Focusing on four jurisdictions where abortion facilities and providers faced violent attacks following the Morgentaler decision of 1988, this study compares provincial government responses to core feminist demands in the area of women's reproductive health: enhanced hospital access, public funding of clinic abortions and safe zone protections. Consistent with previous research on childcare and anti-violence policies, the study finds that in neoliberal times, the presence of left governing parties in Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario generally favoured abortion rights interests while conservative regimes disadvantaged them. The article contributes valuable new insights in revealing (1) the importance of centrist leaders in Ontario and at the federal level to pro-choice policy changes, (2) the significance of feminist critical actors to these outcomes, and (3) major variation among New Democratic Party provincial governments on abortion policy. The conclusion discusses implications of these results and proposes directions for further research.

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.

The role played by ritual in the field of human rights has not been widely remarked or analysed. Here I argue that the triumph of human rights as the predominant language for making social justice claims in the international sphere is partly attributable to the power of certain linguistic and embodied rituals. I suggest that these rituals veil the material factors at stake when human rights are invoked internationally, obscuring the relationship between neoliberalism, material inequality, and human rights. I compare the vision of justice propounded through the rituals of human rights with that proposed by the peasants’ movement, Vía Campesina. Vía Campesina’s vision is grounded in material realities and confronts neoliberal policies head on. I consider how it unsettles the rituals of human rights, and whether it can be preserved in the form of a UN Declaration on the rights of peasants.

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.

This article examines shifts in the regulation and governance of business crime in competition and deceptive trade practices law. It traces policies and enforcement in Canada's Combines Investigation Act/Competition Act from 1975–2005, a period of seismic shift in regulatory law during which formerly dominant Keynesian welfare-state discourses, practices, and policies were replaced by those characterizing the neo-liberal regulatory state. The Competition Bureau was a key player in this transition, by which competition policy became the primary regulatory mechanism of the modern state. The article's purpose is to analyse enforcement records, annual reports, and other documents from the Competition Bureau to show how priorities and practices have changed and to link these changes to shifts in governance associated with the transition from Keynesian economic philosophies to those of the neo-liberal state.

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.

This article examines the discourses of crime and safety mobilized by Gary Doer's provincial NDP government in Manitoba between 1999 and 2009. Through a Foucaultian discourse analysis of statements made by Manitoba NDP members in the Legislative Assembly—in particular, the language and preconceptions drawn on by government members when speaking about matters of crime and safety—the authors assess the role of Third Way and neo-liberal rationalities of crime governance in a provincial crime-control assemblage that seeks to foster “security” beyond the limits of federally defined criminal law. Based on this analysis, the authors discuss how the Manitoba NDP is engaged in a process of “deputizing” public service and communities for purposes of crime control.

In this article, I argue that precarious migration status can be used as an organizing concept for an analysis of (im)migration law in Canada. After situating the regulation of precarious migrants in the historical context of the liberal/neo-liberal shift of the 1970s, I argue that the increase in migrant precariousness over the past few years is likely to increase as a result of recent legislative changes in both refugee and migrant-worker law. Finally, I offer a critique of the traditional liberal argument for migrant rights, inviting an alternative approach to establish migrant rights on the basis of economic participation.