Creating Space for an Alternative Discourse in the Context of Neoliberal Hegemony: The Case of a Long-Standing NGO
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article contributes to a better understanding of how to create space for an alternative discourse, despite increased dominance of neoliberal ideas (particularly as sustained by donor control). In a detailed case study, we show how an international non-governmental organization (NGO) endeavors to build a reputation of expertise centered on the dynamic adaptation of the market and participatory (i.e., grassroots, solidarity-focused) discourses. By producing and disseminating what it hopes to be convincing hybrid artifacts (e.g., in the form of guidelines and articles) that exhibit this expertise, the NGO aims to establish the credibility needed for hybrid artifacts (and the alternative participatory discourse that they carry) to be endorsed, solicited and eventually, adopted by donors and other actors in international development. By highlighting strategic behavior outside the typical confines of funding transactions, our findings shift the focus from shorter-term to longer-term strategizing. Ultimately, our case study illustrates how an organization, against the power of control over financial resources, endeavors to cultivate a counter discourse through the “soft” power of expertise.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".