Making “heartware”: Statecraft and hegemony in Singapore’s welfare regime

Yeo, Yak (2023) Making “heartware”: Statecraft and hegemony in Singapore’s welfare regime. PhD thesis, University of Liverpool.

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Abstract

This project presents a case study of state power and ideology as a cultural force in a neoliberal welfare regime. Utilising a cultural political economy (CPE) approach, I argue that sense-making processes of the welfare apparatus seek to constitute the dominant economic imaginary to produce subjects and sensibilities aligned to sustain capitalist social forms. I illuminate welfare sites as spaces through which capitalist logics are mediated, naturalised and embedded into everyday Singaporean life. Through an analysis of historical contingencies, material policy regulations and government communications, I interrogate state-led processes in the articulation of accumulation strategies and logics to implicate state power in the reproduction of capitalism. Within Singapore, the semiosis and structuration of welfare depoliticises what are in reality highly political welfare relations for the reproduction of Singaporean life. The welfare regime veils the working of state power to legitimise deeply unequal social relations by naturalising racial relations, activating labour market relations and the embedding of the nuclear family. State-led depoliticisation constructs an ideological environment that presents the pursuance of capitalist ideals as a form of Singaporean subjectivity, restricting imaginings of alternative possibilities as the current accumulation regime is presented as good, natural and inevitable. I argue that this results in a post-political condition, where politics to contest the current regime is foreclosed. The welfare apparatus represents state bias and tendencies in their structuring and privileging of certain social processes and relations. Through mapping the dominant economic imaginary, which I describe as the heartware of Singapore, I identify three social forms that seek to organise welfare resources and regulate economic lives. Firstly, a racialised model of citizenship draws boundaries between deserving and underserving subjects across ethnicity and citizenship. Secondly, a commodified model of welfare structures economic productivity and pro-work values into Singaporean lives. Thirdly, the exaltation of the nuclear family privileges heteronormative relations while restricting alternative forms of solidarities to encourage specific forms of social reproduction. Each of these social forms highlight the state’s crisis tendency to secure economic growth while displacing contradictions of development onto staged problematisations. In mapping the dominant economic imaginary through an interrogation of Singaporean social policy, I critique state power in the privileging of certain social identities, practices and relations in the reproduction of capitalism. In applying CPE to Singapore, this thesis hopes to contribute towards a more critically minded social policy analysis within this specific locality.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Law and Social Justice
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	31 Jan 2024 08:51
Last Modified:	31 Jan 2024 08:51
DOI:	10.17638/03172572
Supervisors:	Coleman, Roy Greener, Joe Kirton, Andrew
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3172572