Fiona Dukelow

Discipline, debt and coercive commodification: Post-crisis neoliberalism and the welfare state in Ireland, the UK and the USA:

Ireland, the UK and the USA are heterogeneous examples of liberal worlds of welfare capitalism yet all three countries were deeply implicated in the 2008 global financial crisis. Examining these three countries together provides the opportunity to further develop an international comparative political economy of instability in the context of the globalised and financialised dimensions of Anglo-liberal capitalism and disciplinary governance. Our analysis is guided by the concept of disciplinary neoliberalism (Gill, 1995) through which we explore: (i) the dynamics that have shaped the impacts of and responses to the Great Recession; (ii) the ways in which state-market relations, shaped by differentiated accommodations to market imperative or market discipline, have been used as disciplinary tools and how these have interacted with existing social divisions and iii) the implications for shaping conditions for resistance. We suggest that the neoliberal pathways of each country, whilst not uniform, mark a ‘step-change’ and acceleration in the operation of disciplinary neoliberalism, and is particularly evident in what we identify as the coercive commodification of social policy.

Introduction To Themed Section: Neoliberalism’s Afterlives: States Of Neoliberalism, Power And Resistance In Post-Crisis Societies:

Despite neoliberalism’s contested status, its ‘rascal’ character (Peck et al., 2010), and its shadowy existence (Mudge, 2014), there has been a further surge of interest in neoliberalism since the 2008 global financial crisis. Although that crisis appeared to deal a fatal blow to neoliberal ideology, since then neoliberalism has not only survived but thrives.This is despite generating ‘morbid symptoms’ (Gramsci, 1971: 276) of extreme inequality and unsustainable economic growth at enormous social cost and in increasingly coercive conditions. We look at this phase of neoliberalism as its afterlife: though it remains dominant it is mutating in a multitude of ways to maintain dominance in the face of increasing intellectual critique, popular discontent and loss of legitimacy. Never existing as a pristine set of ideas and principles (as we explore further below), neoliberalism continues to generate new ‘fixes’ to the crises it produces. Various prefixes thus attempt to capture new manifestations of neoliberal surviving and thriving post-crisis including, somewhat paradoxically, ‘zombie neoliberalism’ (Peck, 2010a); neoliberalism 3.0 (Hendrikse and Sidaway, 2010); ‘embedded neoliberalism’ (Cahill, 2014); late neoliberalism (McGimpsey, 2017); and too-late liberalism (McFalls and

Conclusion: The Changing Irish Welfare State

This chapter provides answers to four structural questions about the Irish welfare state: what is the Irish welfare state for, who delivers it, who benefits from it and who pays for it? The chapter outlines ambiguous and uneven patterns of reform across nine different areas of welfare. Change is evident but nuanced; the traditional mixed welfare model persists with more attempts to create state-supported quasi-markets and a strong market logic presence in state societal and market-driven provision. While international drivers are strong, domestic dynamics are crucial. The impact of the crisis was not only to weaken vetoes to implement policy change but also to weaken public support for taxation. This has crucial implications for state capacity to invest in the future of Irish society.

Welfare States: How They Change and Why

In this chapter, Fiona Dukelow and Mary Murphy sketch the landscape of research on welfare state change and set out some of the ways the impact of the economic crisis and the prospect structural change need to be informed by the lessons of previous research on how welfare states change and why. The chapter then proceeds to discuss a set of core structural drivers of welfare state change and their bearing on Irish welfare state change, including neo-liberalisation, internationalisation and the politics of welfare. The final section develops a framework for understanding and tracking the variety of ways structural change may be occurring, outlining four key questions: What is welfare for? Who delivers welfare? Who pays for welfare? Who receives welfare?