Author
Abstract
Taking as its point of departure recent debates on the theoretical status of scale and rescaling in political-economic geography, this article explores the scalar politics of neoliberal workfare. This tendentially hegemonic form of neoliberal social and labor-market policy combines objectives of the dismantling of welfare and the rollback of entitlements with an insistent focus on the activation and enforcement of work. The welfare/workfare restructuring process is an illustration of a deeply politicized and highly dynamic form of regulatory rescaling, based inter alia on the selective appropriation of disembedded local programming models and their purposeful circulation around extralocal policy networks, the dumping of regulatory risks and responsibilities at the local scale and that of the “poor body,” and the complex orchestration of ostensibly decentralized policy regimes by national states and transnational agencies and intermediaries. The rollback of Keynesian-welfarist institutions at the level of the national state provides the (scaled) context for the emergence of these neoliberalized political forms, but crucially, these forms are also beginning to exhibit their own distinctive dynamics and logics—captured here in terms of an ascendant regime of “fast-policy” formation. Workfare regimes are not monolithic systems, but dynamic configurations of restless reform, technocratic emulation, and tangled scalar relations. Politically constructed, they are also responsive/subject to (scaled) processes of local policy failure and social contestation. Scale and scale relations certainly matter, then, but in ways that are politically mediated and institutionally specific, rather than theoretically preordained.
Suggested Citation
Jamie Peck, 2002.
"Political Economies of Scale: Fast Policy, Interscalar Relations, and Neoliberal Workfare,"
Economic Geography, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 78(3), pages 331-360, July.
Handle:
RePEc:taf:recgxx:v:78:y:2002:i:3:p:331-360
DOI: 10.1111/j.1944-8287.2002.tb00190.x
Download full text from publisher
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:recgxx:v:78:y:2002:i:3:p:331-360. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/recg .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.