for Pavlov’s dog, these pedagogic
16  Homo economicus and the neoliberal society
methods are not conducive for fostering curiosity, deep learning, or skills in criti-
cal and lateral thinking, problem-solving, and abstract reasoning (Abrami et al.,
2015; Liu et al., 2015; Sahlberg, 2009; Valli et al., 2008; Wirebring et al., 2015).
Rote memorisation techniques and excessive testing may even stymie the devel-
opment of these cognitive faculties and skills (Sidenvall et al., 2015; Wenglinsky,
2004b), which is ironic given that these are considered key requirements for par-
ticipation and success in the emerging global “knowledge economy”. Despite this,
students are more and more being taught through these methods so that they can
perform well on standardised tests (Brown, 2015; Valli et al., 2008). Additionally,
students are generally told that their scores will dictate whether and which univer-
sity they can attend, which will then determine what types of jobs they can expect
or hope to attain (Patton, 2013).
In the US, education policies have also allowed for the growth of business-
school partnerships whereby businesses and corporations provide funding to
underfunded schools in exchange for publicity and advertisement space. Hewit
(2005) argues that this can go a long way to fostering within students an unques-
tionable faith in, and inherit benevolence of, the corporate world. In anything
from curriculum creation to fund-raising, corporations have and continue to step
in where the state has neglected or been unable to fund services. Molnar (1996,
p. 25) argues that “the problem with this is that students and teachers become sub-
sumed in market logic that, in part because of its pervasiveness, appears (therefore
becomes) impervious to critique”. Policies such as the UK’s 2010 Academies Act,
and the US’s 2010 Race to the Top initiative, further enabled the corporate infil-
tration of public schooling, and facilitated the privatisation of education such that
schools can now be entirely run by private institutions. Known as free schools in
the UK and charter schools in the US, these privatised academies have the added
benefit of being able to hire non-unionised teaching staff at lower wages.
In general, the education policy inputs and outputs reviewed here both subtly
and overtly orient students, parents, teachers, and school administrators towards
market subjectivities and discursive practices of competition, consumption, and
performativity. Moreover, these policies have been substantially influenced and,
in some cases, directly crafted by unelected business leaders, pro-market think
tanks, and venture capitalists (Lipman, 2011). Thus, they serve as pointed exam-
ples of neoliberal policy and governance, and have to varying degrees:

•• Narrowly defined education values giving primacy to economic-instrumentalist

purposes, and positioned education as merely a means for job training.
•• Marketised schools, by making school rankings public, and expecting parents
and students to become rational and responsible consumers of education.
•• Corporatised schools, by introducing neo-managerial organisational strate-
gies and benchmark objectives, as well as forcing schools to compete with
each other for funding and resources.
•• Begun the privatisation of public schools, where entire schools are recon-
structed on profit models, or where selective school functions are outsourced
to the private sector, e.g., school–business partnerships (Lipman, 2011).
 Homo economicus and the neoliberal society  17
The policy inputs and outputs discussed above specifically apply to primary
and secondary education. However, the UK and US university sectors have faced
similar reforms and restructuration. This has been accelerated by the denuding of
higher education and concurrent soar in tuition fees over the past 20 years. Due
to these converging factors and conjunctures, university degree programmes are
now pursuing a more vocationally oriented pedagogy, pitching “tuition fees on a
more lucrative basis, and are valued in terms of their output of knowledge-inten-
sive human capital” (Gaffikin & Perry, 2009, p. 120). In other words, because
they are strapped for cash, universities have shifted their primary concern from
that of developing conscientious, critical, and intellectually curious global citi-
zens to that of maintaining a continuous annual recruitment of fee-paying students
(Hadley, 2015). Senior administrators usually try to accomplish this in three ways
though these will vary by institution. The first is by massive spending on the con-
struction of new teaching buildings, information technology systems, and student
accommodations. The second is by carrying out extensive domestic and interna-
tional advertising campaigns. These tend to feature a given university’s new and/
or planned infrastructure developments, various subject rankings, international
demographic profile, research accomplishments, career services, and graduate
employment figures. Congruently, the main purpose of these building investments
and advertisements is to recruit both domestic and foreign students by convincing
them that they are getting “value for their money”.
The third means consists of the imposition of standardised curriculums,
embedding of transferable and professional skills into course content, and regular
deployment of course and teaching evaluation questionnaires. One can be gener-
ous and assume that these impositions are well intended and meant to improve
the student experience. However, in practice, they are gradually carving away at
departments’ and individual lecturers’ academic freedom. For instance, course
and teaching surveys are used to discipline and regulate academics. This promotes
grade inflation and watered-down curriculum (Bunce et al., 2017), as low evalua-
tion scores reported by disgruntled student-consumers could lead to the closure of
a programme or firing of a lecturer. Additionally, the aforementioned impositions
effectively force academics to base their course content on how well it can prepare
students to attain gainful employment. As well as undermining academics’ free-
dom of what and how to teach, this preoccupation with employability and student
satisfaction goes directly against the traditional Humboldtian pedagogic objective
of fostering “an approach to learning, an attitude of mind, a skill and a capacity to
think rather than specialised knowledge” (Ash, 2006, p. 246).
It is thus arguably not too much of a stretch to claim that due to neoliberal pub-
lic policies and reforms, the UK and US primary and secondary education sectors,
largely currently function as pivotal institutional environments where millennials
are tacitly and overtly socialised to adopt uncritical, consumerist, competitive,
and instrumentalist mindsets and behaviours (Gewirtz & Cribb, 2009; Gibson,
2008; Sardoc, 2018; Sloan, 2008; Stahl et al., 2017; Valli et al., 2008). Moreover,
rather than mitigating this function, universities, may actually be intensifying
it. For example, Leyva’s (2018a) content analysis of the Russell Group’s latest
18  Homo economicus and the neoliberal society
education strategy statements showed that these predominantly contain neoliberal
discursive inflections of global competitiveness, instrumentalism, employability,
and customer satisfaction. This suggests that the Russell Group’s current and
long-term pedagogic and institutional plans strongly reflect the language of the
neoliberal policy agenda for public education, and have virtually abandoned the
historical university mission of nurturing intellectual curiosity, promoting aca-
demic freedom, generating pure scientific knowledge, and fostering character and
conscientious citizenship.14 Relatedly, all the educational institutional changes
discussed in this section may help to partly explain why, for example, UK univer-
sity enrolment in public-service-orientated courses, e.g., education, which usually
attracts students hoping to become teachers, has fallen from 198,120 in 2004/2005
to 173,015 in 2013/2014. Inversely, enrolment for business courses, which gener-
ally lure students hoping to get high-paying corporate jobs, has risen from 290,455
in 2003/2004 to 336,600 in 2013/2014 (Ramsden, 2015). Similarly, in the US,
enrolment in education degrees went from 105,458 in 2000/2001 to 91,623 in
2014/2015, whereas for business, enrolment went from 226,623 in 2000/2001 to
363,799 in 2014/2015 (NCES, 2016). Coincidingly, business degree programmes
are by far the most popular in the UK and US, and considerably more so than
even programmes from the valorised fields in science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics.

Neoliberal urbanisation and non-profit organisations

Neoliberalism has also transformed the landscape, governance, and economies
of UK and US cities. Extolling the neoliberal virtues of “decentralization” and
“localism” post-1980s British and American central governments have rolled
back state funding in favour of decentralised approaches. According to these
policy discourses, local city and town governments have to make do and fig-
ure out their budgets with less federal monies. This is based on the assumption
that decreased federal funding will somehow magically initiate civic enterprise
and social responsibility (Featherstone et al., 2012). Moreover, as industrial jobs
were outsourced from cities like Detroit and Manchester to developing countries,
city governments turned to neoliberal policy prescriptions to restructure their
fledgling economies. For example, in an effort to attract financial capital, poli-
cies implemented in major world cities like London and Los Angeles neglected
much of their industrial sectors. Instead, they offered tax breaks and subsidies to
non-industry-based corporations; curbed their budget deficits to appease the bond
and credit agencies; subcontracted many of their municipal, health, and educa-
tion services to private companies; and instituted an elaborate system of private–
public partnerships.

14 The Russell Group constitutes an association of 24 elite British public universities, and plays
a leading role in influencing the values, ambitions, and practices of domestic and international
higher education institutions.
 Homo economicus and the neoliberal society  19
This approach to urban planning has predictably exacerbated existing division
of major cities along class lines. In many British and American metropolises, rich
residents enjoy extravagant and increasingly gated communities, private munici-
pal services, and 24-hour armed protection. Adler (2010, p. 70) describing the US
context notes that

city governments across the country now provide packages of services and
taxes in the form of Business Improvement Districts, which are tailored to the
means of the neighbourhoods that finance them, so that no subsidisation of
the poor by the wealthy occurs.

At the same time, the majority of urbanites have to pay rising fees and taxes to city
services with declining quality, and struggle with ever-increasing rent, food, and
transport costs as their wages stagnate or decline, and as unemployment and crime
rise. Correspondingly, the responsibility, individualism, and sanctity of private
property discourses that neoliberalism invokes, often obscure the more authori-
tarian and disciplinary arm of neoliberal policies, which have, in effect, criminal-
ised poverty and anti-corporate democratic dissent. Armed with the latest military
technology and surveillance equipment, (sold to them by private corporations of
course), police forces across UK and US cities target, monitor, fine, and/or arrest
dwellers of mostly non-affluent and non-white backgrounds (Graham, 2010). This
is largely to ensure that wealthy neighbourhoods and shopping districts are free of
homeless panhandlers, potential larcenists, anti-social youths, and rabble-rousers.
In between these militarising and privatised urban enclaves exist a number of
non-profit organisations (NPOs) that have proliferated since the onset of neolib-
eralism and stepped in where the state has rolled back (Ismail & Kamat, 2018).
Indeed, offering services ranging from health care and drug addiction counselling
to youth gang prevention and employment training programmes, the demand for
the services that NPOs offer has risen as the adverse societal and macro-economic
effects of free-trade agreements, deregulation, low-taxation, loose monetarism,
and austerity have become more apparent. However, the non-profit sector has
itself undergone considerable neoliberal inflection. That is, due to the constant
preassure to secure operating funding from either private or public bodies, NPOs
have by and large adopted the organisational form, logic, and administrative
practices of for-profit corporations (Dempsey & Sanders, 2010). Consequently,
many non-profits have renounced confrontational advocacy approaches and calls
for substantive and progressive policy changes, to instead work on goals that
“are focused primarily on brokering resources and promoting the organization”
(Mosley, 2012, p. 41). Some can and have resisted such re-structurations, and do
offer a space for community-based solutions to social pathologies and inequali-
ties. Though these are probably in the minority since a significant proportion of
NPOs have yielded to market pressures and instituted practices that redefine cli-
ents as consumers and shift responsibility to individuals (Garrow & Hasenfeld,
2014). A trend that is likely to be intensified by the ongoing cuts to public spend-
ing. These shifts to neo-managerial organisational forms and approaches to the
20  Homo economicus and the neoliberal society
provision of social services thus positions the non-profit sector as yet another
cog in the neoliberal machine. And, one that further serves to take attention away
from viewing social problems as structural problems in need of systematic and
collective redressing (Dempsey, 2009). I should add that the reason I bring these
contexts and issues up is because NPOs organise and provide many after-school
programmes, lessons, and activities to large numbers of emerging and young
adults. They are, therefore, important agents of socialisation, and have had a sig-
nificant influence on the youth participants from my ethnographic study discussed
in Chapter 3.

Neoliberalism and media-culture

Lastly, neoliberalism has also significantly shaped the media-culture that con-
temporary British and American populations, and youth populations in particu-
lar, are predominantly exposed to and voluntarily engage with. Like I mentioned
earlier, the 1980s and early 1990s saw the enactment of domestic reforms, multi-
lateral free-trade agreements, and structural adjustment of the Global South that
loosened or dismantled trade barriers and regulations on employment conditions,
capital controls and mobility, and mergers and acquisitions. This, coupled with
the lingering effects of the global economic recession of the1980s, fostered new
economic imperatives that expedited the oligopolisation of most industries (i.e.,
the market process whereby an industry becomes dominated by a handful of
firms). During this time, several hitherto prominent companies also started facing
stiff competition from cheaper big box stores who were selling their own generic
products. To compete in these new market environments, major businesses were
pushed to expand via corporate consolidation, international incorporation, and/
or conglomeration, i.e., the merging of firms from different and usually unrelated
commercial sectors. Many were additionally pushed to adopt new methods for
differentiating themselves from their competitors. This is because in several if
not most industries (e.g., fashion, fast food, automotive industries), the shrinking
range of competing firms end up offering the same or nearly identical service or
products.15 Well attuned to these structural changes, Madison Avenue reconfig-
ured their marketing strategies, and began promoting their corporate clients not as
manufacturers of everyday commodities, but as unique sellers of dreams, experi-
ences, and lifestyles (Klein, 2000). In other words, these deliberate and admit-
tedly ingenious strategies focused on and emphasised the selling of aspirations,
identities, and feelings rather than products or their utility. Therefore, Starbucks,
for example, doesn’t sell coffee like Dunkin Donuts or Costa does; it sells com-
munity and ambiance, i.e., “the third space”. Nike does not sell shoes like Adidas;
it instead sells athleticism and competitive drive (Klein, 2000). Coincidingly,

15  Current examples of this include Time Warner Cable and DirectTV, both of which sell access to
the same cable channels in the US. Another example would be the jeans sold by H&M, TopShop,
Zara, River Island, American Apparel, and Urban Outfitters, as these all basically look the same.
 Homo economicus and the neoliberal society  21
while financial investment in traditional forms of manufacturing and infrastruc-
ture dramatically declined during the neoliberal era, “the main arenas of produc-
tion that gained were the emergent cultural industries (films, videos, video games,
music, advertising, art shows), which use IT as a basis for the innovation and the
marketing of new products” (Harvey, 2005, p. 158).
The global economic transformations and concurrent shifts in marketing prac-
tices and expenditures described above were followed by the hugely consequential
passing of the US’s 1996 Telecommunications Act and the UK’s Communication
Act 2003. These Acts lifted key restrictions on advertising and media ownership
that had been put in place to prevent the consolidation of mass media outlets;
maintain a diversity of aired political viewpoints, cultural representations, and
artistic content; and prevent the corporate control of information. Predictably, as
a result of all these factors, culture industries have merged to labyrinthine extents
with a plethora of non-media commercial industries to create an omnipresent
consumer media-culture that is especially keen to capitalise on the growing pur-
chasing power of post-1980s youth. Advertisers continue to be a major driver of
this media-culture, as they relentlessly target youth demographics and attempt to
co-opt all forms of youth styles, trends, and music (Beader et al., 2009; Kenway
& Bullen, 2001; McGuigan, 2010). Additionally, from sponsoring art exhibits,
music concerts, and fashion shows, to enforcing legal restrictions over the use
of trademarked cultural artefacts, to deciding on the content and distribution of
music, films, books, and television shows, there are fewer and fewer spaces left in
contemporary UK and US society where cultural production is not controlled or
mediated by a handful of transnational corporations (McGuigan, 2010). Today’s
youth are thus subject to a constant bombardment of branded sounds, images, and
even tastes and smells that entice them to consume and tell them what to aspire
to and believe in, but not to question the night-time production of those branded
commodities or to examine their underlying ideological discourses. With perhaps
some hyperbole, it can be claimed that most contemporary young people are liter-
ally immersed in this media-cultural environment – one that has grown exponen-
tially since the 2000s advent of Web 2.0.
Concordantly, popular media now disseminates neoliberal congruent dis-
courses of materialism, upward mobility, competitiveness, individualism,
and self-­interestedness that are more emphatic and prevalent than during pre-­
neoliberal times (Kasser et al., 2007; McGuigan, 2010; Uhls & Greenfield,
2011a). For example, a psycholinguistic study of the lyrics from the US’s Hot 100
Billboard songs from 1980–2007, found that since 1980, the words “I” and “Me”
have appeared more frequently in popular music lyrics, while prosocial words like
‘We’ and ‘Us’ have significantly dwindled (DeWall et al., 2011). The research-
ers also note that the rise in self-centred and antisocial lyrics found in popular
music correlates with several large-scale psychometric survey results indicating
that American millennials are more narcissistic and self-interested than previ-
ous generations. Relatedly, a parallel body of developmental psychology studies
show that the ubiquity and resulting exposure to materialistic media messages
over the past 40 years are correlated with rising levels of concerns over attaining
22  Homo economicus and the neoliberal society
wealth, fame, status, and material possessions among UK and US millennials
(Easterbrook et al., 2014; Uhls & Greenfield, 2011b; Twenge & Kasser, 2013).
Other studies have speculated that this exposure may be contributing to post-1980
generational decreases in empathy, altruism, and communality (Konrath et al.,
2011; Uhls & Greenfield, 2011a). For example, over the last two decades, UK
and US commercial broadcasts have been dominated by reality television shows
such as X-Factor, American Idol, and The Apprentice, which typically feature
and promote cut-throat competition, narcissistic characters, rugged individualism,
and materialism. In direct reference to these types of shows, Konrath et al. (2011,
p. 189) note that, “overall, the agentic and narcissistic qualities found in modern
media seem consistent with decreasing empathy”.
Neoliberal ideology can also be traced in the mainstream press’ carefully spun
and widely circulated sound-bites, market-citizen framings, and opinion pieces
that call for the reduction or elimination of welfare, taxes, and union rights; the
privatisation of public institutions and services; and the removal of economic,
labour, and environmental regulations (Jensen & Tyler, 2015; McDonald, 2014;
Temple, 2015).16 This ideological saturation conveniently includes an erosion of
criticisms of corporate malfeasance and pro-market policies, along with a near-
constant vilification and misrepresentation of egalitarian ideals, unions, teachers,
public education, welfare recipients, redistributive policies, and market-critical
political figures and organisations (Goldstein et al., 2011; Jensen, 2014). Grantham
and Miller (2010, p. 176), speaking to this state of affairs argue that “journalists
stalk politics in order to discredit democratic activities that might restrain capital”,
and further add that “labor news has been transmogrified into corporate news, and
politics is measured in terms of its reception by business”.
The few independent news outlets that do report non-elite interests, critical
voices, and substantive policy debates are marginalised, constantly underfunded,
and have very limited communicative reach. In addition, the diverse, open, and
free presses that informed generations of radical democratic activism throughout
the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, are rapidly disappearing or being bought
out (McChesney & Nichols, 2009). Meanwhile, rather than helping to inform
democratic deliberation, existing public broadcasts continue to be co-opted,
cheapened, and stripped of substance by media conglomerates. Or worse still,
turned into manufacturers of ridiculous infotainment that celebrates the opulence
of the rich and famous, or vilifies the poor (Jensen & Tyler, 2015). In the UK for
instance, there has been a recent influx of what is described as “poverty porn”
television shows (e.g., Benefits Street). These are documentary-style programmes
that depict welfare recipients as undeserving and lazy scroungers. As Jensen
(2014, p. 2), argues, these shows “perform an ideological function [by generat-
ing] a new ‘commonsense’ around an unquestionable need for welfare reform”.
Correspondingly, as I will elaborate in Chapter 2, and then empirically exam-
ine throughout chapters 3, 4, and 5, all of the media conditions and distributed

16  Notably, these messages are often developed by neoliberal think tanks, e.g., Adam Smith Institute,
Heritage Foundation, Centre for Policy Studies, Institute of Economic Affairs.
 Homo economicus and the neoliberal society  23
narratives described above may be exacerbating the following three seemingly
related longitudinal trends. The first is the reported significant increase in indi-
vidualistic and materialistic traits and decreases in civic interest among American
millennials (Twenge et al., 2012). The second is the UK public’s decreasing
support for paying more taxes to raise benefits for low-income and unemployed
people, which has been declining for 30 years, and is noticeably lowest among
British millennials (Duffy et al., 2013). The third is the declining union member-
ship in both the UK and US, which is also lowest among millennials (Chen, 2018;
O’Connor, 2017).17

Concluding remarks
Now, I am aware of and sympathetic to the critique that neoliberalism is filtered
through, re-constituted, and challenged by various stakeholders across different
localities, making the somewhat and unintentionally top-down description pre-
sented in this chapter contestable. Admittedly, I brushed over important contex-
tual nuances, enactments, and contestations of neoliberalism. This was mostly
due to a tight word count restriction, which limited how much depth I could go
into for each piece of literature discussed in this book. It should also be noted
however, that the grim reality is that no matter how unpopular and contested cer-
tain neoliberal policies may be, British and American power elites at both the
national and local/city level have in many instances implemented them regardless
(see e.g., Hayes & Home, 2011; Pedroni, 2011). Thus, in overlooking this fact
by overly focusing on minor instances of resistance that have not, to be blunt,
really changed anything, the aforementioned critique and accordant scholarship
often seriously downplays and even mystifies the effectiveness of powerful vested
interests and organisations in crafting and carrying out consequential policies and
institutional changes. That said, so far I have only described the macro-structural
and meso-organisational components of the hegemonic equation. But to more
fully explain the hegemony of neoliberalism, it is necessary to account for how
and why everyday people – especially those not situated in the upper-income
brackets – accept, adopt, and reproduce this political-economic system and ideol-
ogy in spite of the objectively and demonstrably unequal, unjust, and exploitative
societal conditions that these engender. This then requires an understanding of
how human cognition develops, functions, and is influenced by society.

17  As of the time of finishing this book, there was a noticeable increase in US millennials getting
unionised jobs. However, this may be a temporary and/or statistically insignificant spike, and US
millennials still make up the lowest unionised age bracket (Chen, 2018).
References

Abeele, V. M., & Roe, K. (2011). New life, old friends: A cross-cultural comparison of
the use of communication technologies in the social life of College freshmen. Young,
19(2), 219–240.
Abrami, P. C., Bernard, R. M., Borokhovski, E., Waddington, D. I., Wade, C. A., &
Persson, T. (2015). Strategies for teaching students to think critically a meta-analysis.
Review of Educational Research, 85(2), 275–314.
Adler, M. (2009). Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science That Makes Life
Dismal. New York: New Press.
Albo, G., Gindin, S., & Panitch, L. (2010). In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial
Meltdown and Left Alternatives. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses: (Notes toward an
investigation). In: B. Brewster’s (ed.), Lenin and Philosophy: And Other Essays (pp.
127–188). New York: Monthly Review Press.
Archer, L., Halsall, A., & Hollingworth, S. (2007). Inner-city femininities and education:
‘Race’, class, gender and schooling in young women’s lives. Gender and Education,
19(5), 549–568.
Archer, L., & Yamashita, H. (2003). Theorising inner-city masculinities: ‘Race’, class,
gender and education. Gender and Education, 15(2), 115–132.
Arendt, F., & Matthes, J. (2014). Cognitive effects of political mass media. In: C.
Reinemann (ed.), Political Communication (pp. 547–568). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Ash, M. G. (2006). Bachelor of what, master of whom? The Humboldt myth and historical
transformations of higher education in German-speaking Europe and the US. European
Journal of Education, 41(2), 245–267.
Ashikali, E. M., & Dittmar, H. (2012). The effect of priming materialism on women’s
responses to thin-ideal media. British Journal of Social Psychology, 51(4), 514–533.
Augoustinos, M., Walker, I., & Donaghue, N. (2014). Social Cognition: An Integrated
Introduction. Los Angeles, CA: Sage.
Babe, R. (2009). Cultural Studies and Political Economy: Toward a New Integration.
Lanham, MD: Lexington.
Baker, A. (2010). Restraining regulatory capture? Anglo-America, crisis politics and
trajectories of change in global financial governance. International Affairs, 86(3),
647–663.
Baker, C. (2012). Cultural Studies Theory and Practice. London: Sage.
Baker, D. (2006). Increasing inequality in the United States. Post-Autistic Economics
Review, 40(2), 18–23.
 References  25
Bakker, T. P., & de Vreese, C. H. (2011). Good news for the future? Young people, internet
use, and political participation. Communication Research, 38(4), 451–470.
Ban, C. (2016). Ruling Ideas: How Global Neoliberalism Goes Local. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective. Annual Review of
Psychology, 52(1), 1–26.
BARB (2017, October 29). Top 100 programmes in latest week (all platforms). Retrieved
from http://www.barb.co.uk/project-dovetail/latest-weekly-top-100-programmesall
platforms/
Barbosa, E. (2008). Wealth of Selves: Multiple Identities, Mestiza Consciousness, and the
Subject of Politics. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press.
Bargh, J. A., Gollwitzer, P. M., Lee-Chai, A., Barndollar, K., & Trötschel, R. (2001). The
automated will: Nonconscious activation and pursuit of behavioral goals. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 81(6), 1014.
Barrett, H. C., & Kurzban, R. (2006). Modularity in cognition: Framing the debate.
Psychological Review, 113(3), 628–647.
Bauer, M. A., Wilkie, J. E., Kim, J. K., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2012). Cuing consumerism
situational materialism undermines personal and social well-being. Psychological
Science, 23(5), 517–523.
Baumeister, R. F., & Bushman, B. J. (2014). Social Psychology & Human Nature. San
Francisco, CA; Wadsworth: Cengage Learning.
Baumgartner, J. C., & Morris, J. S. (2009). MyFaceTube politics: Social networking web
sites and political engagement of young adults. Social Science Computer Review, 28(1),
24–44.
Bay-Cheng, L. Y., Fitz, C. C., Alizaga, N. M., & Zucker, A. N. (2015). Tracking homo
oeconomicus: Development of the neoliberal beliefs inventory. Journal of Social and
Political Psychology, 3(1), 71–88.
Beader, S., Varney, W., & Godsen, R. (2009). This Little Kiddy Went to the Market: The
Corporate Capture of Childhood. New York: UNSW Press.
Beck, U., & Beck-Gensheim, E. (2002). Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism
and Its Social and Political Consequences. London: Sage.
Belkhir, L., & Elmeligi, A. (2018). Assessing ICT global emissions footprint: Trends to
2040 & recommendations. Journal of Cleaner Production, 177, 448–463.
Bessant, J., Farthing, R., & Watts, R. (2015). Co-designing a civics curriculum: Young
people, democratic deficit and political renewal in the EU. Journal of Curriculum
Studies, 48(2), 271–289.
Bessner, D., & Sparke, M. (2017). Nazism, neoliberalism, and the Trumpist challenge to
democracy. Environment and Planning A, 49(6), 1214–1223.
Bhaskar, R. (1978). A Realist Theory of Science. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Biesta, G. (1998). Say you want a revolution… suggestions for the impossible future of
critical pedagogy. Education Theory, 48(4), 499–511.
Biesta, G., & Lawy, R. (2006). From teaching citizenship to learning democracy:
Overcoming individualism in research, policy and practice. Cambridge Journal of
Education, 36(1), 63–79.
Binkley, S. (2011). Happiness, positive psychology and the program of neoliberal
governmentality. Subjectivity, 4(4), 371–394.
Blackman, S. J. (2007). Hidden ethnography: Crossing emotional borders in qualitative
accounts of young people’s lives. Journal of Sociology, 41(4), 699–716.
26 References
Bode, L. (2016). Political news in the news feed: Learning politics from social media. Mass
Communication and Society, 19(1), 24–48.
Bohner, G., & Dickel, N. (2011). Attitudes and attitude change. Annual Review of
Psychology, 62, 391–417.
Booth, P. (2008). Rereading fandom: MySpace character personas and narrative
identification. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25(5), 514–536.
Borah, P. (2014). Does it matter where you read the news story? Interaction of incivility and
news frames in the political blogosphere. Communication Research, 41(6), 809–827.
Boulianne, S. (2018). Twenty years of digital media effects on civic and political
participation. Communication Research, 0093650218808186.
Boulianne, S. (2019). Revolution in the making? Social media effects across the globe.
Information, Communication and Society, 22(1), 39–54.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1989). Social space and symbolic power. Sociological Theory, 7(1), 14–25.
Bourdieu, P. (2000a). Making the economic habitus: Algerian workers revisited.
Ethnography, 1(1), 17–41.
Bourdieu, P. (2000b). Pascalian Meditations. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Boyle, R. (2008). From Troubleshooter to the Apprentice: The changing face of business
on British television. Media, Culture and Society, 30(3), 415–424.
Braedley, S., & Luxton, M. (2010). Neoliberalism and Everyday Life. Montreal: McGill
Queen’s University Press.
Brandtzaeg, P. B. (2017). Facebook is no “Great equalizer” A big data approach to gender
differences in civic engagement across countries. Social Science Computer Review,
35(1), 103–125.
Brod, G., Lindenberger, U., Werkle-Bergner, M., & Shing, Y. L. (2015). Differences in the
neural signature of remembering schema-congruent and schema incongruent events.
Neuroimage, 117, 358–366.
Brown, C. P. (2010). Children of reform: The impact of high-stakes education reform on
preservice teachers. Journal of Teacher Education, 61(5), 477–491.
Brown, C. P. (2015). Taking and teaching the test are not the same: A case study of first-
year teachers’ experiences in high-stakes contexts. Teachers and Teaching, 21(8),
1026–1044.
Brubaker, R., Loveman, M., & Stamatov, P. (2004). Ethnicity as cognition. Theory and
Society, 33(1), 31–64.
Bunce, L., Baird, A., & Jones, S. E. (2017). The student-as-consumer approach in higher
education and its effects on academic performance. Studies in Higher Education,
42(11), 1958–1978.
Burawoy, M. (2008). II: Durable Domination: Gramsci Meets Bourdieu. Conversations
With Pierre Bourdieu. Retrieved from http://burawoy.berkeley.edu/Bourdieu.htm.
Havens Center: University of Wisconsin.
Burawoy, M. (2012). The roots of domination: Beyond Bourdieu and Gramsci. Sociology,
46(2), 187–206.
Bussey, T. J., & Saksida, L. M. (2007). Memory, perception, and the ventral visual
perirhinal-hippocampal stream: Thinking outside of the boxes. Hippocampus, 17(9),
898–908.
Cacciatore, M. A., Scheufele, D. A., & Iyengar, S. (2016). The end of framing as we know
it… and the future of media effects. Mass Communication and Society, 19(1), 7–23.
 References  27
Carlisle, J. E., & Patton, R. C. (2013). Is social media changing how we understand political
engagement? An analysis of Facebook and the 2008 presidential election. Political
Research Quarterly, 66(4), 883–895.
Caruso, E. M., Vohs, K. D., Baxter, B., & Waytz, A. (2013). Mere exposure to money
increases endorsement of free-market systems and social inequality. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General, 142(2), 301–306.
Castells, M. (2007). Communication, power and counter-power in the network society.
International Journal of Communication, 1(1), 238–266.
Cerny, P. (2014). Globalization and the resilience of neoliberalism. Critical Policy Studies,
8(3), 359–362.
Cerulo, K. A. (2010). Mining the intersections of cognitive sociology and neuroscience.
Poetics, 38(2), 115–132.
Chae, Y., Lee, S., & Kim, Y. (2019). Meta-analysis of the relationship between internet
use and political participation: Examining main and moderating effects. Asian Journal
of Communication, 29(1), 35–54.
Chang, H.-J. (2010). 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. London:
Bloomsbury Press.
Chen, M. (2018, February 5). Millennials are keeping unions alive. The Nation. Retrieved
from https://www.thenation.com/article/millennials-are-keeping-unions-alive/.
Chiao, J. Y., Harada, T., Komeda, H., Li, Z., Mano, Y., Saito, D., Parrish, T. B., Sadato, N.,
& Iidaka, T. (2010). Dynamic cultural influences on neural representations of the self.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22(1), 1–11.
Chittenden, T. (2010). Digital dressing up: Modelling female teen identity in the discursive
spaces of the fashion blogosphere. Journal of Youth Studies, 13(4), 505–520.
Christensen, H. S. (2012). Simply slacktivism? Internet participation in Finland. Ejournal
of eDemocracy and Open Government, 4(1), 1–23.
Chomsky, N. (2002). Media Control. New York, NY: Seven Stories Press.
Chomsky, N. (2011). Profit Over People, Neo-Liberalism and Global Order. New York:
Seven Stories Press.
Chu, S. C., & Kamal, S. (2011). An investigation of social media usage, brand
consciousness, and purchase intention towards luxury products among millennials. In:
S. Okazaki (ed.), Advances in Advertising Research (Vol. 2). Wiesbaden: Gabler.
Chubb, J. E., & Moe, T. M. (1990). Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools. Washington,
DC: The Brookings Institution.
Chudek, M., Heller, S., Birch, S., & Henrich, J. (2012). Prestige-biased cultural learning:
Bystander’s differential attention to potential models influences children’s learning.
Evolution and Human Behavior, 33(1), 46–56.
Clery, E., Lee, L., & Kunz, S. (2013). Public Attitudes to Poverty and Welfare 1983–
2011: Analysis Using British Social Attitudes Data. London: National Centre for Social
Research (pp. 1–55).
Cloward, R., Piver, F. P., & Peck, J. (2001). Workfare States. New York: Guilford Press.
Coakley, J. (2011). Ideology doesn’t just happen: Sports and neoliberalism. Journal of
ALESDE, 1(1), 67–84.
Coenen, L., & Van Den Bulck, J. (2018). Reconceptualizing cultivation: Implications for
testing relationships between fiction exposure and self-reported alcohol use evaluations.
Media Psychology, 21(4), 613–639.
Cohen, M. A. (1989). Corporate crime and punishment: A study of social harm and
sentencing practice in the federal courts, 1984–1987. American Criminal Law Review,
26(3), 605–660.
28 References
Colombo, J. (2018, September 27). How interest rate hikes will trigger the next financial
crisis. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessecolombo/2018/09/27/
how-interest-rate-hikes-will-trigge r-the-next-financial-crisis/.
Cowburn, A. (2016, March 12). George Osborne to use cut in disability benefits to ‘fund
middle-class tax giveaway’. The Independent. Retrieved from http://www.independent.
co. uk/news/uk/politics/budget-2016-george-osborne-to-use-acut-in-benefit-payments-
to-disa bled-people-to-fund-a-middle-a6927056.html.
Cribb, A., & Gewirtz, S. (2013). The hollowed-out university? A critical analysis of
changing institutional and academic norms in UK higher education. Discourse: Studies
in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(3), 338–350.
Crisp, R. (1987). Persuasive advertising, autonomy, and the creation of desire. Journal of
Business Ethics, 6(5), 413–418.
Cummins, I. (2018). Poverty, Inequality and Social Work: The Impact of Neoliberalism
and Austerity Politics on Welfare Provision. Bristol: Policy Press.
Curtis, S. (2015, April 13). Twitter prompts UK users to register to vote in General Election.
The Telegraph. Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/11532113/
Twitter-prompts-UK-users-toreg ister-to-vote-in-General-Election.html.
Daboub, A. J., Rasheed, A. M., Priem, R. L., & Gray, D. (1995). Top management team
characteristics and corporate illegal activity. Academy of Management Review, 20(1),
138–170.
Dagher, J. (2018). Regulatory Cycles: Revisiting the Political Economy of Financial
Crises. IMF Working Paper, WP, 18/8, 1–89.
Danna-Lynch, K. (2010). Culture and cognition in the performance of multiple roles: The
process of mental weighing. Poetics, 38(2), 165–183.
Davies, W. (2017). The Limits of Neoliberalism Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of
Competition. London: Sage.
Davis, M. H., & Gaskell, M. G. (2009). A complementary systems account of word
learning: Neural and behavioural evidence. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society Series B: Biological Sciences, 364(1536), 3773–3800.
Dedman, T. (2011). Agency in UK hip-hop and grime youth subcultures – Peripherals and
purists. Journal of Youth Studies, 14(5), 507–522.
Delucchi, M., & Korgen, K. (2002).“We’re the customer-we pay the tuition”: Student
consumerism among undergraduate sociology majors. Teaching Sociology, 30(1), 100–107.
Demant, J., & Ostenguard, J. (2007). Partying as everyday life: Investigations of teenagers’
leisure life. Journal of Youth Studies, 10(5), 517–537.
Dempsey, S. E. (2009). NGOs, communicative labor, and the work of grassroots
representation. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 6(4), 328–345.
Dempsey, S. E., & Sanders, M. L. (2010). Meaningful work? Nonprofit marketization
and work/life imbalance in popular autobiographies of social entrepreneurship.
Organization, 17(4), 437–459.
DeWall, C. N., Pond Jr, R. S., Campbell, W. K., & Twenge, J. M. (2011). Tuning in to
psychological change: Linguistic markers of psychological traits and emotions over
time in popular US song lyrics. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 5(3),
200–207.
Dewey, J. (1990). The School and Society: The Child and the Curriculum. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.
de Zúñiga, H. G., Jung, N., & Valenzuela, S. (2012). Social media use for news and
individuals’ social capital, civic engagement and political participation. Journal of
Computer Mediated Communication, 17(3), 319–336.
 References  29
de Zúñiga, H. G., Molyneux, L., & Zheng, P. (2014). Social media, political expression,
and political participation: Panel analysis of lagged and concurrent relationships.
Journal of Communication, 64(4), 612–634.
Diamond, J. (2004). Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York:
Viking Adult.
Dicieanu, M. (2014). The X-factor of singing competitions TV series. In: V. Marinescu,
S. Branea, & B. Mitu (eds.), Critical Reflections on Audience and Narrativity: New
Connections, New Perspectives (pp. 195–212). Stuttgart, Germany: Ibudem-Press.
di Gennaro, C., & Dutton, W. (2006). The internet and the public: Online and offline
political participation in the United Kingdom. Parliamentary Affairs, 59(2), 299–313.
Dijker, A. J., & Koomen, W. (1996). Stereotyping and attitudinal effects under time
pressure. European Journal of Social Psychology, 26(1), 61–74.
Dimitrova, D. V., Shehata, A., Stromback, J., & Nord, L. W. (2014). The effects of digital
media on political knowledge and participation in election campaigns: Evidence from
panel data. Communication Research, 41(1), 95–118.
Dittmar, H., Bond, R., Hurst, M., & Kasser, T. (2014). The relationship between
materialism and personal well-being: A meta-analysis. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 107(5), 879–924.
Domke, D., McCoy, K., & Torres, M. (1999). News media, racial perceptions, and political
cognition. Communication Research, 26(5), 570–607.
Döring, A. K., Daniel, E., & Knafo-Noam, A. (2016). Introduction to the special section
value development from middle childhood to early adulthood—New insights from
longitudinal and genetically informed research. Social Development, 25(3), 471–481.
Dorling, D. (2014, October 15). Growing wealth inequality in the UK is a ticking timebomb.
The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/
oct/15/wealth-inequality-uk-tickingtim ebomb-credit-suisse-crash.
Druckman, J. N., Hennessy, C. L., St. Charles, K., & Webber, J. (2010). Competing rhetoric
over time: Frames versus cues. The Journal of Politics, 72(1), 136–148.
Duffy, B., Hall, S., O’Leary, D., & Pope, S. (2013). Generation Strains: A Demos and
Ipsos MORI Report on Changing Attitudes to Welfare. London: Demos.
Dylko, I. B. (2010). An examination of methodological and theoretical problems arising
from the use of political participation indexes in political communication research.
International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 22(4), 523–534.
Easterbrook, M. J., Wright, M. L., Dittmar, H., & Banerjee, R. (2014). Consumer culture
ideals, extrinsic motivations, and well-being in children. European Journal of Social
Psychology, 44(4), 349–359.
Eckstein, K., Noack, P., & Gniewosz, B. (2011). Attitudes toward political engagement
and willingness to participate in politics: Trajectories throughout adolescence. Journal
of Adolescence, 35(3), 485–495.
Ekström, M., & Östman, J. (2015). Information, interaction, and creative production: The
effects of three forms of Internet use on youth democratic engagement. Communication
Research, 42(6), 796–818.
Elgot, J. (2017, April 3). Theresa May defends cut in payments for bereaved families.
The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/03/
theresamay defends-cut-in-benefitsfor-bereaved-families.
Ellwood, W. (2011). No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization. New York: New Internationalist.
Enjolras, B., Steen-Johnsen, K., & Wollebæk, D. (2013). Social media and mobilization
to offline demonstrations: Transcending participatory divides? New Media and Society,
15(6), 890–908.
30 References
Epstein, G. A. (ed.) (2005). Financialization and the World Economy. Northampton, MA:
Edward Elgar Publishing.
Evans, J. S. B. (2008). Dual-processing accounts of reasoning, judgment, and social
cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 255–278.
Farthing, R. (2010). The politics of youthful antipolitics: Representing the ‘issue’ of youth
participation in politics. Journal of Youth Studies, 13(2), 181–195.
Featherstone, D., Ince, A., Mackinnon, D., Strauss, K., & Cumbers, A. (2012). Progressive
localism and the construction of political alternatives. Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers, 37(2), 177–182.
Federico, C. M., & Hunt, C. V. (2013). Political information, political involvement, and
reliance on ideology in political evaluation. Political Behavior, 35(1), 89–112.
Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (2013). Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture. London:
Sage.
Fitzgibbon, W. (2013). Riots and probation: Governing the precariat: Wendy Fitzgibbon
suggests that probation officers share some of the characteristics of those they supervise.
Criminal Justice Matters, 93(1), 18–19.
Flanagan, C. (2004). Volunteerism, leadership, political socialization, and civic
engagement. In: R. Lerner, & L. Steinberg (eds.), Handbook of Adolescent Psychology
(pp. 721–745). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
Flanagan, C. (2008). Young people’s civic engagement and political development.
In: A. Furlong (ed.), International Handbook on Youth and Young Adulthood: New
Perspectives and Agendas (pp. 293–300). New York: Routledge.
FOE (2019, January 29). How is plastic made? Climate change is a key ingredient. Friends
of the Earth. Retrieved from https://friendsoftheearth.uk/plastics/how-is-plastic-made.
Freeman, D. (2017). De-Democratisation and Rising Inequality: The Underlying Cause
of a Worrying Trend. Inequalities Institute: London School of Economics & Political
Science. WORKING PAPER 12,1–31.
Friedman, M. (1948). A monetary and fiscal framework for economic stability. American
Economic Review, 38(3), 245–264.
Friedman, M. (2002). Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Friere, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Penguin Publications.
Fromm, E. (1955). The Sane Society. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Fukuyama, F. (1992). The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press.
Furlong, A., & Cartmel, F. (2007). Young People and Social Change. Milton Keynes:
Open University Press.
Gabielkov, M., Ramachandran, A., Chaintreau, A., & Legout, A. (2016, June). Social
clicks: What and who gets read on twitter? In: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM
SIGMETRICS International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer
Science, ACM SIGMETRICS / IFIP Performance 2016, Jun 2016, Antibes Juan-les-
Pins (pp. 179–192). .
Gaffikin, F., & Perry, D. C. (2009). Discourses and strategic visions: The US Research
University as an institutional manifestation of neoliberalism in a global era. American
Educational Research Journal, 46(1), 115–144.
Garrett, R. K. (2009). Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure
among Internet news users. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14(2),
265–285.
Garrow, E. E., & Hasenfeld, Y. (2014). Institutional logics, moral frames, and advocacy:
Explaining the purpose of advocacy among nonprofit human-service organizations.
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 43(1), 80–98.
 References  31
Gawronski, B., & Bodenhausen, G. V. (2006). Associative and propositional processes in
evaluation: An integrative review of implicit and explicit attitude change. Psychological
Bulletin, 132(5), 692–731.
Geraci, A., & Surian, L. (2011). The developmental roots of fairness: Infants’ reactions to
equal and unequal distributions of resources. Developmental Science, 14(5), 1012–1020.
Gewirtz, S., & Cribb, A. (2009). Understanding Education: A Sociological Perspective.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Ghosh, V. E., & Gilboa, A. (2014). What is a memory schema? A historical perspective on
current neuroscience literature. Neuropsychologia, 53, 104–114.
Ghosh, V. E., Moscovitch, M., Colella, B. M., & Gilboa, A. (2014). Schema representation
in patients with ventromedial PFC lesions. The Journal of Neuroscience, 34(36),
12057–12070.
Gibson, H. (2008). Ideology, instrumentality and economics education: On the secretion
of values within philanthropy, financial capability and Enterprise education in English
schools. International Review of Economics Education, 7(2), 57–78.
Giddens, A. (1998). The Third Way. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gilbert, P. (2017). Living Like Crazy. York: Annwyn House.
Gilboa, A., & Marlatte, H. (2017). Neurobiology of schemas and schema-mediated
memory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(8), 618–631.
Gill, S. (1998). New constitutionalism, democratisation and global political economy.
Pacifica Review: Peace, Security & Global Change, 10(1), 23–38.
Gill, R. (2008). Culture and subjectivity in neoliberal and postfeminist times. Subjectivity,
25(1), 432–445.
Gill, S. (2003). Power and Resistance in the New World Order. New York: Palgrave
Macmilan.
Glaser, E. (2014, March 21). Bring back ideology: Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ 25 years
on. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/21/
bring back-ideology-fukuyama-end-history-25-years-on.
Godfrey, E. B., Santos, C. E., & Burson, E. (2017). For better or worse? System justifying
beliefs in sixth-grade predict trajectories of self-esteem and behavior across early
adolescence. Child Development, 90(1), 180–195.
Goldstein, R., Macrine, S., & Chesky, N. (2011). Welcome to the “New Normal”: The
news media and neoliberal reforming education. Journal of Inquiry and Action in
Education, 4(6), 112–132.
Good, J. (2007). Shop till we drop? Television, materialism and attitudes about the natural
environment. Mass Communication and Society, 10(3), 365–383.
Gotham, K. F. (2012). Disaster, Inc.: Privatization and post-Katrina rebuilding in New
Orleans. Perspectives on Politics, 10(3), 633–646.
Graeber, D. (2004). Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago, IL: Prickly
Paradigm Press.
Graeber, D. (2011). Consumption. Current Anthropology, 52(4), 489–511.
Graf, J., & Aday, S. (2008). Selective attention to online political information. Journal of
Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 52(1), 86–100.
Graham, S. (2010). Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. New York: Verso.
Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections From the Prison Notebooks. London: International
Publisher’s Co.
Grantham, B., & Miller, T. (2010). The end of neoliberalism 1. Popular Communication,
8(3), 174–177.
32 References
Greener, T., & Hollands, R. (2006). Beyond subculture and post-subculture? The case of
virtual psytrance. Journal of Youth Studies, 9(4), 393–418.
Groccott, C. (2018, November 20). Markets over morals: Neoliberal thought has
always struggled to Condemn Authoritarianism. University of Leicester School
of Business. Blog: Distinctive and Relevant. Retrieved from https://staffblogs.
le.ac.uk/management/2018/11/20/markets-over-morals-neoliberalthought
-has-always-struggled-to-condemn-authoritarianism/.
Gronau, N., & Shachar, M. (2015). Contextual consistency facilitates long-term memory of
perceptual detail in barely seen images. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human
Perception and Performance, 41(4), 1095–1111.
Habermas, J. (1991). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into
a Category of Bourgeois Society (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought).
Boston: The MIT Press.
Hadley, G. (2015). English for Academic Purposes in Neoliberal Universities: A Critical
Grounded Theory. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.
Halkias, G., & Kokkinaki, F. (2014). The degree of ad–brand incongruity and the distinction
between schema-driven and stimulus-driven attitudes. Journal of Advertising, 43(4),
397–409.
Hall, S. (2011). The neo-liberal revolution. Soundings, 8, 9–27.
Hall, S., & Rustin, M. (eds.) (2015). After Neoliberalism?: The Kilburn Manifesto. London:
Lawrence and Wishart Limited.
Halupka, M. (2014). Clicktivism: A systematic heuristic. Policy and Internet, 6(2),
115–132.
Hameleers, M., & Schmuck, D. (2017). It’s us against them: A comparative experiment
on the effects of populist messages communicated via social media. Information,
Communication and Society, 20(9), 1425–1444.
Hamnett, C. (2014). Shrinking the welfare state: The structure, geography and impact of
British Government benefit cuts. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers,
39(4), 490–503.
Hargittai, E., & Shaw, A. (2013). Digitally savvy citizenship: The role of internet skills
and engagement in young adults’ political participation around the 2008 presidential
election. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 57(2), 115–134.
Harmon, M. D. (2001). Affluenza: Television use and cultivation of materialism. Mass
Communication and Society, 4(4), 405–418.
Harris, A. (2008). Young women, late modern politics, and the participatory possibilities
of online cultures. Journal of Youth Studies, 11(5), 481–495.
Hartwell, M. (1995). A History of the Mont Pelerin Society. Liberty Fund Inc.
Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harvey, L., Ringrose, J., & Gill, R. (2013). Swagger, ratings and masculinity: Theorising
the circulation of social and cultural value in teenage boys’ digital peer networks.
Sociological Research Online, 18(4), 9.
Hawkes, S. (2017, March 13). Trouble AHEAD Pensioner spending will send Britain’s
welfare bill rocketing to £240 billion a year by the end of the decade. The Sun.
Retrieved from https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3081683/pensioner-spending-will-
send-britainswel fare-bill-rocketingto-240-billion-a-year-by-the-end-of-the-decade/.
Hayek, F. (1994). The Road to Serfdom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Hayes, A. F. (2013). Introduction to Mediation, Moderation, and Conditional Process
Analysis: A Regression-Based Approach. New York, NY: Guilford Press.
 References  33
Hayes, G., & Home, J. (2011). Sustainable development, shock and awe? London 2012 and
Civil Society. Sociology, 45(5), 749–764.
Heath, S., & Walker, C. (eds.) (2011). Innovations in Youth Research. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Henderson, D. (2000). The case for sweatshops. Hoover Daily Report. Retrieved from
http://w ww.hoover.org/news/daily-report/24617.
Henisz, W. J., Zelner, B. A., & Guillén, M. F. (2005). The worldwide diffusion of market
oriented infrastructure reform, 1977–1999. American Sociological Review, 70(6),
871–897.
Henrich, J., & Boyd, R. (2002). On modeling cognition and culture. Journal of Cognition
and Culture, 2(2), 87–112.
Hewer, C. J., & Roberts, R. (2012). History, culture and cognition: Towards a dynamic
model of social memory. Culture and Psychology, 18(2), 167–183.
Hewit, R. (2005). Priming the pump: “educating for market democracy.” In: D. Boyles
(ed.), Schools or Markets? Commercialism, Privatization, and School-Business
Partnerships (pp. 59–68). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Hollingworth, S., & Williams, K. (2009). Constructions of the working-class ‘Other’ among
urban, white, middleclass youth: ‘chavs’, subculture and the valuing of education.
Journal of Youth Studies, 12(5), 467–482.
Holt, L. (2008). Embodied social capital and geographic perspectives: Performing the
habitus. Progress in Human Geography, 32(2), 227–246.
Holt, K., Shehata, A., Strömbäck, J., & Ljungberg, E. (2013). Age and the effects of news
media attention and social media use on political interest and participation: Do social
media function as leveller? European Journal of Communication, 28(1), 19–34.
Houston, S. (2001). Beyond social constructionism: Critical realism and social work.
British Journal of Social Work, 31(6), 845–861.
Hunt, J. M., Kernan, J. B., & Mitchell, D. J. (1992). Materialism as social cognition:
Some initial thoughts and suggested directions. In: F. R. Rudmin, & M. Richins (eds.),
Meaning, Measure, and Morality of Materialism (pp. 46–49). Provo, UT: Association
for Consumer Research.
Hunt, J. M., Kernan, J. B., & Mitchell, D. J. (1996). Materialism as social cognition:
People, possessions, and perception. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 5(1), 65–83.
Hurst, M., Dittmar, H., Bond, R., & Kasser, T. (2013). The relationship between
materialistic values and environmental attitudes and behaviors: A meta-analysis.
Journal of Environmental Psychology, 36, 257–269.
Husted, C., & Gendron, R. (2010, May 22–25). Organi-cultural deviance. In: Administrative
Sciences Association of Canada Conference on Social Responsibility Business Ethics,
Saskatchewan, Canada.
IEA (2018). The future of petrochemicals. In: Towards More Sustainable Plastics and
Fertilisers (pp. 1–132). International Energy Agency. Retrieved from https://webstore.
iea.org/the-future-of-petrochemicals
Igartua, J. J., Moral-Toranzo, F., & Fernández, I. (2012). Cognitive, attitudinal, and
emotional effects of news frame and group cues, on processing news about immigration.
Journal of Media Psychology, 23(4), 174–185.
IPCC (2018). Summary for policymakers. In: V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, H.-O. Pörtner,
D. Roberts, J. Skea, P. R. Shukla, A. Pirani, W. Moufouma-Okia, C. Péan, R. Pidcock,
S. Connors, J. B. R. Matthews, Y. Chen, X. Zhou, M. I. Gomis, E. Lonnoy, T. Maycock,
M. Tignor, and T. Waterfield (eds.), Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report
on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C above Pre-Industrial Levels and Related
34 References
Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global
Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to
Eradicate Poverty (pp. 1–32). World Meteorological Organization.
Ismail, F., & Kamat, S. (2018). NGOs, social movements and the neoliberal state:
Incorporation, reinvention, critique. Critical Sociology, 44(4–5), 569–577.
Ivancheva, M. P. (2015). The age of precarity and the new challenges to the academic
profession. Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai-Studia Europaea, 60(1), 39–48.
Jaller, M. (2018, November 21). Online shopping is terrible for the environment. It doesn’t
have to be. Vox. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/the-big idea/2017/12/21/16805324/
black-friday-2018-amazon-online-shopping-cyber-Mondayenv ironmental-impact.
Jeffres, L. W., Neuendorf, K., Bracken, C. C., & Atkin, D. (2008). Integrating theoretical
traditions in media effects: Using third-person effects to link agenda-setting and
cultivation. Mass Communication and Society, 11(4), 470–491.
Jensen, T. (2014). Welfare commonsense, poverty porn and doxosophy. Sociological
Research Online, 19(3), 3.
Jensen, T., & Tyler, I. (2015). ‘Benefits broods’: The cultural and political crafting of anti-
welfare commonsense. Critical Social Policy, 35(4), 470–491.
Jessop, B. (1995). The Regulation Approach, Governance and Post-Fordism, Economy
and Society. London: Blackwell Publishing.
Johansen, M. S., & Joslyn, M. R. (2008). Political persuasion during times of crisis:
The effects of education and news media on citizens’ factual information about Iraq.
Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 85(3), 591–608.
Jones, S. (2018, December 20). Trump will always Find a way to punish the poor. New York
Magazine. Retrieved from http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/trump-proposes
stricter-work-requirements-for-food-stamps.html.
Jost, T. J. (1995). Negative illusions: Conceptual clarification and psychological evidence
concerning false consciousness. Political Psychology, 16(2), 397–424.
Kahne, J., Lee, N. J., & Feezell, J. T. (2013). The civic and political significance of online
participatory cultures among youth transitioning to adulthood. Journal of Information
Technology and Politics, 10(1), 1–20.
Kamal, S., Chu, S. C., & Pedram, M. (2013). Materialism, attitudes, and social media usage
and their impact on purchase intention of luxury fashion goods among American and
Arab young generations. Journal of Interactive Advertising, 13(1), 27–40.
Kasser, T. (2011). Capitalism and autonomy. In: V. I. Chirkov, R. M. Ryan, & K. M.
Sheldon (eds.), Human Autonomy in Cross-Cultural Context: Perspectives on the
Psychology of Agency, Freedom, and Well-Being (pp. 191–206). Dordrecht: Springer.
Kasser, T. (2016). Materialistic values and goals. Annual Review of Psychology, 67,
489–514.
Kasser, T., Cohn, S., Kanner, A. D., & Ryan, R. M. (2007). Some costs of American
corporate capitalism: A psychological exploration of value and goals conflicts.
Psychological Inquiry, 18(1), 1–22.
Kasser, T., & Ryan, R. M. (1993). A dark side of the American dream: Correlates
of financial success as a central life aspiration. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 65(2), 410–422.
Katz, J., Gravelin, C. R., & O’Brien, C. (2017). Neoliberal beliefs and perceptions of
unintended adolescent pregnancy after consensual or forced sex. Sex Roles, 78(11–12),
810–821.
Kemp, S. (2015). Digital, social and mobile in 2015. We are Social. Retrieved from http://
wearesocial.sg/blog/2015/01/digital-social-mobile-2015/.
 References  35
Kenway, J., & Bullen, E. (2001). Consuming Children: Education-Entertainment
Advertising. London: Open University Press.
King, A. (2005). The habitus process: A sociological conception. Journal for the Theory of
Social Behaviour, 35(4), 463–468.
Kitayama, S., & Park, J. (2010). Cultural neuroscience of the self: Understanding the social
grounding of the brain. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 5(2–3), 111–129.
Klein, N. (2000). No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Toronto, Canada: Alfred
A. Knopf.
Klein, N. (2008). The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador.
Klikauer, T. (2015). What is managerialism? Critical Sociology, 41(7–8), 1103–1119.
Knobloch-Westerwick, S., & Kleinman, S. B. (2012). Preselection selective exposure
confirmation bias versus informational utility. Communication Research, 39(2),
170–193.
Knobloch-Westerwick, S., & Meng, J. (2009). Looking the other way: Selective exposure
to attitude-consistent and counterattitudinal political information. Communication
Research, 36(3), 426–448.
Knobloch-Westerwick, S., & Meng, J. (2011). Reinforcement of the political self through
selective exposure to political messages. Journal of Communication, 61(2), 349–368.
Kohn, A. (2015). Progressive education: Why it’s hard to beat, but also hard to find.
Bank Street College of Education. Retrieved from https://educate.bankstreet.edu/
progressive/2.
Kompridis, N. (2000). So we need something else for reason to mean. International
Journal of Philosophical Studies, 8(3), 271–295.
Konrath, S. H., O’Brien, E. H., & Hsing, C. (2011). Changes in dispositional empathy
in American College students over time: A meta-analysis. Personality and Social
Psychology Review, 15(2), 180–198.
Krosnick, A. J., & Alwin, F. D. (1991). Aging, cohorts, and the stability of sociopolitical
orientations over the life’s span. American Journal of Sociology, 97(1), 169–195.
Kühne, R., Weber, P., & Sommer, K. (2015). Beyond cognitive framing processes: Anger
mediates the effects of responsibility framing on the preference for punitive measures.
Journal of Communication, 65(2), 259–279.
Kushin, M. J., & Yamamoto, M. (2010). Did social media really matter? College
students’ use of online media and political decision making in the 2008 election. Mass
Communication and Society, 13(5), 608–630.
Lampinen, J. M., Copeland, S. M., & Neuschatz, J. S. (2001). Recollections of things
schematic: Room schemas revisited. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition, 27(5), 1211.
Larner, W. (2000). Neo-liberalism: Policy, ideology, governmentality. Studies in Political
Economy, 63(1), 5–26.
Lawler, S. (2005). Rules of engagement: Habitus, power and resistance. The Sociological
Review, 52(2), 110–128.
Lawson, D. (2018, July 26). Why Brexit is really about competing visions of capitalism.
The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/why-brexit-is-really-
about competing-visions-of-capitalism-100274.
Lecheler, S., & De Vreese, C. H. (2011). Getting real: The duration of framing effects.
Journal of Communication, 61(5), 959–983.
Lee, N. J., Shah, D. V., & McLeod, J. M. (2013). Processes of political socialization:
A communication mediation approach to youth civic engagement. Communication
Research, 40(5), 669–697.
36 References
Lee, S., Park, J., & Lee, S. (2016). The interplay of internet addiction and compulsive
shopping behaviors. Social Behavior and Personality: an International Journal,
44(11), 1901–1912.
Lee, Y. H., & Hsieh, G. (2013, April). Does slacktivism hurt activism? The effects of
moral balancing and consistency in online activism. In: CHI Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems CHI ‘13, Paris, 27 April–2 May 2013. New York,
USA: ACM.
Lewallen, J., Miller, B., & Behm-Morawitz, E. (2016). Lifestyles of the rich and famous:
Celebrity media diet and the cultivation of emerging adults’ materialism. Mass
Communication and Society, 19(3), 253–274.
Leyva, R. (2014a). On the psychology and libertarian socialism of Erich Fromm: Towards
an empirical psychological retrofit. In: S. J. Miri, R. Lake, & T. M. Kress (eds.),
Reclaiming the Sane Society: Essays on Erich Fromm’s Thought (pp. 3–15). Rotterdam:
Sense Publishers.
Leyva, R. (2014b). Social darwinism. In: D. C. Phillips (ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational
Theory and Philosophy (pp. 765–767). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Leyva, R. (2017). Exploring UK Millennials’ social media consumption patterns and
participation in elections, activism and ‘Slacktivism’. Social Science Computer Review,
35(4), 462–479.
Leyva, R. (2018a). Unpacking the usage and implications of neoliberal language in the
Russell Group’s education strategies. Šolsko Polje – Journal for Theory and Research
in Education, 29(1–2), 77–96.
Leyva, R. (2018b). Experimental insights Into the socio-cognitive effects of viewing
materialistic media on welfare support. Media Psychology, 22(4), 601–625.
Leyva, R. (2019). Towards a cognitive-sociological theory of subjectivity and habitus
formation in neoliberal societies. European Journal of Social Theory, 22(2), 250–271.
Lieberman, D. M., Schreiber, D., & Ochsner, N. K. (2003). Is political cognition like
riding a bicycle? How cognitive neuroscience can inform research on political thinking.
Political Psychology, 24(4), 681–704.
Lieberman, M. D., Ochsner, K. N., Gilbert, D. T., & Schacter, D. L. (2001). Do amnesics
exhibit cognitive dissonance reduction? The role of explicit memory and attention in
attitude change. Psychological Science, 12(2), 135–140.
Lipman, P. (2011). The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race,
and the Right to the City (Critical Social Thought). New York: Routledge.
Littler, J., & Couldry, N. (2008). The work of work: Reality TV and the negotiation of
neoliberal labour in the apprentice. In: W. In de Jong, & T. Austin (eds.), Rethinking
Documentary: New Perspectives and Practices (pp. 258–267). Berkshire, UK:
McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing.
Liu, J., & Kelly, P. D. (2010). Democracy is hard/democracy is messy. Journal for Civic
Engagement, 16(1), 1–13.
Liu, Z. K., He, J., & Li, B. (2015). Critical and creative thinking as learning processes at
top ranking Chinese middle schools: Possibilities and required improvements. High
Ability Studies, 26(1), 139–152.
Lizardo, O. (2004). The cognitive origins of Bourdieu’s habitus. Journal for the Theory of
Social Behaviour, 34(4), 375–401.
Lloyd, A. (2012). Working to live, not living to work: Work, leisure and youth identity
among call centre workers in North East England. Current Sociology, 60(5), 619–635.
Lodge, M., McGraw, K. M., Conover, P. J., Feldman, S., & Miller, A. H. (1991). Where is
the schema? Critiques. American Political Science Review, 85(04), 1357–1380.
 References  37
Lodge, M., & Taber, C. S. (2005). The automaticity of affect for political leaders, groups,
and issues: An experimental test of the hot cognition hypothesis. Political Psychology,
26(3), 455–482.
Loughlin, C., & Barling, J. (2001). Young workers’ work values, attitudes, and behaviours.
Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 74(4), 543–558.
MacDonald, R., & Marsh, J. (2005). Disconnected Youth? Growing Up in Britain’s Poor
Neighbourhoods. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Madison, S. D. (2011). Critical Ethnography: Methods, Ethics, and Performance. New
York: Sage.
Mandler, G. (1982). The structure of value: Accounting for taste. In: M. S. Clark, & S.
T. Fiske (eds.), Affect and Cognition: 17th Annual Carnegie Mellon Symposium on
Cognition. New York: Psychology Press.
Maniaci, M. R., & Rogge, R. D. (2014). Caring about carelessness: Participant inattention
and its effects on research. Journal of Research in Personality, 48, 61–83.
Mason, P. (2010). Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed. New York: Verso.
Matthes, J., & Schmuck, D. (2017). The effects of anti-immigrant right-wing populist
ads on implicit and explicit attitudes: A moderated mediation model. Communication
Research, 44(4), 556–581.
McChesney, M. R., & Nichols, J. (2009). The Death and Life of American Journalism: The
Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again. New York: Nation Books.
McDonald, L. (2014). Think tanks and the media: How the conservative movement gained
entry into the education policy arena. Educational Policy, 28(6), 845–880.
McGuigan, J. (1992). Cultural Populism. New York: Sage.
McGuigan, J. (2008). Apprentices to cool capitalism. Social Semiotics, 18(3), 309–319.
McGuigan, J. (2010). Cool Capitalism. London: Pluto Press.
McNally, D. (2009). From financial crisis to world-slump: Accumulation, financialisation,
and the global slowdown. Historical Materialism, 17(2), 35–83.
Miles, S. (2015). Young people, consumer citizenship and protest the problem with
romanticizing the relationship to social change. Young, 23(2), 101–115.
Millican, J. (2014). Higher education and student engagement: Implications for a new
economic era. Education + Training, 56(7), 635–649.
Min, S. J. (2010). From the digital divide to the democratic divide: Internet skills,
political interest, and the second-level digital divide in political internet use. Journal of
Information Technology and Politics, 7(1), 22–35.
Mirowski, P. (2014). Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. New York: Verso.
Mirowski, P., & Plehwe, D. (eds.) (2009). The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the
Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Molnar, A. (1996). Giving Kids the Business: The Commercialization of America’s
Schools. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Monbiot, G. (2016, April 15). Neoliberalism – The ideology at the root of all our problems.
The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/
neoliberalism -ideology-problem-george-monbiot.
Morgan, M., & Shanahan, J. (2010). The state of cultivation. Journal of Broadcasting &
Electronic Media, 54(2), 337–355.
Morozov, E. (2009, September 5). From slacktivism to activism. Foreign Policy. Retrieved
from http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/09/05/from-slacktivism-to-activism/.
Morris, D. S., & Morris, J. S. (2013). Digital inequality and participation in the political
process real or imagined? Social Science Computer Review, 31(5), 589–600.
38 References
Morris, R. G. M. (2006). Elements of a neurobiological theory of hippocampal function:
The role of synaptic plasticity, synaptic tagging and schemas. European Journal of
Neuroscience, 23(11), 2829–2846.
Moscovitch, M. (2008). The hippocampus as a stupid, domain specific module: Implications
for theories of recent and remote memory, and of imagination. Canadian Journal of
Experimental Psychology, 62(1), 62–79.
Mosley, J. E. (2012). Keeping the lights on: How government funding concerns drive
the advocacy agendas of nonprofit homeless service providers. Journal of Public
Administration Research and Theory, 22(4), 841–866.
Moy, P., Tewksbury, D., & Rinke, E. M. (2016). Agenda-setting, priming, and framing. In
K. B. Jenson, R. T. Craig, J. D. Pooley, & E. W. Rothenbuler (eds.), The International
Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy (pp. 1–13). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Nabi, R. L., & Riddle, K. (2008). Personality traits, television viewing, and the cultivation
effect. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 52(3), 327–348.
National Center for Education Statistics (2016). Digest of educational statistics. Retrieved
from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_322.10.asp?current=yes.
Nature Climate Science (editorial) (2019). The price of fast fashion. Nature Climate
Science, 8, 1.
Neundorf, A., Smets, K., & Garcìa-Albacete, G. M. (2013). Homemade citizens: The
development of political interest during adolescence and young adulthood. Acta
Politica, 48(1), 92–116.
Newman, S. (2016). Postanarchism. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Nilan, P., & Feixa, C. (eds.) (2006). Global Youth? Hybrid Identities, Plural Worlds. New
York: Taylor and Francis.
Norman, J. (2018). Adam Smith: What He Thought, and Why It Matters. Bristol: Allen
Lane.
Nunes, J. C., Drèze, X., & Han, Y. J. (2011). Conspicuous consumption in a recession:
Toning it down or turning it up? Journal of Consumer Psychology, 21(2), 199–205.
O’Connor, S. (2017, September 18). Trade unions strive to stay relevant by wooing the
young. The Financial Times. Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/3f6e9d7c-
98bb11e7, a652-cde3f882dd7b.
Office for National Statistics (2011). Census 2011 table links. Retrieved from http://www.
nomisweb.co.uk/census/2011/key_statistics.
O’Flynn, G., & Petersen, E. B. (2007). The ‘good life’ and the ‘rich portfolio’: Young
women, schooling and neoliberal subjectification. British Journal of Sociology of
Education, 28(4), 459–472.
O’Neill, D. (2012). No cause for celebration: The rise of celebrity news values in the
British quality press. Journalism Education, 1(2), 26–44.
Opree, S. J., & Kühne, R. (2016). Generation me in the spotlight: Linking reality TV to
materialism, entitlement, and narcissism. Mass Communication and Society, 19(6),
800–819.
Orgad, S., & Meng, B. (2017). The maternal in the city: Outdoor advertising representations
in Shanghai and London. Communication, Culture and Critique, 10(3), 460–478.
Patel, R. (2010). The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine
Democracy. London: Portobello Books.
Patton, G. (2013, September 1). Children to be told which GCSEs lead to best-paid
jobs. The Telegraph. Retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/
educationnews/10277378/Children-to-be-told- which-GCSEs-lead-to-best-paid-jobs.html.
 References  39
Peck, J., & Tickell, A. (2002). Neoliberalizing space. Antipode, 34(3), 380–404.
Pedroni, T. (2011). Urban shrinkage as a performance of whiteness: Neoliberal urban
restructuring, education, and racial containment in the post-industrial, global niche city.
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 32(2), 203–215.
Penny, L. (2010, October 1). Facebook, capitalism and geek entitlement. The New
Statesman. Retrieved from http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie- penny/2010/10/
socialfacebook-geek-women.
Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion. In:
L. Berkowitz (ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (pp. 123–205). New
York: Academic Press.
Plehwe, D., Walpen, B. J., & Neunhöffer, G. (eds.) (2007). Neoliberal Hegemony: A
Global Critique. New York: Routledge.
Polanyi, K. (2001). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our
Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Ponsford, D. (2017, February 9). UK magazine abcs: Winners, losers and full breakdown as
circulation declines average 6 percent. PressGazette. Retrieved from http://www.pressgaz
ette.co.uk/uk-magazine-abcs-winners-losers-and-full-breakdownas-circulation-
declineaver age-6-per-cent.
Powell, B. (2008). ‘In defense of  “sweatshops”’. Library of Economics and Liberty. Retrieved
from http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2008/Powellsweatshops.html.
Prieg, L., Greenham, T., Simms, A., & Potts, R. (2011). Subverting Safer Finance: How the
UK holds back global financial regulation. New Economics Foundation. Retrieved from
http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/subverting safer-finance.
Pym, D. (1986). The Employment Question and Other Essays. London: Freedom Press.
Ramesh, R. (2011, December 5). Income inequality growing faster in UK than any other
rich country, says OECD. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.
com/society/2011/dec/05/income-inequality-growing-faster-uk.
Ramsden, B. (2015). Patterns of Higher Education Institutions in the UK. Universities UK.
Rai, R., Chauhan, C., & Cheng, M. I. (2018). Materialistic values, brand knowledge and
the mass media: Hours spent on the internet predicts materialistic values and brand
knowledge. Current Psychology, 1–9.
Reed, A. (2014, March 1). Nothing left: The long slow surrender of American liberals.
Harpers. Retrieved from http://harpers.org/archive/2014/03/nothing-left-2/.
Reeves, A., & de Vries, R. (2016). Does media coverage influence public attitudes towards
welfare recipients? The impact of the 2011 English riots. The British Journal of
Sociology, 67(2), 281–306.
Reinsberg, B., Kentikelenis, A., Stubbs, T., & King, L. (2019). The world system and the
hollowing out of state capacity: How structural adjustment programs affect bureaucratic
quality in developing countries. American Journal of Sociology, 124(4), 1222–1257.
Ridgeway, L. C. (2006). Linking social structure and interpersonal behavior: A theoretical
perspective on cultural schemas and social relations. Social Psychology Quarterly,
69(5), 5–16.
Riley, C. E. S., Griffin, C., & Morey, Y. (2010). The case for ‘everyday politics’: Evaluating
neo-tribal theory as a way to understand alternative forms of political participation,
using electronic dance music culture and an example. Sociology, 44(345), 345–363.
Robin, J., & Moscovitch, M. (2014). The effects of spatial contextual familiarity on
remembered scenes, episodic memories, and imagined future events. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(2), 459–475.
40 References
Robinson, C. (2009). Nightscapes and leisure spaces: An ethnographic study of young
people’s use of free space. Journal of Youth Studies, 12(5), 501–514.
Roccas, S. (2003). Identification and status revisited: The moderating role of self
enhancement and self-transcendence values. Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, 29(6), 726–736.
Roskos-Ewoldsen, B., Davies, J., & Roskos-Ewoldsen, D. R. (2004). Implications of the
mental models approach for cultivation theory. Communications, 29(3), 345–363.
Roskos-Ewoldsen, D. R., Roskos-Ewoldsen, B., & Carpentier, F. (2008). Media priming:
An updated synthesis. In: J. Bryant, & M. B. Oliver (eds.), Media Effects: Advances in
Theory & Research (pp. 90–109). New York: Routledge.
Sahlberg, P. (2009, May 28–29). The role of education in promoting creativity: Potential
barriers and enabling factors. In: E. Villalba (ed.), Measuring Creativity: Proceedings
for the Conference, “Can Creativity Be Measured?”, (pp. 337–344). Brussels,
Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. Saito, E., & Atencio.
Sardoc, M. (2018). The language of neoliberal education: An interview with Henry Giroux.
Šolsko Polje – Journal for Theory and Research in Education, 29(1–2), 97–106.
Savoia, A. (2017, December 14). Global inequality is on the rise – But at vastly different
rates across the world. The Conversation. Retrieved from http://theconversation.com/
global-inequality-is-on-the-rise-but-at-vastly-different-rates-across-the-world-88976.
Sayer, A. (1992). Realism & Social Science. London: Sage.
Schlozman, K. L., Verba, S., & Brady, H. E. (2010). Weapon of the strong? Participatory
inequality and the Internet. Perspectives on Politics, 8(2), 487–509.
Schröder, T., & Thagard, P. (2013). The affective meanings of automatic social behaviors:
Three mechanisms that explain priming. Psychological Review, 120(1), 255–280.
Scott, D., & Usher, R. (1999). Researching Education. London: Continuum.
Sears, D. O., & Levy, S. (2003). Childhood and adult political development. In: D. O.
Sears, L. Huddy, & R., Jervis. (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology (pp.
60–109). New York: Oxford University Press.
Shanahan, J., Shanahan, J., & Morgan, M. (1999). Television and Its Viewers: Cultivation
Theory and Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sharif, S. P., & Khanekharab, J. (2017). Identity confusion and materialism mediate the
relationship between excessive social network site usage and online compulsive buying.
Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 20(8), 494–500.
Shen, F., & Edwards, H. H. (2005). Economic individualism, humanitarianism, and welfare
reform: A value-based account of framing effects. Journal of Communication, 55(4),
795–809.
Sherrod, L. R., Flanagan, C., & Youniss, J. (2002). Dimensions of citizenship and
opportunities for youth development: The what, why, when, where, and who of
citizenship development. Applied Developmental Science, 6(4), 264–272.
Shildrik, T., Blackman, S., & MacDonald, R. (2009). Young people, class, and place.
Journal of Youth Studies, 12(5), 457–465.
Shrum, L. J. (2004). The cognitive processes underlying cultivation effects are a function of
whether the judgments are on-line or memory-based. Communications, 29(3), 327–344.
Shrum, L. J., Burroughs, J. E., & Rindfleisch, A. (2005). Television’s cultivation of
material values. Journal of Consumer Research, 32(3), 473–479.
Shrum, L. J., Lee, J., Burroughs, J. E., & Rindfleisch, A. (2011). An online process model
of second-order cultivation effects: How television cultivates materialism and its
consequences for life satisfaction. Human Communication Research, 37(1), 34–57.
 References  41
Sidanius, J. (1984). Political interest, political information search, and ideological
homogeneity as a function of sociopolitical ideology: A tale of three theories. Human
Relations, 37(10), 811–828.
Sidenvall, J., Lithner, J., & Jäder, J. (2015). Students’ reasoning in mathematics textbook
task-solving. International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and
Technology, 46(4), 533–552.
Simpson, S. (2002). Corporate Crime, Law, and Social Control. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Slater, G. B. (2015). Education as recovery: Neoliberalism, school reform, and the politics
of crisis. Journal of Education Policy, 30(1), 1–20.
Sloan, K. (2008). The expanding educational services sector: Neoliberalism and the
corporatization of curriculum at the local level in the US. Journal of Curriculum
Studies, 40(5), 555–578.
Sloane, S., Baillargeon, R., & Premack, D. (2012). Do infants have a sense of fairness?
Psychological Science, 23(2), 196–204.
Smedley, T. (2017, April 12). Is the world running out of water? BBC. Retrieved from
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170412-is-the-world-running-out-of-fresh-water.
Smith, A. (1796). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Librito
Mondi.
Smith, A. (1822). The Theory of Moral Sentiments. J Richardson.
Smith, L. C., & Thompson, S. (2015). Tuning out or tuned out? A critical discourse analysis
of youth political participation in Britain. Journal of Promotional Communications,
3(2), 295–301.
Sperber, D., & Hirschfeld, A. L. (2004). The cognitive foundations of cultural stability and
diversity. Cognitive Sciences, 9(1), 40–47.
Spies-Butcher, B. (2002). Tracing the rational choice origins of social capital: Is social
capital a neo-liberal Trojan Horse? Australian Journal of Social Issues, 37(2), 173–192.
Srivastava, S. B., & Banaji, M. R. (2011). Culture, cognition, and collaborative networks
in organizations. American Sociological Review, 76(2), 207–233.
Stahl, G., Nelson, J., & Wallace, D. (eds.) (2017). Masculinity and Aspiration in an Era of
Neoliberal Education: International Perspectives. New York: Routledge.
Steger, B. M., & Roy, K. R. (2010). Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Stephenson-Abetz, J., & Holman, A. (2012). Home is where the heart is: Facebook and
the negotiation of “old” and “new” during the transition to college. Western Journal of
Communication, 76(2), 175–193.
Stiglitz, J. (2008, July 7). The end of neoliberalism. Project Syndicate. Retrieved from
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stiglitz101/English.
Stiglitz, J. (2012, February 6). Capturing the ECB. Project Syndicate. Retrieved from
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/capturing-the-ecb.
Strandberg, K. (2013). A social media revolution or just a case of history repeating itself?
The use of social media in the 2011 Finnish parliamentary elections. New Media and
Society, 15(8), 1329–1347.
Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network (2002). The policy
roots of economic crisis and poverty: A multi-country participatory assessment of
structural adjustment. World Bank/Civil Society/Government, 1–97.
Surowiecki, J. (2017, March 6). Trump’s mysterious stock boom. The New Yorker.
Taibbi, M. (2010). Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That
Is Destroying America. New York: Random House.
42 References
Taylor, E., & Taylor-Gooby, P. (2015). Benefits and welfare: Long-term trends or short
term reactions? British Social Attitudes, 32, 74–101.
Temple, L. (2015). Neoliberalism, austerity and the UK media. SPERI British Political
Economy Brief, 18, 1–7.
Terry, L. D. (1998). Administrative leadership, neo-managerialism, and the public
management movement. Public Administration Review, 58(3), 194–200.
Theocharis, Y., & Quintelier, E. (2014). Stimulating citizenship or expanding
entertainment? The effect of Facebook on adolescent participation. New Media and
Society, 18(5), 817–836.
Thomas, J. (1993). Doing Critical Ethnography. New York: Sage.
Thomas, N., & O’Kane, C. (1998). The ethics of participatory research with children.
Children and Society, 12(15), 336–348.
Tihelková, A. (2016). Framing the ‘scroungers’: The re-emergence of the stereotype of the
undeserving poor and its reflection in the British press. BMO Studies in English, 41(2),
121–139.
Torney-Purta, J. (1992). Cognitive representations of the political system in adolescents:
The continuum from pre-novice to expert. New Direction for Child Development,
56(56), 11–25.
Towner, T. L. (2013). All political participation is socially networked? New media and the
2012 election. Social Science Computer Review, 31(5), 527–541.
Tse, D., Takeuchi, T., Kakeyama, M., Kajii, Y., Okuno, H., Tohyama, C., Bito, H., &
Morris, R. G. (2011). Schema dependent gene activation and memory encoding in
neocortex. Science, 333(6044), 891–895.
Turner, S. (2007). Social theory as a cognitive neuroscience. European Journal of Social
Theory, 10(3), 357–374.
Twenge, J. M., Campbell, W. K., & Freeman, E. C. (2012). Generational differences in
young adults’ life goals, concern for others, and civic orientation, 1966–2009. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology, 102(5), 1045–1062.
Twenge, J. M., & Kasser, T. (2013). Generational changes in materialism and work
centrality, 1976–2007: Associations with temporal changes in societal insecurity
and materialistic role modeling. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39(7),
883–897.
Uhls, Y. T, & Greenfield, P. M (2011a). The value of fame: Preadolescent perceptions of
popular media and their relationship to future aspirations. Developmental Psychology,
48(2), 315–326.
Uhls, Y. T., & Greenfield, P. M. (2011b). The rise of fame: An historical content analysis.
Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 5(1), article 1.
Retrieved from https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/4243/3289.
United Nations Climate Change (2017, October 16). Climate Change Is A Key
Driver of Migration and Food Insecurity. Retrieved from https://unfccc.int/news/
climate-change-is-a- key-driver-of-migration-and-food-insecurity.
Valli, L., Croninger, G. R., Chambliss, J. M., Graeber, O. A., & Buese, D. (2008). Test
Driven: High-Stakes Accountability in Elementary Schools. New York: Teachers
College Press.
Van Der Pijl, K., & Yurchenko, Y. (2015). Neoliberal entrenchment of North Atlantic
capital. From corporate self-regulation to state capture. New Political Economy, 20(4),
495–517.
van Dijk, T. (1998). Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach. London: Sage.
van Dijk, T. (2006). Discourse, context and cognition. Discourse Studies, 8(1), 159–177.
 References  43
van Kesteren, M. T., Beul, S. F., Takashima, A., Henson, R. N., Ruiter, D. J., & Fernández,
G. (2013). Differential roles for medial prefrontal and medial temporal cortices in
schema-dependent encoding: From congruent to incongruent. Neuropsychologia,
51(12), 2352–2359.
van Kesteren, M. T., Ruiter, D. J., Fernández, G., & Henson, R. N. (2012). How schema
and novelty augment memory formation. Trends in Neurosciences, 35(4), 211–219.
Van Laer, J. (2010). Activists online and offline: The internet as an information channel
for protest demonstrations. Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 15(3), 347–366.
Vansteenkiste, M., Duriez, B., Simons, J., & Soenens, B. (2006). Materialistic values and
well-being among business students: Further evidence of their detrimental effects.
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 36(12), 2892–2908.
Vohs, K. D. (2015). Money priming can change people’s thoughts, feelings, motivations,
and behaviors: An update on 10 years of experiments. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: General, 144, e86–e93.
Vissers, S., & Stolle, D. (2014). The Internet and new modes of political participation:
Online versus offline participation. Information, Communication and Society, 17(8),
937–955.
Vitak, J., Zube, P., Smock, A., Carr, C. T., Ellison, N., & Lampe, C. (2011). It’s complicated:
Facebook users’ political participation in the 2008 election. Cyberpsychology, Behavior,
and Social Networking, 14(3), 107–114.
Voutsaki, S. (1997). The creation of value and prestige in the Aegean Late Bronze Age.
Journal of European Archaeology, 5(2), 34–52.
Vraga, E., Bode, L., & Troller-Renfree, S. (2016). Beyond self-reports: Using eye
tracking to measure topic and style differences in attention to social media content.
Communication Methods and Measures, 10(2–3), 149–164.
Vratuša, V. (2002). Globalization of democratic participation and self-governance versus
globalization of oligopolistic markets and totalitarianism. Sociologija, 44(4), 289–314.
Wall, D. (2010). The No-Nonsense Guide to Green Politics. Oxford: New Internationalist.
Weidner, J. R. (2009). Governmentality, capitalism, and subjectivity. Global Society,
23(4), 387–411.
Wenglinsky, H. (2004a). Facts or critical thinking skills? What NAEP results say.
Educational Leadership, 62(1), 32–35.
Wenglinsky, H. (2004b). Closing the racial achievement gap: The role of reforming
instructional practices. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 12(64), 1–24.
Wetherill, J. (2016, August 12). No more keeping up with the kardashians? Show records
lowest ratings ever after fakery. Daily Star. Retrieved from https://www.dailystar.
co.uk/showbiz-tv/hot-tv/537316/KUWTK-Keeping-Up-WithTheKa rdashians-Cuba-
Havanafake-Scott-Disick-birthday.
Wiggan, J. (2015). Reading active labour market policy politically: An autonomist analysis
of Britain’s Work Programme and Mandatory Work Activity. Critical Social Policy,
35(3), 369–392.
Wirebring, L. K., Lithner, J., Jonsson, B., Liljekvist, Y., Norqvist, M., & Nyberg, L.
(2015). Learning mathematics without a suggested solution method: Durable effects
on performance and brain activity. Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 4(1), 6–14.
Wolfsfeld, G., Segev, E., & Sheafer, T. (2013). Social media and the Arab spring politics
comes first. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 18(2), 115–137.
WWF (2015). Living Forests Report Chapter 5: Saving Forests at Risk. World Wildlife
Fund, 1–54.
 44 References
Xenos, M., Vromen, A., & Loader, B. D. (2014). The great equalizer? Patterns of social
media use and youth political engagement in three advanced democracies. Information,
Communication and Society, 17(2), 151–157.
Zhang, C., & Conrad, F. (2014). Speeding in web surveys: The tendency to answer very
fast and its association with straightlining. Survey Research Methods, 8(2), 127–135.
Zhang, W., Johnson, T. J., Seltzer, T., & Bichard, S. L. (2009). The revolution will be
networked: The influence of social networking sites on political attitudes and behavior.
Social Science Computer Review, 28(1), 75–92.
Zhang, W., Seltzer, T., & Bichard, S. L. (2013). Two sides of the coin assessing the
influence of social network site use during the 2012 US presidential campaign. Social
Science Computer Review, 31(5), 542–551.

View publication stats