ABSTRACT

Neoliberalism has been widely seen as the intellectual precursor and ideological buttress of the restructuring of global capitalist markets and values since the 1970s. It refers specifically to refurbished free-market economics, but has developed a wider set of meanings. As a concept it is closely associated with others such as Globalization and Individualization, and has been attributed with a dramatic impact on the ways in which public and private life are perceived and organized. But it has a high degree of elasticity, a term that is at once ‘intriguing and infuriating’ (Davies 2009: 88).