In this collection of essays, an international group of scholars investigate the global building cleaning industry to reveal the extent of neoliberalism's impact on cleaners. This book provides the first intensive study focusing on building cleaners and their global experiences Brings together an international group of scholars and experts to investigate different national contexts and examples Draws out important commonalities and highlights significant differences in these experiences Examines topics including erosion of cleaners' industrial citizenship rights, the impact of outsourcing upon their working conditions, economic security, and the intensification of their work and its negative effects on physical health Considers how cleaners are mobilizing to resist and respond to the restructuring of their work.

Neoliberalism has become a dirty word. In political discourse, it stigmatizes a political opponent as a market fundamentalist; in academia, the concept is also mainly wielded by its critics, while those who might be seen as actual neoliberals deny its very existence. Yet the term remains necessary for understanding the varieties of capitalism across space and time. Arguing that neoliberalism is widely misunderstood when reduced to a doctrine of markets and economics alone, this book shows that it has a political dimension that we can reconstruct and critique. Recognizing the heterogeneities within and between both neoliberal theory and practice, The Political Theory of Neoliberalism looks to distinguish between the two as well as to theorize their relationship. By examining the views of state, democracy, science, and politics in the work of six major figures—Eucken, Röpke, Rüstow, Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan—it offers the first comprehensive account of the varieties of neoliberal political thought. Ordoliberal perspectives, in particular, emerge in a new light. Turning from abstract to concrete, the book also interprets recent neoliberal reforms of the European Union to offer a diagnosis of contemporary capitalism more generally. The latest economic crises hardly brought the neoliberal era to an end. Instead, as Thomas Biebricher shows, we are witnessing an authoritarian liberalism whose reign has only just begun.

The college experience is increasingly positioned to demonstrate its value as a worthwhile return on investment. Specific, definable activities, such as research experience, first-year experience, and experiential learning, are marketed as delivering precise skill sets in the form of an individual educational package. Through ethnography-based analysis, the contributors to this volume explore how these commodified "experiences" have turned students into consumers and given them the illusion that they are in control of their investment. They further reveal how the pressure to plan every move with a constant eye on a demonstrable return has supplanted traditional approaches to classroom education and profoundly altered the student experience.

Since the renaissance of market politics on a global scale, precarious work has become pervasive. Divided into two parts, the first section of this cross-disciplinary book analyses the different forms of precarious work that have arisen over the past thirty years. These transformations are captured in ethnographically orientated chapters on sweatshops; day labour; homework; unpaid contract work of Chinese construction workers; the introduction of insecure contracting in the Korean automotive industry; and the insecurity of Brazilian cane cutters. The editors and contributors then collectively explore trade union initiatives in the face of precarious work and stimulate debate on the issue.

In this collection, innovative and eminent social and policy analysts, including Colin Crouch, Anna Coote, Grahame Thompson and Ted Benton, challenge the failing but still dominant ideology and policies of neo-liberalism. The editors synthesise contributors’ ideas into a revised framework for social democracy; rooted in feminism, environmentalism, democratic equality and market accountability to civil society. This constructive and stimulating collection will be invaluable for those teaching, studying and campaigning for transformative political, economic and social policies.

There has been a tendency amongst feminists to see domestic work as the great leveller, a common burden imposed on all women equally by patriarchy. This unique study of migrant domestic workers in the North uncovers some uncomfortable facts about the race and class aspects of domestic oppression. Based on original research, it looks at the racialisation of paid domestic labour in the North - a phenomenon which challenges feminsim and political theory at a fundamental level. The book opens with an exploration of the public/private divide and an overview of the debates on women and power. The author goes on to provide a map of employment patterns of migrant women in domestic work in the North; she describes the work they perform, their living and working conditions and their employment relations. A chapter on the US explores the connections between slavery and contemporary domestic service while a section on commodification examines the extent to which migrant domestic workers are not selling their labour but their whole personhood. The book also looks at the role of the Other in managing dirt, death and pollution and the effects of the feminisation of the labour market - as middle class white women have greater presence in the public sphere, they are more likely to push responsibility for domestic work onto other women. In its depiction of the treatment of women from the South by women in the North, the book asks some difficult questions about the common bond of womanhood. Packed with information on the numbers of migrant women working as domestics, the racism, immigration or employment legislation that constrains their lives, and testimonies from the workers themselves, this is the most comprehensive study of migrant domestic workers available.

Since the late 1980s, critical geopolitics has gone from being a radical critical perspective on the disciplines of political geography and international relations theory to becoming a recognised area of research in its own right. Influenced by poststructuralist concerns with the politics of representation, critical geopolitics considers the ways in which the use of particular discourses shape political practices. Initially critical geopolitics analysed the practical geopolitical language of the elites and intellectuals of statecraft. Subsequent iterations have considered the role that popular representations of the international political world play. As critical geopolitics has become a more established part of political geography it has attracted ever more critique: from feminists for its apparent blindness to the embodied effects of geopolitical praxis and from those who have been uncomfortable about its textual focus, while others have challenged critical geopolitics to address alternative, resistant forms of geopolitical practice. Again, critical geopolitics has been reworked to incorporate these challenges and the latest iterations have encompassed normative agendas, non-representational theory, emotional geographies and affect. It is against the vibrant backdrop of this intellectual development of critical geopolitics as a subdiscipline that this Companion is set. Bringing together leading researchers associated with the different forms of critical geopolitics, this volume produces an overview of its achievements, limitations, and areas of new and potential future development. The Companion is designed to serve as a key resource for an interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners interested in the spatiality of politics.

Law, Immunization and the Right to Die focuses on the urgent matter of legal appeals and judicial decisions on assisted death. Drawing on key cases from the United Kingdom and Canada, the book focuses on the problematic paternalism of legal decisions that currently deny assisted dying and questions why the law fails to recognize what many describe as "compassionate motives" for assisted death. When cases are analyzed as discourses that are part of a larger socio-political logic of governance, judicial decisions, it is argued here, reveal themselves as relying on the construction of neoliberal fictions – fictions that are here elucidated with reference to Michel Foucault’s theoretical insights on pastoral power and Roberto Esposito’s philosophical thesis on immunization. Challenging the socio-political logic of neoliberalism, the issue of assisted dying goes beyond the predominant legal concern with protecting – or immunizing – individuals from one another, in favor of minimal interference. This book calls for a new kind of politics: one that might affirm people and their finitude both more collectively, and more compassionately.

Chartered in 1921, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is a worldwide organization that represents more than two million workers in occupations from healthcare and government service to custodians and taxi drivers. Women form more than half the membership while people in minority groups make up approximately forty percent. Luís LM Aguiar and Joseph A. McCartin edit essays on one of contemporary labor’s bedrock organizations. The contributors explore key episodes, themes, and features in the union’s recent history and evaluate SEIU as a union with global aspirations and impact. The first section traces the SEIU’s growth in the last and current centuries. The second section offers in-depth studies of key campaigns in the United States, including the Justice for Janitors and Fight for $15 movements. The third section focuses on the SEIU’s work representing low-wage workers in Canada, Australia, Europe, and Brazil. An interview with Justice for Janitors architect Stephen Lerner rounds out the volume. Contributors: Luís LM Aguiar, Adrienne E. Eaton, Janice Fine, Euan Gibb, Laurence Hamel-Roy, Tashlin Lakhani, Joseph A. McCartin, Yanick Noiseux, Benjamin L. Peterson, Allison Porter, Alyssa May Kuchinski, Maite Tapia, Veronica Terriquez, and Kyoung-Hee Yu

""Discusses the role of women workers who are joining the workforce in the cityscape and bringing to surface the contradictions that this assumption offers"--Provided by publisher"--