Retooling social reproduction for neoliberal times: The example of the social economy

Both the Foucauldian and the regulationist accounts provide useful critical entrées to understanding the development of the social economy, but they share similar structuralist shortcomings. In looking for how the social economy translates or relates to a broader neoliberal project or programme, there is a tendency to overstate processes that reproduce neoliberalism, and to ignore the potentials for the social economy to serve as an element of a settlement that might break with neoliberalism. The way forward would seem to demand an approach with a finer sense of agency. This is not so much a strategy of introducing agency so as to then adopt an excessive voluntarism, as one of keeping an analytical door open to possibilities of change.