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Mobilizer leads: Profs Stephan Manning and Rob Caruana, University of Sussex

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Paper 1: From rehabilitation to repression: Prison labour, authoritarian neoliberalism, and the remaking of social policy

Prisons do not stand apart from the welfare state; they are becoming one of its central institutions. This article repositions prison labour governance as a domain of social policy through which states organise labour, manage marginalised populations, and structure inclusion and exclusion. Drawing on illustrative cases across democratic, hybrid, and authoritarian settings, the analysis develops a fourfold typology of governance innovation to trace how coercive labour practices become embedded within formally reform-oriented frameworks. Situating prison labour within wider debates on authoritarian neoliberalism and the punitive turn in welfare states, the article argues that carceral labour operates as part of a broader continuum through which surplus populations are governed through activation, containment, and exclusion. What emerges is that the transformation of prison labour governance reflects not the abandonment of rehabilitative discourse but its procedural remaking as a mechanism through which punishment, economic extraction, and legitimacy are jointly reproduced across political regimes. The article concludes by outlining implications for social policy scholarship concerning welfare provision, labour market regulation, and social protection.

 Paper 2: Ethics under siege: Alt-right ideologies and the political work of corporate DEI rollbacks

The rise of supremacist movements such as the alt-right, alongside far-right political rhetoric, has contributed to the rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies in corporate settings. Drawing on a process-relational approach and content analysis of academic and media sources, it explores how narratives of white victimhood, reverse discrimination, and progress as the enemy shape corporate decisions, become mobilisable within corporate contexts and inform the political work through which corporate actors reinterpret, recalibrate, or withdraw DEI commitments. These pressures are ideological and also reflect the material and cultural interests of historically privileged groups within a broader political climate that legitimizes extremism and rejects pluralism. The study demonstrates how internal actors and external networks challenge or reinforce these dynamics, revealing the contested nature of DEI. It extends theories of the politics of organising by identifying how ethically grounded corporate responses may counter exclusionary tendencies.

Both papers deal with a very important yet under-researched intersection of political ideology, precarious work and human resource practices.  Mustafa is an extremely prolific scholar who has published many papers on workplace equality, diversity and inclusion from comparative and relational perspectives.

Bio:

https://www.brunel.ac.uk/people/mustafa-ozbilgin

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