Market Citizenship

Citizens are caught in a paradox. Voting levels are falling, there are growing feelings of powerlessness, social unfairness and yet citizens are constantly told that they have more choice as well as greater freedom and liberty. This book brilliantly explains these discrepancies. It shows that the new definitions of freedom as responsibility to create prosperity through markets is seriously distorting citizenship whilst appearing to be unbiased and neutral. It exposes inconsistencies in the market-based and apolitical vision of our collective future. This book: outlines how market citizenship involves a new kind of rationality in which citizens are defined as individualized utility maximizers shows how the idea that citizens act primarily to develop their narrow self-interest has encouraged the creation of competitive governance mechanisms analyses how market mechanisms are used to decide who are ′winners′ and ′losers′ - from the loss of youth groups funding to global treaties discussess the shortfalls when key contemporary issues are tackled through ′win-win′ solutions with business working alongside consumers, with little or no role for government explaims how localism and the devolution of power is being used to support the status quo. suggests new kinds of engagement are emerging because markets have undermined politics. Essential reading for students, policy-makers and researchers of citizenship within sociology, politics, economics, geography and social policy.

This book presents a systematic study of the history, theory and policy of investor citizenship and residence programmes. It explores how states develop new rules of joining their community in response to globalisation and highlights the tension between citizenship policies aimed at migrant integration and those, such as the sale of passports, which create ‘long-distance citizens’. Individual chapters offer insights in the historical relationship between citizenship, money and property; discuss arguments that support and counter the practice of the sale of citizenship; and examine the interests and strategies of the different actors—states, companies, individuals—that constitute the ‘supply’ and ‘demand’ sides of the burgeoning citizenship industry. The book provides a global overview of the market for investor citizenship as well as a separate policy analysis of the sale of citizenship and residence in the European Union.

This open access book asks whether cash-transfer programs for very low-income households promote social and economic citizenship and, if so, under what conditions. To this end, it brings together elements that are too often considered separately: the transformation of social and economic citizenship rights in a market-centered context, and the increasing popularity of cash transfer as an instrument both of social policy and humanitarian action. We link these by juxtaposing theoretical treatment of citizenship and inclusion with concrete policy case studies set in contemporary Turkey. Cases are taken both from domestic social policy and international relief efforts aimed at Syrian refugees. Theoretical discussion and case studies lead to the conclusion that cash transfer programs can promote economic and social inclusion – if deployed at an appropriate scale; if sufficient financial, technical, and social resources are available; and if program design and implementation promotes market inclusion of beneficiaries both as consumers and workers.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book analyses the considerable variation in the shares of private provision for core services in education, health and social services, in the Scandinavian countries. The chapters compare countries, service areas, and the for-profit, non-profit and public sectors. Each focuses on different levels of change: the mix of welfare providers, national laws and regulations, governance in municipalities, nursing homes and schools, and finally, the consequences experienced by the users of the services. The authors ask which combinations of governance structures, service sector providers, and user choice give the best results for active citizenship. Promoting Active Citizenship will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including Public Administration and Management, Non-Profit Management, Social Policy, Innovation in Public Service, Social Care and Education and School Research.

As the neo-liberal marketization of citizenship and the resulting processes of individualization proceed, debates on citizenship tend to flounder in outmoded ideological oppositions. By examining concrete cases and processes that accompany contemporary practices of citizenship, this volume brings analytical clarity to contemporary debates about citizenship. The state, the market and the forum are analysed as competing fields of citizenship practice, and it is their complex relationship which helps us to understand the role and function not only of the debate on citizenship, but of the institutions and practices of citizenship itself in the contemporary world.

Post-Mao market reforms in China have led to a massive migration of rural peasants toward the cities. Denied urban residency, this "floating population" provides labour but loses out on government benefits. This study challenges the notion that markets promote rights and legal equality.

This book is an ambitious intertwining of multidisciplinary themes about citizenship, social exclusion, statelessness, civil society, knowledge, the public sphere, networks and narrativity. Margaret Somers offers a fundamental rethinking of democracy, freedom, rights and social justice in today's world. This is political, economic and cultural sociology and social theory at its best.

Changing labour markets, welfare policies and citizenship readdresses the question of how full citizenship may be preserved and developed in the face of enduring labour market pressures. It: clarifies the relationship between changing labour markets, welfare policies and citizenship; discusses possible ways in which the spill-over effect from labour market marginality to loss of citizenship can be prevented; specifies this problem in relation to the young, older people, men and women and immigrants; offers theoretical and conceptual definitions of citizenship as a new, alternative approach to empirical analyses of labour market marginalisation and its consequences; highlights the lessons to be learned from differing approaches in European countries.