Perhaps the most pressing threat to agonistic democracy, indeed to any form of participatory democracy, in contemporary life is neoliberalism. I conclude the book, then, by considering how neoliberalism undermines the material conditions, citizen capacities, and forms of life necessary to practice radical democracy, and then imagine how local experiments in grassroots democracy can contest neoliberalism and renew the civic life of persons and communities. One such example is participatory budgeting initiatives, wherein portions of municipalities’ public funds are made subject to the deliberation, determinations, and authority of citizen assemblies. I analyze one particular instantiation of this democratic practice in Cascais, Portugal, showing how it has served to re-engage ordinary persons in the democratic system, develop their capacities for self-governance, and make constructive use of conflict-negotiation for democratic ends. I conclude by suggesting that grassroots democratic practices like these provide contexts in which citizens can cultivate the kinds of democratic virtues necessary for sustaining an agonistic politics.

With reference to the ethos of the ‘neoliberal turn’ in education, the chapter critically analyses and interprets English Medium Instruction (EMI) in South Asia as it is promoted exogenously and realised at the grassroots level endogenously. The chapter identifies in what ways EMI creates unequal opportunities for people from different socioeconomic, educational, demographic, and indigenous backgrounds and consequently results in discrimination and social injustice in South Asian contexts. The chapter also shows that EMI policies and practices indicate a strong presence of monolingual biases, ideologies, and negative attitudes towards mother tongues and indigenous languages. In addition, colonialism rearticulated in neoliberal higher education promotes the English language. In the end, the chapter suggests that a more context-driven, rational, synchronised, and holistic approach to EMI is needed to decolonise and liberate EMI policies and establish linguistic equality, language rights, and social justice in South Asia.

The chapter situates the English Medium Instruction (EMI) policy and practices within a private university in part of Kazakhstan to gather the perspectives of the users to examine their orientations towards the use of EMI, the potential they see in the EMI policy, and their perceptions of the widespread expansion of the English language industry in the local market. The study employed qualitative interviews with students, teachers, and administrators. The participants’ perspectives show their entrepreneurial orientations towards English, evident in their repeated discourses of the English language as potential capital and a key to global competitiveness. They also endorse the intense pursuit of EMI policy in Kazakhstan because, as they understand, individual as well as governmental-level investment in English-related language skills make brighter promises and prospects in the current global economy. English is also believed to enhance Kazakhstani citizens’ global competitiveness. In theoretical terms, these orientations are deeply interwoven with the core principles of neoliberalism and neoliberal rationality, characterized by terms such as capital, globalization, global competitiveness, economic advantage, market logic, and private investment.

When Britain accepted an IMF loan in 1976 few thought that it would usher in a new political economy that would endure to the present, so how did it?

How has Britain been transformed since the financial crisis of 2008?

Global Leaders in the 21st Century examines the current context of international management and looks at the noteworthy changes in the business and leadership contexts of globalization. A major shift appears to be taking place in the global political economy. The predominant system characterized by global economic agreements, free trade, global supply chains, and multilateral institutions is being challenged by an increase in the primacy of national interests and security. In this volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, traditional ways of managing are not entirely adequate, and global leaders need to develop new skills. This chapter introduces the concept of Mindful Global Leadership and its components of context sensitivity, perspective taking, and a process orientation. It also presents a global leadership typology-based task complexity and relationship complexity.

This chapter examines the promotion of entrepreneurship and business startups in Oman and its rhetorical targeting of youth and women. Although innovation is part of the promotion agenda, entrepreneurship is often focused on encouraging citizens to create their own private sector job. The chapter focuses on the experiences of young people in internalising entrepreneurship promotion discourses and in starting personal businesses. It illustrates two key tensions – first, the tension between rentierism embedded within authoritarian governing structures, on the one hand, and the logic of neoliberal capitalism, on the other; and second, the tensions between rhetoric and realities of youth and female empowerment narratives. Entrepreneurship is expressed and promoted as an empowering activity, and at times is experienced as such, but can also be used to legitimise or reconstitute patriarchal and authoritarian structures to accommodate the market. The space of entrepreneurship promotion is both a key tactic of labour market bandaging, and a distinct illustration of rentier neoliberalism

This chapter offers concluding reflections, taking readers through three intersecting vectors that run through the book. The first establishes how the segmented labour markets of the region are embedded within global structures and processes, which in turn shape domestic and regional structures and the frames through which social relations and regulations unfold. The second vector suggests three historical junctures as especially important in shaping labour trajectories in the region: (1) the partial incorporation of Omani labour and transnational Asian labouring classes into global capitalism through colonial development; (2) the wider integration of Gulf economies and labour markets into global capitalism through the expansion of the oil industry; and (3) the increasing embeddedness of the region in neoliberal capitalism. Finally, the third vector explains the liberalising and nationalising dialectic in labour governance The heterodox approach of the book offers a direction for future scholarship on the GPE of labour, demonstrating both how empirically-grounded national and regional case studies can highlight and explain global patterns, as well as how the present and future of work in local spaces are entangled within the trajectories of global capitalist development.

This chapter reassesses Bradbury’s fictionalization of the academic world as a multifaceted exploration of the ironies of a value-free society and of literature’s responses to dehumanization, from the 1950’s “Age of Anxiety” to the postmodern vanishing of the author and its much-awaited re-materialization. From the ambivalence of liberal humanism in Eating People Is Wrong to the bitter satire of sociology as a threat to free will and accountability in The History Man, from the caricature of intellectual arrogance in Doctor Criminale and Mensonge to the problematization of anti-foundational epistemologies that legitimize interpretation in To the Hermitage, Bradbury’s novels of ideas dissect the institutional conditions of knowledge in democratic societies. They offer us not only a humorous outlook on postwar England but also a critical lens to examine the role of the humanities and the mission of academic institutions on a broader scale, issues that continue to be timely.

The conclusion of Money, Value, and the State reflects on the rise of a neoliberal government of value. The architecture of political economy for postcolonial Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda—their currency management, agrarian credit, export monopolies, and price controls—was similar to how many other nation-states managed capitalism, exerted sovereignty, and cultivated citizenship in the postwar decades. And like many other parts of the world, by the late-1970s, the government of value in East Africa was challenged by new models of determining worth. The neoliberal proviso to “get prices right” targeted the legitimacy of the moneychanger state: instead of controlling the conversion between currencies and managing exchange rates, central banks would delegate power to commercial firms. It was likewise a call to eliminate state monopolies on the valuation of export crops and other commodities in favor of merchants’ power to set prices. Yet, instead of merely being a project of marketisation, neoliberalism was always a theory of state power and the ethos of citizenship. As structural adjustment was imposed—haltingly, imperfectly—by international creditors and their East African partners, the problematic of price continued to imply far more than the value of a commodity. It was a call to revalue the relationship among people and between citizens and states. As a result, the state government of value has not disappeared--it has been disavowed by central banks and bureaucracies that dismiss popular claims-making in favor of serving the sovereignty of capital.

This chapter situates the field of LGBTIQ psychology in relationship to broader global and political contexts. An overview of the socio-legal status of same-gender sexualities and trans internationally (e.g., criminalisation of LGBTIQ people; marriage equality) is provided. The impact of global socio-political frameworks, specifically neoliberalism and right-wing extremism, on LGBTIQ people is evaluated. Terminology in the field of LGBTIQ psychology and the merits of different variations on language are also discussed.