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Journal of Economic Geography 2:179-220 (2002)
Copyright © 2002 Oxford University Press

Article

Labor, zapped/growth, restored? Three moments of neoliberal restructuring in the American labor market

Jamie Peck*

Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA. email <jpeck{at}geography.wisc.edu>

Abstract

The paper revisits the works of Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison in order to develop a critical commentary on the post-1970s restructuring path of the US economy. It is argued that Bluestone and Harrison's three major books (The Deindustrialization of America, The Great U-Turn, and Growing Prosperity) not only provide compelling, real-time analyses of three significant moments of neoliberal labor-market restructuring – the advent of deindustrialization, the emergence of systemic inequality, and the effective ‘normalization’ of unequal economic growth – but also, taken as an historically situated body of work, draw attention to a series of long-run trends and institutional shifts in economic regulation which are of particular significance in the present conjuncture. Most pertinently, perhaps, they raise the question of the political and theoretical significance of neoliberalism as a mode of economic regulation and the nature of its relationship – substantially causal or merely coincidental? – with the celebrated American boom of the 1990s. Presenting a sympathetic critique of left-institutional analyses of spatial-economic restructuring and associated reform proposals, the paper concludes by arguing that both the institutional durability and the political tenacity of neoliberalism may have been underestimated.

Keywords: labor-market restructuring, neoliberalism, political economy of growth, United States economy

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