Julie MacLeavy works at the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. She is an economic geographer interested in: the governance of work and worklessness | work-orientated welfare reform | austerity | gender divisions of work and care | economic restructuring and labour market change | neoliberalism | inequality | urban change.
She is currently researching the gendered dimensions of the austerity state, funded through a University of Bristol IAS Fellowship (2017-18).
Julie is an Associate Editor of the journal Geoforum. Address: School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, BS8 1SS, United Kingdom
Journal publication in geography changed significantly in the late 20th century as its dominance ... more Journal publication in geography changed significantly in the late 20th century as its dominance by learned societies was captured by (large, multi-national) commercial organisations making large profits from freely-donated authors’ intellectual property. Further changes are now proposed, involving journals being freely accessible, sustained not by subscriptions but rather by author payments, which will enhance capitalist publishers’ profit-making potential and disadvantage authors. Alternatives are needed, returning to the earlier model whereby research papers are not treated as profit-making commodities.
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2e, 2020
Social class has featured in geographical writings since the early 1970s. Since this time there h... more Social class has featured in geographical writings since the early 1970s. Since this time there have been significant changes in the class landscape, arguably the most important being the perceived disappearance of the “working class” in advanced industrialized nations. Deindustrialization and several decades of substantial social mobility have seen generations of young people from working-class backgrounds gain educational qualifications to secure employment in the expanding “middle class”. Yet often the employment posts they obtain are relatively low in pay and status, and the workers remain relatively disadvantaged by a lack of job security. Reflecting a growing realization that class and its accoutrements have not disappeared, calls for a renewed focus on class present a picture of Western society marked by a growing divide between a wealthy elite and the multitude of groups being pushed to the periphery by changes in labor markets and associated institutional structures. Geographical work has revealed how more and more people are becoming marginalized, as well as the consequences of this process for politics and space. Within this body of research, contemporary class experiences and emotions are understood as complex as inequality is (re)produced in line with broader patterns of social disadvantage. There are also important variations noted between Western, and more specifically European, transformations of class, and changes observed in the Global South where the global division of labor has created a new working class, but without the trade union consciousness or politics to rally against dismal working conditions and employment prospects.
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2018
There is a growing narrative that the outcome of the UK referendum on European Union membership w... more There is a growing narrative that the outcome of the UK referendum on European Union membership was the product of disenfranchisement and disillusionment wrought by the uneven consequences of economic restructuring in different UK regions, cities and communities. Those most likely to vote ‘leave’ were concentrated among those ‘left behind’ by globalisation, whilst those voting ‘remain’ were clustered within more affluent areas and social groups. These uneven geographies of leave and remain voting have been taken to reveal two diametrically opposed groups in British politics, obscuring the messy and contradictory ways in which votes are cast. In seeking to bring these complexities to light, this paper explores the motivating factors behind the Brexit vote amongst older working-class white men in Sunderland, England. The paper shows how economic stagnation and the experience of different forms of marginality led to a nostalgia for times past and a mistrust of political elites amongst this cohort. The paper documents how the feelings expressed by research participants became linked to the EU project and its real and perceived impacts on the local area. In doing so, it shows that the referendum shaped and changed the electorate by asking them to align themselves with those either for or against Britain’s membership of the EU. The paper concludes by reflecting on the possibilities for creating an inclusive form of politics that treats different responses to the referendum question as the basis for an open conversation about democracy and democratic ideals.
This paper calls for deepening understandings of inequality and the reproduction of inequality ac... more This paper calls for deepening understandings of inequality and the reproduction of inequality across the income distribution. In particular, it brings intergenerational transmissions and place effects, their interaction and progression over time into greater focus. The objective is to understand the implications of increasing inequality for those in the large and under-researched ‘middle group’. The paper makes the case for urban and regional research that uses extensive longitudinal data, both qualitative and quantitative, to reveal the totality of the processes impacting the middle group, from those who are just managing to those who are advancing and flourishing.
This paper uses a feminist state-theoretical approach to explore the development of Brexit and ar... more This paper uses a feminist state-theoretical approach to explore the development of Brexit and argues that the UK's EU referendum and its aftermath reflect a gendered politics embedded within the ongoing neoliberal restructuring of the state. Directing attention to the struggle to protect women's interests, maintain equality strategies, and more generally infuse a gender dimension in political discussions, the paper emphasizes the risks of Brexit for women and gender equality. It concludes by asking how at the current conjecture-when European regulation on gender equality is being framed as 'stifling' economic growth-we can build up a fairer and more equal United Kingdom. ARTICLE HISTORY
The past eighteen months have delivered a series of ‘surprising’ electoral outcomes. In the US, t... more The past eighteen months have delivered a series of ‘surprising’ electoral outcomes. In the US, the election of Donald Trump confounded expectations. In the UK, the leave result from the EU referendum and the subsequent snap General Election which saw the Conservative Party lose their majority have been heralded as knife-edge moments and a new period in politics. This paper makes an alternative contention. It posits that the electoral outcomes of 2016 and 2017 were not arbitrary or new occurrences, but instead represent the latest expressions of long-standing historical trends towards increased inequality across the West. Recognising that the impacts of economic and political restructuring have been unevenly distributed between different groups and geographical areas, the paper makes the case that these electoral outcomes must be seen in the light of policy moves creating a more polarised social and spatial structure. Using the UK as an illustrative case, the paper explores the developments that have reinforced spatial opportunity structures and the reproduction of disadvantage over time. In doing so, the paper contextualises the revanchism resultant from processes of social residualisation and articulates the need to focus on the long run effects of rising inequality now being seen to shape voters’ choices.
Against a backdrop of persistent gender inequalities around childcare, recent research suggests t... more Against a backdrop of persistent gender inequalities around childcare, recent research suggests that some men – and especially fathers – are engaging to a greater extent in the everyday tasks of social reproduction. However, our understanding of the multiple factors, motivations and institutions that facilitate and constrain this nuanced 'regendering of care' phenomenon in different national contexts remains limited. Previous work has theorized the uneven rise of male primary caregiving in North America and Scandinavia. This article extends these debates through an empirical focus on the United Kingdom in the wake of the 2008–09 recession and double dip of 2011–12, to explore male work-care in relation to economic restructuring, welfare spending cuts, rising costs of childcare, policy interventions which seek to culturally and numerically defeminize care work, and concerns over work–life balance in an 'age of austerity'. The final part of the article explains the significance of a larger research agenda that recentres the expansive work–life balance literature through an expanded focus of analysis on men, work-care intermediaries and socially sustainable modes of post-recessionary growth.
This paper focuses on the implementation of workfare in the US, with the aim of understanding the... more This paper focuses on the implementation of workfare in the US, with the aim of understanding the passive response of the unions and other progressive groups to the restructuring and retrenchment of the American welfare system. In particular, it considers the disparate efforts to organise welfare recipients and low-wage workers around the restructuring of social benefits towards work in the District of Columbia. Although the convergence of welfare recipients and low-wage workers through 'work-first' initiatives has the potential to spur political mobilisation and protest against the reform of welfare, it is found that at the local level campaigns against workfare are diverse and changeable, producing very little – it could be argued – in terms of long-term resistance. Identifying forms of dissidence in Washington DC as constitutive of the broader liberal regime of governance and re-regulation, this paper probes the forms, possibilities and problems of organising workfare subjects. This allows for consideration of the extent to which workfare programmes are being re-inscribed within emerging patterns of political-economic development and the potential for future action.
In this short commentary, I respond to Weller and O'Neill's (2014) presentation of neoliberalism ... more In this short commentary, I respond to Weller and O'Neill's (2014) presentation of neoliberalism as a 'summary word that elides a complex reality and dissuades close political engagement'. Whilst I agree that we need to avoid the easy rhetoric of universality in our research enquiries, our attempts to recognize, explain and theorize paradigmatic changes in capitalism necessitate a comprehension of the global context. Attending to the relationship between local ideas and policies and the 'global imaginary' of neoliberalism is critical for understanding and evaluating recent political and economic changes. Whilst we do need to constantly reflect on the perils of reifying neoliberalism as a conceptual category, we might also still need and make use of this category, in a more qualified and variegated form, precisely in order to critique shifts in capitalism through explicit examples and propose alternatives to the global futures imagined in the neo-liberal story.
In 1994, Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell published ‘Jungle law breaks out: neoliberalism and global-l... more In 1994, Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell published ‘Jungle law breaks out: neoliberalism and global-local disorder’. In this paper, Peck and Tickell proposed that the dramatic acceleration of place-based
competition was the result of political-economic disorder at the global scale and that neoliberalism was critical to the understanding of this shift in scale of political and economic governance practices. Moreover, they argued that rather than restoring and sustaining economic growth, local strategies were
the product of continuing regulatory crisis. Peck and Tickell’s insights helped inspire and initiate one of the most influential and growing areas of political economic geography: the theorisation and research of neoliberalism. This body of work presents neoliberalism as the regulatory expression of capitalism’s
unstable, contradictory and crisis-ridden dynamic to highlight the ongoing search for a new institutional fix. This commentary traces Peck and Tickell’s original insights in relation to the persistent framing of neoliberalism as an inevitable response to the breakdown of Keynesian-Welfarism. Drawing on research
on welfare state restructuring, it further outlines how the ‘lore’ of neoliberalism as regulatory solution inhibits discussion of alternative regulatory forms
Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 4 (3): 355-367, 2011
This paper considers the UK coalition government’s austerity drive, which attempts to garner publ... more This paper considers the UK coalition government’s austerity drive, which attempts to garner public support for the reduction or withdrawal of welfare entitlements through appeals to frugality, self-sufficiency and fiscal prudence. In particular, the paper considers the recasting of the former Labour government’s work incentives and welfare disincentives amidst mounting pressures on public expenditure. The reorientation of state assistance towards work, coupled with the proposed simplification of working-age benefits and tax credits is argued to present a particular challenge to the financial security and autonomy of women, signalling the end of the process of modernising the welfare system that was forged around the single earner family model in the period of post-war austerity.
Welfare-to-work lies at the heart of the British government’s employment strategy. Its key initia... more Welfare-to-work lies at the heart of the British government’s employment strategy. Its key initiative – a series of ‘New Deals’ for the Unemployed – is a supply-side active labour market policy that has been combined with important changes to the tax and benefit system to try and engage the unemployed in employment. In this, the need to give support to individuals to partake in work is emphasised. Yet there is little consideration of how the re-regulation of labour markets through welfare-to-work is contingent upon gender and class relations which condition the levels of access that (working-class) women and men have to work. This article explores gender issues across Britain’s outgoing Labour government’s New Deal initiative using a local case study to consider how the institutionalisation of welfare-to-work at the local level constrains, rather than enables, improvements to women’s quality of life. In constraining the potential of local projects to offer working-class women access to the labour market through programmes that create a genuine ‘work-life’ balance (as opposed to seeking the advancement of a market rationale), institutional restructuring around the New Deals is found to increase the pressures on women to be ‘work ready’. With greater numbers of women facing the challenges of unemployment in the current recession, the framework of contemporary policy does not effectively tackle the acute difficulties that ‘working-class’ women face in accessing paid work and consequently legitimates the gendered effects of (un)employment. In this context, attention to the gendering of governmental techniques associated with welfare-to-work is argued to be of ever increasing importance.
Chapter in Birch, K, and Mykhnenko, V (Eds.) The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism: The Collapse of an Economic Order? (London: Zed Books), pp. 133-150, 2010
Journal publication in geography changed significantly in the late 20th century as its dominance ... more Journal publication in geography changed significantly in the late 20th century as its dominance by learned societies was captured by (large, multi-national) commercial organisations making large profits from freely-donated authors’ intellectual property. Further changes are now proposed, involving journals being freely accessible, sustained not by subscriptions but rather by author payments, which will enhance capitalist publishers’ profit-making potential and disadvantage authors. Alternatives are needed, returning to the earlier model whereby research papers are not treated as profit-making commodities.
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2e, 2020
Social class has featured in geographical writings since the early 1970s. Since this time there h... more Social class has featured in geographical writings since the early 1970s. Since this time there have been significant changes in the class landscape, arguably the most important being the perceived disappearance of the “working class” in advanced industrialized nations. Deindustrialization and several decades of substantial social mobility have seen generations of young people from working-class backgrounds gain educational qualifications to secure employment in the expanding “middle class”. Yet often the employment posts they obtain are relatively low in pay and status, and the workers remain relatively disadvantaged by a lack of job security. Reflecting a growing realization that class and its accoutrements have not disappeared, calls for a renewed focus on class present a picture of Western society marked by a growing divide between a wealthy elite and the multitude of groups being pushed to the periphery by changes in labor markets and associated institutional structures. Geographical work has revealed how more and more people are becoming marginalized, as well as the consequences of this process for politics and space. Within this body of research, contemporary class experiences and emotions are understood as complex as inequality is (re)produced in line with broader patterns of social disadvantage. There are also important variations noted between Western, and more specifically European, transformations of class, and changes observed in the Global South where the global division of labor has created a new working class, but without the trade union consciousness or politics to rally against dismal working conditions and employment prospects.
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 2018
There is a growing narrative that the outcome of the UK referendum on European Union membership w... more There is a growing narrative that the outcome of the UK referendum on European Union membership was the product of disenfranchisement and disillusionment wrought by the uneven consequences of economic restructuring in different UK regions, cities and communities. Those most likely to vote ‘leave’ were concentrated among those ‘left behind’ by globalisation, whilst those voting ‘remain’ were clustered within more affluent areas and social groups. These uneven geographies of leave and remain voting have been taken to reveal two diametrically opposed groups in British politics, obscuring the messy and contradictory ways in which votes are cast. In seeking to bring these complexities to light, this paper explores the motivating factors behind the Brexit vote amongst older working-class white men in Sunderland, England. The paper shows how economic stagnation and the experience of different forms of marginality led to a nostalgia for times past and a mistrust of political elites amongst this cohort. The paper documents how the feelings expressed by research participants became linked to the EU project and its real and perceived impacts on the local area. In doing so, it shows that the referendum shaped and changed the electorate by asking them to align themselves with those either for or against Britain’s membership of the EU. The paper concludes by reflecting on the possibilities for creating an inclusive form of politics that treats different responses to the referendum question as the basis for an open conversation about democracy and democratic ideals.
This paper calls for deepening understandings of inequality and the reproduction of inequality ac... more This paper calls for deepening understandings of inequality and the reproduction of inequality across the income distribution. In particular, it brings intergenerational transmissions and place effects, their interaction and progression over time into greater focus. The objective is to understand the implications of increasing inequality for those in the large and under-researched ‘middle group’. The paper makes the case for urban and regional research that uses extensive longitudinal data, both qualitative and quantitative, to reveal the totality of the processes impacting the middle group, from those who are just managing to those who are advancing and flourishing.
This paper uses a feminist state-theoretical approach to explore the development of Brexit and ar... more This paper uses a feminist state-theoretical approach to explore the development of Brexit and argues that the UK's EU referendum and its aftermath reflect a gendered politics embedded within the ongoing neoliberal restructuring of the state. Directing attention to the struggle to protect women's interests, maintain equality strategies, and more generally infuse a gender dimension in political discussions, the paper emphasizes the risks of Brexit for women and gender equality. It concludes by asking how at the current conjecture-when European regulation on gender equality is being framed as 'stifling' economic growth-we can build up a fairer and more equal United Kingdom. ARTICLE HISTORY
The past eighteen months have delivered a series of ‘surprising’ electoral outcomes. In the US, t... more The past eighteen months have delivered a series of ‘surprising’ electoral outcomes. In the US, the election of Donald Trump confounded expectations. In the UK, the leave result from the EU referendum and the subsequent snap General Election which saw the Conservative Party lose their majority have been heralded as knife-edge moments and a new period in politics. This paper makes an alternative contention. It posits that the electoral outcomes of 2016 and 2017 were not arbitrary or new occurrences, but instead represent the latest expressions of long-standing historical trends towards increased inequality across the West. Recognising that the impacts of economic and political restructuring have been unevenly distributed between different groups and geographical areas, the paper makes the case that these electoral outcomes must be seen in the light of policy moves creating a more polarised social and spatial structure. Using the UK as an illustrative case, the paper explores the developments that have reinforced spatial opportunity structures and the reproduction of disadvantage over time. In doing so, the paper contextualises the revanchism resultant from processes of social residualisation and articulates the need to focus on the long run effects of rising inequality now being seen to shape voters’ choices.
Against a backdrop of persistent gender inequalities around childcare, recent research suggests t... more Against a backdrop of persistent gender inequalities around childcare, recent research suggests that some men – and especially fathers – are engaging to a greater extent in the everyday tasks of social reproduction. However, our understanding of the multiple factors, motivations and institutions that facilitate and constrain this nuanced 'regendering of care' phenomenon in different national contexts remains limited. Previous work has theorized the uneven rise of male primary caregiving in North America and Scandinavia. This article extends these debates through an empirical focus on the United Kingdom in the wake of the 2008–09 recession and double dip of 2011–12, to explore male work-care in relation to economic restructuring, welfare spending cuts, rising costs of childcare, policy interventions which seek to culturally and numerically defeminize care work, and concerns over work–life balance in an 'age of austerity'. The final part of the article explains the significance of a larger research agenda that recentres the expansive work–life balance literature through an expanded focus of analysis on men, work-care intermediaries and socially sustainable modes of post-recessionary growth.
This paper focuses on the implementation of workfare in the US, with the aim of understanding the... more This paper focuses on the implementation of workfare in the US, with the aim of understanding the passive response of the unions and other progressive groups to the restructuring and retrenchment of the American welfare system. In particular, it considers the disparate efforts to organise welfare recipients and low-wage workers around the restructuring of social benefits towards work in the District of Columbia. Although the convergence of welfare recipients and low-wage workers through 'work-first' initiatives has the potential to spur political mobilisation and protest against the reform of welfare, it is found that at the local level campaigns against workfare are diverse and changeable, producing very little – it could be argued – in terms of long-term resistance. Identifying forms of dissidence in Washington DC as constitutive of the broader liberal regime of governance and re-regulation, this paper probes the forms, possibilities and problems of organising workfare subjects. This allows for consideration of the extent to which workfare programmes are being re-inscribed within emerging patterns of political-economic development and the potential for future action.
In this short commentary, I respond to Weller and O'Neill's (2014) presentation of neoliberalism ... more In this short commentary, I respond to Weller and O'Neill's (2014) presentation of neoliberalism as a 'summary word that elides a complex reality and dissuades close political engagement'. Whilst I agree that we need to avoid the easy rhetoric of universality in our research enquiries, our attempts to recognize, explain and theorize paradigmatic changes in capitalism necessitate a comprehension of the global context. Attending to the relationship between local ideas and policies and the 'global imaginary' of neoliberalism is critical for understanding and evaluating recent political and economic changes. Whilst we do need to constantly reflect on the perils of reifying neoliberalism as a conceptual category, we might also still need and make use of this category, in a more qualified and variegated form, precisely in order to critique shifts in capitalism through explicit examples and propose alternatives to the global futures imagined in the neo-liberal story.
In 1994, Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell published ‘Jungle law breaks out: neoliberalism and global-l... more In 1994, Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell published ‘Jungle law breaks out: neoliberalism and global-local disorder’. In this paper, Peck and Tickell proposed that the dramatic acceleration of place-based
competition was the result of political-economic disorder at the global scale and that neoliberalism was critical to the understanding of this shift in scale of political and economic governance practices. Moreover, they argued that rather than restoring and sustaining economic growth, local strategies were
the product of continuing regulatory crisis. Peck and Tickell’s insights helped inspire and initiate one of the most influential and growing areas of political economic geography: the theorisation and research of neoliberalism. This body of work presents neoliberalism as the regulatory expression of capitalism’s
unstable, contradictory and crisis-ridden dynamic to highlight the ongoing search for a new institutional fix. This commentary traces Peck and Tickell’s original insights in relation to the persistent framing of neoliberalism as an inevitable response to the breakdown of Keynesian-Welfarism. Drawing on research
on welfare state restructuring, it further outlines how the ‘lore’ of neoliberalism as regulatory solution inhibits discussion of alternative regulatory forms
Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 4 (3): 355-367, 2011
This paper considers the UK coalition government’s austerity drive, which attempts to garner publ... more This paper considers the UK coalition government’s austerity drive, which attempts to garner public support for the reduction or withdrawal of welfare entitlements through appeals to frugality, self-sufficiency and fiscal prudence. In particular, the paper considers the recasting of the former Labour government’s work incentives and welfare disincentives amidst mounting pressures on public expenditure. The reorientation of state assistance towards work, coupled with the proposed simplification of working-age benefits and tax credits is argued to present a particular challenge to the financial security and autonomy of women, signalling the end of the process of modernising the welfare system that was forged around the single earner family model in the period of post-war austerity.
Welfare-to-work lies at the heart of the British government’s employment strategy. Its key initia... more Welfare-to-work lies at the heart of the British government’s employment strategy. Its key initiative – a series of ‘New Deals’ for the Unemployed – is a supply-side active labour market policy that has been combined with important changes to the tax and benefit system to try and engage the unemployed in employment. In this, the need to give support to individuals to partake in work is emphasised. Yet there is little consideration of how the re-regulation of labour markets through welfare-to-work is contingent upon gender and class relations which condition the levels of access that (working-class) women and men have to work. This article explores gender issues across Britain’s outgoing Labour government’s New Deal initiative using a local case study to consider how the institutionalisation of welfare-to-work at the local level constrains, rather than enables, improvements to women’s quality of life. In constraining the potential of local projects to offer working-class women access to the labour market through programmes that create a genuine ‘work-life’ balance (as opposed to seeking the advancement of a market rationale), institutional restructuring around the New Deals is found to increase the pressures on women to be ‘work ready’. With greater numbers of women facing the challenges of unemployment in the current recession, the framework of contemporary policy does not effectively tackle the acute difficulties that ‘working-class’ women face in accessing paid work and consequently legitimates the gendered effects of (un)employment. In this context, attention to the gendering of governmental techniques associated with welfare-to-work is argued to be of ever increasing importance.
Chapter in Birch, K, and Mykhnenko, V (Eds.) The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism: The Collapse of an Economic Order? (London: Zed Books), pp. 133-150, 2010
The Handbook for the Future of Work offers a comprehensive and critical analysis of a series of k... more The Handbook for the Future of Work offers a comprehensive and critical analysis of a series of key debates concerning the changing nature of work and employment. The temporal focus is primarily on the last twenty years, and arguments about technology, automation and capitalist transformation, as the economic landscape shifts and new work practices and relations are established. The book is timely insofar as it intertwines the radical promises, threats and implications of this rapidly changing landscape with more formal/mainstream narratives and discussions of work and employment. In this sense it addresses a growing interdisciplinary interest by distinctively going beyond a narrow focus on the role of technology that dominates too much of the conversation on the future of work, opening out to broader debates about the character of capitalism at a time of crisis, conflict and contestation over alternatives. No single volume currently provides a detailed insight into the different domains in which the challenges – and opportunities – of technological advancement in the workplace have been considered, nor the way this multifaceted and dynamic process of economic transformation calls into question the centrality that work continues to play in our social and political imaginaries. The Handbook for the Future of Work accordingly serves as a crucial resource for navigating the complexities of this new intellectual terrain. This introductory chapter sets out the book’s thematic coverage by outlining its substantive content, including detailing how writing about the ‘future of work’ has quickly become a vitally important component of contemporary political and economic critique both inside and outside of the academy.
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Papers by Julie MacLeavy
competition was the result of political-economic disorder at the global scale and that neoliberalism was critical to the understanding of this shift in scale of political and economic governance practices. Moreover, they argued that rather than restoring and sustaining economic growth, local strategies were
the product of continuing regulatory crisis. Peck and Tickell’s insights helped inspire and initiate one of the most influential and growing areas of political economic geography: the theorisation and research of neoliberalism. This body of work presents neoliberalism as the regulatory expression of capitalism’s
unstable, contradictory and crisis-ridden dynamic to highlight the ongoing search for a new institutional fix. This commentary traces Peck and Tickell’s original insights in relation to the persistent framing of neoliberalism as an inevitable response to the breakdown of Keynesian-Welfarism. Drawing on research
on welfare state restructuring, it further outlines how the ‘lore’ of neoliberalism as regulatory solution inhibits discussion of alternative regulatory forms
competition was the result of political-economic disorder at the global scale and that neoliberalism was critical to the understanding of this shift in scale of political and economic governance practices. Moreover, they argued that rather than restoring and sustaining economic growth, local strategies were
the product of continuing regulatory crisis. Peck and Tickell’s insights helped inspire and initiate one of the most influential and growing areas of political economic geography: the theorisation and research of neoliberalism. This body of work presents neoliberalism as the regulatory expression of capitalism’s
unstable, contradictory and crisis-ridden dynamic to highlight the ongoing search for a new institutional fix. This commentary traces Peck and Tickell’s original insights in relation to the persistent framing of neoliberalism as an inevitable response to the breakdown of Keynesian-Welfarism. Drawing on research
on welfare state restructuring, it further outlines how the ‘lore’ of neoliberalism as regulatory solution inhibits discussion of alternative regulatory forms