Peak neoliberalism? Revisiting and rethinking the concept of neoliberalism

Neoliberalism has become a ubiquitous concept, used across numerous disciplines and in the analysis of diverse and varied phenomena (Springer et al., 2016). It is conceptualized in different ways: for example, as a geographical process; a form of governmentality; the restoration of elite class power; a political project of institutional change; a set of transformative political-economic ideas; an international development policy paradigm; an epistemic community or thought collective; and an economic ideology or doctrine (Springer, 2010b, 2016a; Flew, 2014; Birch, 2015a, 2017). In relation to organization studies, and this journal especially, neoliberalism has been associated with the restructuring of economics as a tool of organizational governance (e.g. Davies and Dunne, 2016), the transformation of universities and academia as sites of knowledge prosumption and immaterial labour (e.g. Rai, 2013), the rise of business schools as centres of social and political reproduction (e.g. Harney, 2009), and the extension of particular forms of corporate governance dominated by shareholder interests (Birch, 2016).