John Clarke: "Citizen Consumers: Neo-liberal Subjects or Points of Contested Articulation?"

John Clarke is Professor of Social Policy at the Open University, UK, where he has worked for more than twenty years. He thinks of himself as trying to introduce social policy to the cultural turn. His work has centred on the social, cultural and political struggles around the remaking of welfare states, ranging from the impact of managerialism and consumerism on state policy and practice, through to wider questions of globalisation, neo-liberalism and the reworking of alignments of nation, state and welfare. His most recent book is Changing Welfare, Changing States: new directions in social policy, published by Sage in 2004. With Jeff Maskovsky and Catherine Kingfisher, he is editing a collection titled Regimes of Power: contours of neo-liberalism, to be published in 2006.