This paper theorizes the nature of neoliberal social policy, making three substantial contributions. First, processes of “economization” are identified as a central characteristic of neoliberalism: economization constitutes a “bridge” between Foucauldian and (neo-)Marxist accounts of neoliberalism – two perspectives that are in many respects hardly reconcilable – because extending the economic logic to non-economic areas (neoliberalism as a governmental rationality) also potentially increases the profit-making opportunities in previously uncommodified domains (neoliberalism as a capitalist project). Second, the paper links economization processes not only to projects of austerity and welfare retrenchment but also to the more generous “social investment” agenda. Third, the paper highlights the central paradox of neoliberal social policy, whereby higher degrees of economization are associated with more generous social policy: more “social” versions of neoliberalism are those that ironically downplay the social logic, transforming social policies into economic investments. The paper also discusses the problems related to economization in terms of de-democratization.

Recent sociological scholarship on market design is ill-equipped to understand the normative and political aspects of experts’ practices in connection to political conflicts over the commodification of social rights. I develop an original approach to the politicized use of market devices to address collective concerns in a noneconomic policy field: education. When designing a high-stakes school accountability system, policymakers in Chile confronted a moral conundrum: should schools be valued according to their students’ absolute proficiency, or according to the school’s relative effectiveness? Progressive and conservative experts in charge of settling this dilemma pushed for using the statistical model (OLS vs. HLM) that yielded rankings that fit their moral preferences. Through qualitative analyses of experts’ real-world application of quantitative methods, as well as experts’ interpretations of these methods’ performative consequences, I mobilize the much-debated concept of “moral background” to unravel the conditions for subsuming ideological dissent into consensual forms of decision-making.

This paper argues that conceptualizing Western state citizenship from the vantage point of advancing liberalism is insufficient. Instead, recently restrictive trends may be summarized under the umbrella of earned citizenship. Conceived of as privilege not right, this is a citizenship that is simultaneously more difficult to get and easier to lose, and it inheres elements of neoliberalism and of nationalism in tandem. One could even call it an instance of neoliberal nationalism, which is neither ethnic nor civic but including on the basis of merit and desert. The rise of earned citizenship is a convergent trend across Western Europe and the classic immigrant nations of North America and Australia.

This article examines public debates on the legitimacy of banking profits in the 2008 credit crunch. A content analysis of 957 newspaper articles published in Germany and the UK in the early weeks after the Lehman Brothers collapse examines critical statements directed at illegitimate forms of financial profit in order to identify the cultural legitimacy of financial capitalism. The conceptual framework provided by the French sociology of justification points to the role of shared orders of value as a normative reference for public discourses. In both national debates, four important boundaries for legitimate profits were drawn that concerned the problems of ownership, risk-management capacities of traders, fraudulent client relations, and speculative gambling. The meaning of this classical moral criticism of banks was transformed in the context of the 2008 crisis: a line between “normal” and “excessive” financial profits was drawn, defining an area of legitimate profit-seeking that hewed to the basic assumptions of the market model. Economic theory was used as a scheme of public economic morality. The seemingly harsh critical debate effectively reproduced a legitimate image of a functioning financial market, deflecting public attention away from the structural ambivalences of financial profit-seeking and granting legitimacy to the institutional status quo of financial capitalism.

What, in fact, is the Welfare State? This article traces the emergence of the welfare state as a specific mode of government, describing its distinctive rationality as well as its characteristic forms, functions and effects. It identifies five sectors of welfare governance, the relations between them, and the various forms these take in different times and places. It discusses the contradictory commitments that shape welfare state practices and the problems associated with these practices and contradictions. It situates welfare state government within a long-term account of the changing relations between the social and the economic spheres. And it argues that the welfare state ought to be understood as a “normal social fact”—an essential (though constantly contested) part of the social and economic organization of modern capitalist societies.

This article considers aspects of the use of class in sociology and anthropology since the period around 1970, when Neo-Marxism became important in the social sciences, and is concerned primarily with Marxist and Weberian uses of the concept. It considers changes in the use of class in terms of two dimensions. One is the degree to which class is placed in a more macroscopic or more microscopic frame. The other is the degree to which class is defined in more objectivist terms or relies more on the way that the people being studied use the term. It is argued that since around 1970 writing on class has tended to become more microscopic and subjectivist. This tendency is related to changes within the two disciplines and within society more generally. The article closes with a consideration of some of the costs of this changing scholarly orientation to class.