NEOLIBERALISM AS SUBJECTIVITY AND INDIVIDUALISATION DISCOURSE IN GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT: THE CASE OF THE WORLD BANK

Abstract

The strange non-death of neoliberalism is puzzling. Despite the significant shifts in global development over the last 50 years, it continued to function under the aegis of neoliberalism. Despite the transition from the “roll-back” deregulatory Washington Consensus to the “roll-out” interventionist post-Washington Consensus in the 1990s and then a further transformation following the 2008 crisis, global governance and development retained their neoliberal status. In light of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the question of the (non)death of neoliberalism has resurfaced. How can the continuity of neoliberalism be understood notwithstanding its periodisations? The thesis suggests that the resilience and periodisations of neoliberalism can be understood through particular subjectivity – individualisation. It constructs a novel subjectivity-based understanding of neoliberalism and explores its explanatory power through its empirical application to the case of the World Bank. Via critical discourse analysis of the Bank’s texts of different periods, the thesis looks at how and to what extent the World Bank’s discourse continued to constitute an encapsulation of neoliberal subjectivity over time. Combining the governmentality perspective with elements of the Discourse Theory (DT) of Laclau and Mouffe (1985), the thesis advances a post-structuralist framework, conceptualising neoliberalism as a discourse of individualisation and understanding hegemony and governmentality as modes of its discursive functioning. Individualisation – a discursive reframing of subjectivity towards sovereign post-patrimonial forms – constitutes a condition of possibility for governmentality as a mode of discourse. Within this framework, transitions from the “roll-back” to the “roll-out” and the “post-not-past” phases of neoliberal development constitute crises of individualisation: its discursive dislocations and reconfigurations from open destructive “roll-back” to an increasingly post-patrimonial concealed “roll-out” individualisation, accompanied by a shift from technical to affective governmentalities. The thesis operationalises the framework via a discourse analysis of the World Bank’s selected World Development Reports and publications. Following the 7-stage iterative methodology, the thesis traces discursive individualisation within the Bank’s agenda of different periods along three consistent discursive themes – Poverty, Health and Education/Knowledge. The thesis identifies important changes within these themes over time, interpreting those within the understanding of neoliberalism as individualisation. It shows how through the “roll-back” and “roll-out” phases the Bank’s discourse was premised on individualised subjectivity. The thesis identifies a shift away from individualisation within the Bank’s recent publications, raising questions about the continued resilience of neoliberalism as individualised subjectivity.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Stuart Shields (Supervisor) & Carl Death (Supervisor)