open Democracy News Analysis - Responsibility and neo-liberalism, Grahame Thompson - Comments

http://taghioff.info/dant/ on "Responsibility and neo-liberalism"

http://taghioff.info/dant/ — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 17:36:36 +0100

Thompson argues coherantly that neo-liberalism has become internalised into a form of governmentality, where a certain kind of personal responsibility works hand in hand with the outer forms of governance. However it is important to remember that this internalisation of responsibility is neither new, nor unique to neo-liberalism, and that what are significant are the specific forms these internalisations take. The nub of the problem is this: Individual responsibility is amenable to a kind of privatisation, where it is set as a target to individuals and then measured. In management speak this is broadly called management by objectives. This is the kind of form of responsibility neo-liberalism has taken on: You can see it in development with the rise of Log frame analysis, and in governance in the ways in which treasury departments have internalised Log frame type approaches as a way to measure the performance of public spending. But the problem is that this kind of target setting is terrible when it comes to collective responsibility. Management by objectives has been critiqued as such int he management literature, since as a procedure, it does not tend to uncover problems that cut accross the individualising metrics used. Whilst the parts may be efficient, systemic issues tend to be neglected, meaning that you get massive "Nash equilibriums", that is situations where individual interest turn out very much less efficient than a collective approach would bring. You need look no further than Private Finance Initiatives, or the toothlessness of Corporate Social Responsibility to see this. The problem is this: Not all bottom up, emergent solutions are good: This is why humans were interested in designing things in the first place. There is still the problem of top-down design that is irrelevant to circumstances, as totalitarian states often demonstrate, but this is not the end of the discussion, and neither is a more nuanced view of neo-liberalism. You can take a kind of "market failure" approach, and say you need to intervene where emergent solutions don't work. But that also misses a crucial point. That intervention need not just be fire-fighting. It can also be planning, looking ahead, and exercising foresight, alongside an awareness of how emergent economic and social forces tend to play out. The big myth of neo-liberalism is that it is impossible to plan and predict, and so governments don't need to take responsibility, it is better to leave it to more responsive others. But that is an obfuscation. Look at climate change: Spontaneous collective action is failing solidly in this area, and business leaders are calling for regulation, so that they can do the right thing without losing out to their competitors. This is a classic Nash equilibrium type situation, and clearly a regulating, predicting and planning governance needs to step in to break the stalemate, before we all run out of time. This is exactly what neoliberal approaches cannot provide: They can distribute responsibility to those with control of capital, they can make it easier to reconfigure capital, partly by lmiting people's rights, they can make more of the polity into capital, by making more of the system tradeable, but governing, planning and regulating is not a strong part of the neo-liberal approach, which is more attuned to gradual marginal tinkering. Strong, predictive, systemic planning (i.e. leadership) is the work of governments, who really need to rediscover what it means to govern well, and to lead far more based on something longer-sighted than profit.

seriously70 on "Responsibility and neo-liberalism"

seriously70 — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 01:44:42 +0100

Thompson brings up some interesting questions related to concepts of responsibility in globalized capitalism. But IMO he (like others, e.g. Anthropology News, Sept.2006) then falls prey to an academic temptation that muddies the waters: a (pop) concept that is out there (neo-liberalism) is found to have several meanings, and an expedition is then mounted to find out what "it" really is and how we should judge it. It's always useful to employ official rhetoric to critique the system producing it, but I see no point in getting bogged down with a moral revaluation of the term "neoliberalism".

alfredo.bremont on "Responsibility and neo-liberalism"

alfredo.bremont — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 22:53:18 +0100

The main problems of liberalism is size, the capitalist system is a system created for a limited amount of individuals. Today we got many more individuals than previously thought of, in this configuration the globalisation of the capitalist system no longer functions. The system was not, created for a full-fledged economy Reason why wars generate reconstruction and after the war, there is peace and order for a certain period, and once again, destruction follows the cycle. A globalise world can only function under a socialist environment, therefore the rich and famous will be force to reduce their wealth and shared. Quality will have to replace quantity and on a certain way, we can say we take some steps backwards in order to readjust to the actual properly. Decreasing the production of cheap and expendable items and replaces them for more long-lasting goods is the solution to the many problems the economy is facing now. This demands education readjustment and the notion of caring and understanding what you produce; the time of your existence, you spend on the labour force and the time you grand to your self. Existence today demands a balance between the stressing hours and the leisure hours. More leisure hours are necessary in order to keep sanity, while more working hours to obtain more money will only increase your psychological bills and decrease your existence. The time we spend living is short, the rest is just time! La partie de la vie que nous vivons est courte, tout le reste n’est pas de la vie, c’est du temps.

blessdkrumheit on "Responsibility and neo-liberalism"

blessdkrumheit — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 03:52:28 +0100

GPFrank Recent history: the last few years especially show that "self-regulation" as the chief means of running this "industrial-military" complex simply does not work. There is a point when language means what it says and when it says "limited liability" then what are the obligations beyond learning what one can get away with? "Limited liability" came about by a legal error by an accidental copying from a notebook in 1883. A relatively recent Supreme Court decision (in the 1960's I believe) affirmed it in the sense that practice stays a law if it is never challenged. But when is responsibility completely lost? It is when an owner does not know what he or she owns. The Sveringen railroad magnates worked leverage and interlocks to the extent that they didn't know what they owned and did not, own, according to comments at the time. During the Reagan salad years; in 1984 was invented and perfected the process of destroying companies in order to acquire them. According to the book, "Barbarians at the Gate" the responsibility or conscience of key board members of Nabisco and Reynolds was furthermore destroyed by piling on ridiculous benefits and perks. Destroying a business that is well run is as unconscionable as the early Bolsheviks. What we need, first of all a committee set up by Congress to examine owners of corporations, directorates and trusts to find out how much they know about their own property. If they prove incompetent commissions should be appointed to straighten out these enterprises until they become transparent: first to the owners and then to the public. In short, wealth must be kept at least liable for transparency.

Responsibility and neo-liberalism, Grahame Thompson

Grace Davies — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 19:11:38 +0100

The issue of "responsibility" has increasingly become a defining feature of the current era of neo-liberal globalisation. At every level of governmental and social policy, and in many contexts of political and media discussion, the notion can be used to convey a potent sense both of empowerment and policing, of autonomy and control. How far can a close examination of the idea illuminate contemporary forms of power and governance?

An opportunity to think about this question in some detail was provoked by a conference in London on 20-21 July 2007 focusing on issues of corporate accountability and limited liability under globalisation. In the event, the thorough discussion of the complex question of what limited liability involves was matched by a central concern with "responsibility".

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