9. Neoliberalism, Outsourcing, and Domination

This chapter seeks to approach neoliberalism focusing less on ideology than on practices and their effects. Neoliberalism is linked to the deregulation processes of companies as production institutions (internal labour market, stable work, etc.) and associated to flexibility and precariousness. Deregulation in neoliberalism is to be considered as a managerial strategy and one of its main instruments is outsourcing. After discussing the financial background of capitalism in the 1980s, the chapter analyses neoliberalism from the point of view of its new policies of organization and structure which, through blurring boundaries reshuffle the conditions of workers’ subjection, are responsible for corporations’ transformation. The confluence of capital and new information and communication technologies, through outsourcing, has created a new regime of domination which ties distance control and disciplinary power as a major mode of subjection. Segmented processes of production have produced a time-space rupture of labour solidarities and concealed social conditions in every step of the whole production process. But subcontracting has also permitted new forms of control through which lead companies impose their authority on the subcontractor’s staff. The remote connection of the NICT, its ability to supervise “every moment in an open space”, is largely associated with the force of prescription and processes of labour standards. Some sociologists and philosophers have insisted on the constructivist project of neoliberalism; this chapter shows that it is installing a penitentiary climate at the threshold of the twenty-first century.