Neoliberal wrongdoing, or same as it ever was? A review essay
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3790
Nota critica di James G. Carrier, ed., Economy, crime and wrong in a neoliberal era, New York, Berghahn, 2018, pp. 276.
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Neoliberal wrongdoing, or same as it ever was? A review essay
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                                        2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 193-201




                                                                  NOTE CRITICHE

Neoliberal wrongdoing, or same as it ever was?
A review essay
Alan SMART
University of Calgary



James G. CARRIER (ed) | Economy, crime and wrong in a neoliberal era, New York,
Berghahn, 2018, pp. 276.



   Wrongdoing and crime are constantly on our lips and newspapers/
newsfeeds, while true crime is one of the fastest growing genres in all media.
Even if, based on statistics, crime’s prevalence has dropped in most rich
countries, the malfeasance of political and entertainment elites produces a
fascinated audience for collusion, corruption and fraud. This book offers a
diverse selection of insightful case studies of deviance, wrongdoing and
crime in recent decades. Each offers rich discussion of particular kinds of
malfeasance which are enabled or colored by the political economic context
in which they occur.
   Each chapter has many merits, but my main concern is to examine the
core framing of the volume as a whole: the relationship between
crime/wrong and neoliberalism. Before we can evaluate the linkages, it is
necessary to clarify the terms. Wrongdoing is generally adequately
conceptualized, although with neglect of important work in the field such as
the distinction between illegal and illicit, influentially explored by van
Schendel and Abraham (2005). More problematic is the idea of
neoliberalism. In the Introduction, James Carrier allows that it is a “slippery


This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Alan Smart
Neoliberal wrongdoing, or same as it ever was? A review essay
2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 193-201.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3790
194                                                                  ALAN SMART


concept”, and says that in the volume it means three things: “a historical
period, an economics and a political economy” (p. 1). He fails to adequately
distinguish neoliberalism from classic liberalism in any of these senses,
other than being located in the “neoliberal period”, which is dated from the
1970s. Carrier concentrates on distinguishing neoliberalism from its
predecessor, which I call Fordism for simplicity. His description of the
neoliberal political economy is not etic, but emic, relying on member
experience of the era: we know it when we see it. This limits the utility of
such definitions for comparison and generalization. The claim that an
increasing value was “placed on market activity, commercial success and the
innovation that was taken to produce it” would be equally valid, applied to
the late 18th or 19th centuries. The strengthening of the political position of
businesses also increased at this time. The way in which “people were
increasingly encouraged to see themselves as entrepreneurs” (p. 2) is hardly
new in American society, for instance, and the moral valuation of economic
success echoes Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic.
   Briefly, I myself see the term neoliberal as only justified if it means
something different than liberal. Otherwise, it is more a revival than
something new. The most interesting aspects of neoliberal regimes and
governments have been the ways in which they extended markets into
unconventional realms of life, for example by outsourcing governmental
services, carbon credit markets, or providing insurance for climate change
risks. Or as Steven Sampson defines it in the Conclusion, “the increasing
encroachment of market rationality into spheres of social life formerly
governed by non-market logics” (p. 243). This is what Peck and Tickell
(2002) describe as the roll-out phase of neoliberalism, as opposed to the
rollback phase where leaders concentrated on dismantling the protections
and corporatist arrangements of Fordism and social democracy. Carrier
emphasizes the rollbacks more than the rollouts, and thus fails to adequately
separate post-1973 neoliberalism from classic neoliberalism.
   I turn now to the main focus of the book: the relationship between
(neo)liberalism and crime/wrongdoing. The Introduction says the purpose of
the book is to “consider whether there are forms of economic activity,
expectations of the normal and the abnormal, and understandings of the
proper and the improper that are distinctive to that era”. This purpose is
justified because “neoliberalism includes a set of assertions about what
proper economic behaviour is” so that “the rise of neoliberalism has made
the question of proper and improper economic activity more visible than
usual” (p. 1). This is an excellent question, but without precision about the


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nature of neoliberalism, it is challenging to answer. Leaving aside adequate
delineation between neoliberalism and classic liberalism, the question
becomes whether the differences with the Fordist era are established. Even
with this reduced scope, defensible generalizations are hard to see. Still, the
effort to do so is admirable and worthy. These chapters will stimulate further
work in this direction.
   One of the problems with providing a clear account of the neoliberal/
wrongdoing interface is what we might call the neglect of “actually existing
pre-neoliberalism”. For example, Royrvik provides a fascinating critique of
management through key performance indicators (KPIs) and other forms of
quantified evaluation and incentives. Such systems, he suggests, are easily
manipulated and tend to change forms of work, and subjectivity, in ways
that ignore important substantive concerns that the KPIs are intended to
represent and “do so in ways that ignore professional and ethical
judgement” (p. 67). The will to quantify, he suggests, produces socialities
that encourage the “proliferation of economic activities that many see as
questionable” (p. 66) such as overseas bribery to obtain contracts and other
advantages. In many ways I agree with this assessment, and have argued that
anti-corruption strategies, such as those in Hong Kong, which rely on
preventing corrupt activities by setting precise boundaries between corrupt
and acceptable actions facilitate collusion by making socially illegitimate
actions legal right up to the line. This is part of a broad tendency towards
what has been called “gaming the system”, hitting the target while missing
the point (Smart 2018). As long as KPIs are met, managers gain power over
their subordinates while “giving them good reason to ignore their
professional and ethical judgement” (p. 86).
   This kind of argument, apparent in other chapters as well, seems to
presume some management golden age when managers and other members
of the economic and political elite behaved better. Let us only consider the
classic Fordist era from World War II to the mid-1970s. Managers, but not
workers, were largely insulated from the alienating Taylorist management of
mass production. But consumers of American made automobiles (described
by consumer activist Ralph Nader as often “unsafe at any speed”) had less
reason to consider it a golden age. Did managers always focus on their
professional and ethical obligations? Not those that were engaged with
corrupt politicians and mafia bosses in urban political machines and mafia
leaders to control unions. Oligopolies with fat profit margins could afford
labor contracts with good benefits for the white males who dominated the
primary labour sector, while abuses and dangerous working conditions faced
minorities and women in the secondary labour sector. One only has to read

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196                                                                  ALAN SMART


work on the era by sociologists of law like Block and Chambliss (1981) to
question whether economic crime is increased by actually existing
neoliberalism. It is certainly a possibility but not one that has been
adequately demonstrated. If we look back farther to the age of mercantile
capitalism, governments, and their agents such as the East India Company
and Hudson’s Bay Company, plundered as much of the world as they could,
gaining commercial advantage through forces of arms (Frank 1998).
    In his informative description of financial supervision in the post-2008
European Union, Daniel Seabra Lopes concludes that finance in the
neoliberal era has stabilized around three related movements: the interplay
of innovation and wrongdoing facilitated by regulatory arbitrage; an
international framework that attempts to free finance from politics; and the
predominance of technical knowledge over social conventions. He provides
an incisive discussion of the cat-and-mouse game between regulators and
profit (more precisely, rent) seekers. He says that although financial markets
are global, “supervision and regulation remain largely confined to national
borders” (p. 102). This seems to neglect American legal extraterritoriality,
which exerts inordinate influence on the world economy. Critics decry
America’s financial imperialism, while policymakers are looking for ways to
limit its reach. “European companies are increasingly impacted by the
extraterritoriality of US sanctions”, according to the head of BusinessEurope,
the main employer federation in the EU (The Economist “Uncle Sam’s game”
Jan 19 2019 61-63). Economic Pax Americana perhaps? But surely not liberal,
or neoliberal, in any general sense, since it allocates to only one state the
power to impose its rules beyond its borders.
    Part of the problem, and one common among anthropologists discussing
neoliberalism, is a tendency to see neoliberalism as synonymous with most
of the policies and practices they find abhorrent. With this kind of analysis,
if a government is considered to be neoliberal, all of the negative things that
they do are castigated as neoliberal, even if they have little to do with
extending markets and choice, and instead are authoritarian rather than
neoliberal. The clearest case of this approach here is the chapter by Kathy
Powell on neoliberalism in Central America. As she writes, neoliberalism in
the region renders the “poor surplus, both producing migrants and
rationalizing the option of organized crime, while the security framework
that protects those imperatives itself exacerbates the dangers migrants seek
to escape” (p. 212). The discussion of migrants’ narratives of the dangers
faced, and the moral economy that encourages them to undertake such
hazardous journeys, are evocative and important, but lumping everything


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NEOLIBERAL WRONGDOING, OR SAME AS IT EVER WAS?                                       197


together as neoliberalism fails to sufficiently illuminate the situation, or the
possible solutions. As an aside, I was surprised to see heavy use of the term
“moral hazard” without any definition of it (usually seen as the negative
outcomes of insurance encouraging greater risk-taking), and apparently
treating it as immoral risks imposed on marginalized people by unfair
political economies (Smart 2013).
   The following chapter by Josiah Heyman deals with similar issues of the
political economy of migration, from Mexico to the United States, but with
more precise analysis of the relationship between neoliberalism and
unauthorized migration. He notes one meaning of neoliberalism as freeing
individuals to make decisions, but demonstrates how far US policies toward
Mexican migration diverge from this definition. Rather, neoliberal policies in
other domains, such as structural adjustment and regional free trade, are
seen as causing massive dislocations in Mexico and Central America that
generate cross-border unauthorized movements. Unauthorized labour
migration involves, rather, “activities that evade limitations on market
processes within incomplete neoliberalism” (p. 220). In other words, migrant
flows were “reinforced by neoliberalism but were not a product of it” (p.
221). The broader picture of oppression, exploitation, suffering and
wrongdoing existed for Mexicans in the United States, including American
citizens of Mexican descent, long predated the 1970s, as did oppressions in
Mexico that drove the exodus. He suggests that the bigger picture is not one
that is exclusive to neoliberal regimes, but results from the “place of
peasants in uneven capitalist development” (p. 228). Neoliberalism is only
one phase of a “broader pattern of capitalist devaluation of the peasantry”
(p. 235) and which I might add was also found in communist, colonial and
imperial regimes.
   Still, the chapters in this book demonstrate that economic crimes such as
fraud are facilitated by changes associated with neoliberalism. While
pharmaceutical fraud is hardly new (think of highly hazardous patent
medicines of the past or Big Tobacco’s Big Lie), the sophistication of the
schemes to defraud public health systems through promotion of off-label use
based on sponsored clinical trials does seems novel (chapter by Kalman
Applbaum). In his useful historical analysis of taxation, Thomas Cantens
suggests that the complexity of the contemporary economy leads to the
justification of tax policies shifting away from (liberal) rights and values and
towards (neoliberal) calculability, with the outcome privileging the wealthy.
The elaborate financial regulatory schemes of the European Union, discussed
by Lopes, and the not-yet-illegal schemes used to work around them, would
be unimaginable in the 19th century. How can we reconcile my criticism with

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198                                                                  ALAN SMART


this evidence? I accept that the quality and form of economic crime is
influenced by neoliberal policies and practices, just as economic crime in the
18th century and under Fordist regimes of accumulation took on particular
patterns associated with those political economic regimes. This is where the
strength of this collection lies, in careful diagnosis of how these historical
influences structure and encourage particular kinds of fraud and economic
wrongdoing in the contemporary era. This is apparent in Sabina Stan’s
examination of how the exchange of favors and corruption in Romanian
health care took different forms under successive regimes. The pervasive
acceptance of gifts by doctors in exchange for scarce medical services
survived under the early post-socialist system, but during a period of
austerity since 2010 has become increasingly criminalized. Her conclusion
that the shifting evaluation and practice of informal exchanges in healthcare
is a “function of the evolving reconfigurations of citizenship and the
struggles that social actors wage around it” suggests that we need to be
careful to situate our analyses of wrongdoing in subtle shifts rather than
explain them in terms of broad but insufficiently precise generalizations.
   Liberal attitudes of free markets and neoliberal attitudes that allegedly
value growth over values can also reduce crime, by ending prohibitions such
as those against marijuana, and producing new growth industries, as Michael
Polson’s chapter describes. The resistance to legalization, continuing at the
American federal level, despite state level legalizations, suggests that in our
supposedly neoliberal era, “traditional” values still have immense impacts
on the economic choices of our governments, particularly ones that are just
as neo-authoritarian as they are neoliberal. To see politics as organized only
around economic growth and individual entrepreneurship provides too
narrow and truncated an account of contemporary political economies.
Hypocrisy, prejudice and xenophobia operate simultaneously, perhaps as
often at a tangent to economic growth as in harness with it.
   The conclusion by Steven Sampson offers what may be the clearest
formulation of the neoliberal/wrongdoing nexus. He draws on the chapters
to suggest that in the neoliberal era we have a “situation in which it is
deviance that sets the rules rather than rules marking out what is deviant
[…] the rules seem to be an artifact of deviance” (p. 249). While this is a
plausible and powerful indictment, again, one wonders if it adequately
distinguishes the situation from the past. In some ways, rules apply to rulers
in ways that didn’t seem to be the case a half century ago. The indiscretions
of British monarchs and American presidents before Watergate were widely
known by reporters, but unreported by convention and political pressure.
Collusion by big business and politicians to ensure the dominance of pro-

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business and often mafia-infiltrated unions were undertaken to marginalize
more progressive unions. The fake science, and payoffs to politicians, used
to undermine strong evidence that tobacco caused cancer delayed health
warnings and regulations for many years, at the cost of hundreds of
thousands of deaths and many more cancers. Similarly, scholars of critical
legal studies have repeatedly shown that judicial interpretation of the law
and its precedents is essentially indeterminant, constantly responding to
tactical responses by elaborating on the meaning of the rules, which
facilitates new manipulations, with no final certainty (Moore 1978; Coombe
1989). Legal and rule reform running after implementation problems, and
regulatory capture, has arguably long been normal. Perhaps the issue with it
under neoliberal regimes is, to quote Canadian folksinger Bruce Cockburn,
that “the trouble with normal is it always gets worse”.
   This review has been perhaps too critical, but only because I took
seriously the important question at the core of the book’s conception, the
relationship between neoliberalism and wrong. Anthropologists,
sympathizing with the losers in the changing political economy, seem to be
prone to loose usages of neoliberalism. Yet, as Sampson describes, these
chapters offer penetrating analyses of the “strategies and tactics that people
and communities use when faced with neoliberal encroachment into their
lives” (p. 247). Despite definitional issues, the regulatory systems have for
the most part disadvantaged the less privileged segments of the world, and
are subject to sophisticated forms of manipulation by the elite, sometimes
simply creative “situational adjustment” (Moore 1978), sometimes collusion,
sometimes fraud and corruption. But when we turn to what is to be done, an
excessively positive account of the Fordist era, far from just and inclusive to
racial minorities, indigenous peoples, women, members of the LGBTQ2SA+
community, etc. risks making the wrong choices about how to regulate
markets and reform economies and polities. We certainly need, for example,
a revitalization of anti-trust controls against the network effect based
oligopoly of the tech giants which are generating massive profits through
their surveillance of our activities (Zuboff 2019); but a return to cozy
economic nationalist deals between corporations and government at the
expense of consumers doesn’t seem like a sensible choice either. Yes,
markets are rigged, and inequality has risen within most countries. After all,
the freeing of markets in China have lifted 500 million people out of extreme
poverty between 1981 and 2012. How can we rescue the baby of economic
freedoms from the filthy bathwater of elites rigging the system to their
advantage?



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200                                                                         ALAN SMART


REFERENCES
Block, Alan A., William J. Chambliss, 1981, Organizing crime, New York, Elsevier.
Coombe, Rosemary, 1989, Room for manoeuver: Toward a theory of practice in
      critical legal studies. Law & Social Inquiry, 14, 1: 69–121.
Frank, Andre Gunder, 1998, ReOrient: Global economy in the Asian age, Berkeley,
      University of California Press.
Moore, Sally Falk, 1978, Law as process: An anthropological approach, London,
      Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Peck, Jamie, Adam Tickell, 2002, Neoliberalizing space, Antipode, 34, 3: 380-404.
Smart, Alan, 2013, Housing support for the “undeserving”: Moral hazard, fires, and
      laissez-faire in Hong Kong, in Ethnographies of social support, Markus
      Schlecker, Friederike Fleischer, eds, New York, Palgrave Macmillan: 17-37.
Smart, Alan, 2018, The unbearable discretion of street-level bureaucrats: Corruption
      and collusion in Hong Kong, Current Anthropology, 59: S37-S47.
van Schendel, Willem, Itty Abraham, 2005, Illicit flows and criminal things: States,
      borders, and the other side of globalization, Bloomington, Indiana University
      Press.
Zuboff, Shoshana, 2019, The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for the future at
      the new frontier of power, New York, Profile Books.




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 Alan SMART, Professor Emeritus, University of Calgary, has conducted research on
 urban issues, housing, foreign investment, social change, food safety, zoonotic
 diseases, informality, smart cities and agriculture in Hong Kong, China, and
 Canada. He is author of Making Room: Squatter Clearance in Hong Kong (Hong Kong
 University Press, 1992) Petty capitalists and globalization (co-edited with Josephine
 Smart, SUNY Press, 2005), The Shek Kip Mei Myth: Squatters, fires and colonial rule
 in Hong Kong, 1950-1963 (Hong Kong University Press, 2006), Posthumanism:
 Anthropological Insights (co-authored with Josephine Smart, University of Toronto
 Press, 2017) and numerous articles in journals and edited volumes.
 asmart@ucalgary.ca




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Alan Smart
Neoliberal wrongdoing, or same as it ever was? A review essay
2019 | ANUAC. VOL. 8, N° 1, GIUGNO 2019: 193-201.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3790
