Neoliberal Culture

"Neoliberal Culture challenges cultural policy research and media studies to forge a more sophisticated and critical understanding of the politics of culture today. It is a sequel to Jim McGuigan's earlier Cool Capitalism and goes much further with his interrogation of how present-day capitalism commands the cultural field. Neoliberal principles and practices have achieved global hegemony over recent decades with implications for every aspect of social and cultural life. This book focuses specifically on the politics of culture with regard to the arts, media and everyday life under present-day neoliberal conditions. The author argues that there is a neoliberal structure of feeling that is yet more deeply entrenched than its cool-capitalist veneer might suggest. Neoliberal 'common sense' reduces all value, cultural and humane, to economic value and refashions the self psychologically and in a precarious labour market according to entrepreneurial ruthlessness and the 'free-market' imperatives of contemporary capitalism"--