Viral Neoliberalism: The Road to Herd Immunity Still A Rocky One

The objective of this article is to assess the dominant global economic system and the resulting power relations from the perspective of the strategies used worldwide against the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The predominantly biomedical approach has not sufficiently taken into account the actual dimension of COVID-19 as a syndemic. While the much longer-term pandemic caused by the neoliberalism virus has not been systematically considered by public and global health scholars in the context of COVID-19, it exhibits essential characteristics of an infectious pathogen, and the symptoms can be described and detected according to biomedical criteria. Even more, the severity of leading symptoms of neoliberalism such as growing inequities calls for immunization campaigns and ultimately herd immunity from viral neoliberalism. However, achieving worldwide immunity would require an anti-neoliberal vaccine, which is extremely challenging to develop vis-à-vis the power relations in global health.

Discursive Marketisation Through Positive Evaluation: A Diachronic Analysis of About Us Texts of Top-Tier Chinese Universities Over the Past Two Decades

This study explored the marketisation process of top-tier Chinese universities by scrutinising their self-promotional strategies over the past two decades. Drawing on Martin and White's (2005) Appraisal framework, we identified all attitudinal markers in the About Us texts posted by 35 top-tier Chinese universities on their official websites at two time-points: the turn of the century and the year of 2021. The 35 universities were drawn from China's "Double First Class" Initiative that prioritises the development of a select group of elite universities in China. Close textual analyses focussing on the attitudinal markers with reference to their contexts were conducted to identify the themes evaluated in the About Us texts; Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were run to quantitatively compare the relative frequencies of the attitudinal markers between the two phases, which was then supplemented by diachronic qualitative comparisons on the fine-grained linguistic features surrounding the markers. The study identified seven major themes positively appraised by the universities at both time-points. It also revealed diachronic differences in the use of attitudinal markers, reflecting a mediated change of promotional strategies over the past 20 years or so in the Chinese higher education context. These findings point to the influence of market, government, and tradition on Chinese top-tier universities' promoting strategies and the role of social cognition in shaping student choice. They also suggest the emergence of a higher education system with Chinese characteristics that features a reconciliation of market and government forces.

Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic: University rankings or co-operatives as a strategy for developing an equitable and resilient post-secondary education sector?

University leaders, governments, industries and donors use university rankings to assess the success or failure of higher education institutions; however, these rankings tell us nothing about how universities are challenging or amplifying oppression in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This article first examines the implications of the incompatible aims of universities: performing well based on rankings while espousing commitments to equity and anti-oppressive practices. Second, this article proposes co-operatives as a strategy for developing a more equitable and resilient post-secondary education sector. The assumption underpinning this proposal is that without structural changes to higher education, COVID-19 will amplify an already inequitable distribution of resources and lessen the ability of universities to play a responsible role in expanding public debate and increasing understanding of critical issues facing the planet. Co-operatives could be an effective way for the sector to engage with the need to radically alter how we interact with each other and the natural world, both now and beyond the pandemic.

Balancing welfare and market logics: Procurement regulations for social and health services in four Nordic welfare states

Aim:

In increasingly market-oriented welfare regimes, public procurement is one of the most important instruments for influencing who produces which services. This article analyses recent procurement regulations in four Nordic countries from the point of view of addiction treatment. The implementation of public procurement in this field can be viewed as a domain struggle between the market logic and the welfare logic. By comparing the revision of the regulations after the 2014 EU directives in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, we identify factors affecting the protection of a welfare logic in procurement. We discuss the possible effects of different procurement regulations for population welfare and health.

Data and theoretical perspective:

The study is based on the recently revised procurement laws in the four countries, and adherent guidelines. The analysis is inspired by institutional logics, looking at patterns of practices, interests, actors, and procurement as rules for practices.

Results:

Procurement regulations are today markedly different in the four countries. The protection of welfare and public health aspects in procurement – strongest in Norway – is not solely dependent on party political support. Existing service providers and established steering practices play a crucial role.

Conclusion:

In a situation where market steering has become an established practice and private providers are strongly present, it can be difficult to introduce strong requirements for protection of welfare and population health in procurement of social services.

Body work in assisted conception: exploring public and private settings

Body work has been foregrounded in recent sociological writings on health and social care, particularly the emotional labour of patient care. In this article I explore the social and emotional dimensions of body work in assisted conception in private and public National Health Service (NHS) clinics. Drawing on an ethnographic study, I explore how tensions around bodily attributes, treatment costs, clinic performance and the extent of consumer sovereignty were managed in decisions about who to treat and in what manner. In NHS settings, body work involved efforts to standardise and constrain bodies in line with an ethics of justice that included the co-construction of protocols and performance measurement and a strong emphasis upon teamwork and influencing the behaviour of the sector as a whole. In contrast, body work in private settings was more overtly organised around an ethos of individual consumption that emphasised bespoke treatment together with an active critique of the regulator, based on a strong entrepreneurial ethos. Emotional labour in private settings was also more overt. I conclude by exploring the implications of my analysis for the study of assisted conception, the sociology of body work and the further marketisation and deregulation of medicine.

Privatisation & marketisation of post-birth care: the hidden costs for new mothers

Retrenchment of government services has occurred across a wide range of sectors and regions. Care services, in particular, have been clawed away in the wake of fiscal policies of cost containment and neoliberal policies centred on individual responsibility and market autonomy. Such policies have included the deinstitutionalisation of care from hospitals and clinics, and early discharge from hospital, both of which are predicated on the notion that care can be provided informally within families and communities. In this paper we examine the post-birth "care crisis" that new mothers face in one region of Canada.

METHOD

The data are drawn from a larger study of social determinants of pregnant and new mothers' health in Victoria, Canada. Mixed methods interviews were conducted among a purposive sample of women at three points in time. This paper reports data on sample characteristics, length of stay in hospital and health service gaps. This data is contextualised via a more in-depth analysis of qualitative responses from Wave 2 (4-6 weeks postpartum).

RESULTS

Out results show a significant portion of participants desired services that were not publically available to them during the post-birth period. Among those who reported a gap in care, the two most common barriers were: cost and unavailability of home care supports. Participants' open-ended responses revealed many positive features of the public health care system but also gaps in services, and economic barriers to receiving the care they wanted. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to recent neoliberal reforms. DISCUSSION & CONCLUSIONS: While Canada may be praised for its public provision of maternity care, mothers' reports of gaps in care during the early postpartum period and increasing use of private doulas is a worrying trend. To the extent that individual mothers or families rely on the market for care provision, issues of equity and quality of care are pivotal. This paper concludes with suggestions for further research on the impact of recent changes in post-birth care on new fathers and on inequities in pre and post-birth care in less-resourced regions of the world.