Market Citizenship

Citizenship is now a key battleground in the fight over the direction of personal and political morality, domestic and global policy, social justice and the spread of violence across the world. Market Citizenship: Experiments in Democracy and Globalization offers a compelling account of the past and future of citizenship. Drawing on a rich fund of empirical material, author Amanda Root analyzes a new paradigm of social relations: market citizenship.

• outlines how market citizenship involves a new kind of rationality in which citizens are defined as individualized utility maximizers
• shows how the idea that citizens act primarily to develop their narrow self-interest has encouraged the creation of competitive governance mechanisms
• analyses how market mechanisms are used to decide who are ′winners′ and ′losers′ - from the loss of youth groups funding to global treaties
• discussess the shortfalls when key contemporary issues are tackled through ′win-win′ solutions with business working alongside consumers, with little or no role for government
• explaims how localism and the devolution of power is being used to support the status quo.
• suggests new kinds of engagement are emerging because markets have undermined politics.

Essential reading for students, policy-makers and researchers of citizenship within sociology, politics, economics, geography and social policy.