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Responsibility and its derivatives – going beyond the ‘standard’ critique of 

neoliberalism 
 

TRNKA, SUSANNA & CATHERINE TRUNDLE. 2017. Competing Responsibilities – The 

Ethics and Politics of Contemporary Life. Chicago: Duke University Press. 296pp. SC: $26.95. 

ISBN: 978-0822363750. 

 

Keywords: responsibility, care, health, neoliberalism.  

 

Neoliberalism, the economic (and societal) form of governance, is widely described through one 

of its core mechanisms: responsibilization, the ‘divestiture of obligations from the state onto 

individuals,’ cultivating a self-empowered person (p. 2f), a responsible citizen (p.4). In this very 

worthwhile volume, the editors and contributors bust this strong link between responsibility and 

neoliberalism with a wide range of empirical (and theoretical) observations of how responsibility 

can be found to work differently in contemporary society. The contributions dispute the claim that 

responsiblization is always a practice of the state stepping out of its original responsibility, often 

clad in a narrative of enabling personal choice and autonomy; instead, they first find other loci for 

responsibility and self-cultivation completely outside of the state nexus (9). Secondly, the authors 

also claim that (complete) autonomy might not always be desired or achieved but that the striving 

for it might in fact result in (new) communities and relations (10). Lastly, ‘care for others’ might 

spring from responsibility as an ‘enduring commitment between parties’ (12) – to be found in 

settings from kinship to education or healthcare. 

 

Altogether, the volume is very strong in finding the holes in the neoliberal logic of (self) 

responsiblitzation: where does it stop? What are its unintended consequences? They argue that in 



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fact the analytic of responsibility is not the issue (in neoliberalism); instead we need to ask: ‘who 

is held responsible by whom for what’ (16, 34)?  

 

*** 

 

One of the biggest strengths of the volume is the variety of ‘locations’ and ‘sectors’ that the 

contributors engage in their search for alternative kinds of responsibility. On the one hand, we 

learn from Zigon comparing different models of (addiction) harm reduction to (empirically and 

theoretically) sharpen our understanding of responsibility (linear versus networked and open, 65f); 

on the other hand, several studies focus on the more widely thought of context of corporate 

responsiblization with its ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR, Smith, Ch. 5) and (corporate) 

audit culture as extended to for instance the university (Shore, Ch. 4). Other contributors zoom out 

to a comprehensive systems-approach asking the question ‘who is responsible’ looking at public 

entities (from supra-state actors to states and individual administrators), corporations and 

(individual) citizens alike in contexts as diverse as air pollution (Tnka, Ch. 3), missing people in 

Cyprus (Davis, Ch. 6), war crimes in Sierra Leone (Shaw, Ch. 7) or nuclear tests (Trundle, Ch.10) 

 

Various different vectors of the anthropological imagination are thought through with the lenses 

of responsibility, responsibilization and their derivatives: from a focus on medicine and science 

(Chs 2, 3, 8 and 10), economy and business (3-5) and kinship (8-10) to the state which features 

implicitly in most accounts. Only the element of religion is almost completely absent (beyond 

observations about the moral discourse surrounding HIV in Ch 8) which is surprising given the 

strong (historical) basis for responsibility (or ethics) in this sector (cf. Laidlaw 2014). While I 

appreciate the extension of the analysis – something that is also at the heart of my institute – a 

slightly more direct genealogy (beyond the introduction) might have benefited some of the 

contributions and the overall flow. 

 

Overall, I found the volume particularly illuminating for researchers in the realm of medical 

anthropology or the anthropology of care and health. Zigon’s chapter (Ch. 2) starts off specifically 

strongly and with a lot of nuance on a topic I have been thinking about in my own work, too: safe 

injection programs as part of harm reduction for drug users. He critiques the ‘standard approach’ 



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to harm reduction producing (neoliberal) restrictive individual responsibility and puts it against 

the ‘Vancouver model.’ In his eyes, the latter more closely resembles a networked landscape of 

services and open entry points much more aligned to support oftentimes chaotic and non-linear 

people struggling with addiction. Similarly, Trnka (Ch. 3) takes up the question of air pollution in 

the Czech Republic and asks: who has a responsibility to care for the citizens who themselves are 

hard-beaten by rising unemployment and hardship? Is the state the ‘ultimate moral agent’ (p.76) 

and how much does the steel industry have to pay up? Paradoxically, how much individual 

responsibility to protest and put public pressure on these corporate and state actors do citizens have 

to shoulder (p. 83)? Responsibility – individual and otherwise – features in a great variety of 

unexpected and intertwined ways in Trnka’s story – which is also true for Adam’s chapter (Ch. 8) 

on HIV. Adam shows how tackling HIV has been framed as a collective goal (of a healthy 

population) that can only be achieved by focusing on individual responsibility to practice ‘safe 

sex’ (without having to invoke communitarianism or altruism, p. 187), if need be enforced through 

punitive measures. In fact, much of this framing has proven both ineffective and insufficient (p. 

190) because it does not consider the complex role of competing motivations based on emotions 

or kinship ties. Adam’s chapter seems reasonably close to other case studies of tracing 

responsibilization, of deflecting responsibility from corporate and state actors (p. 192). Which 

makes me ask: how different are some of the contributions to this volume to the more traditional 

studies of neoliberal responsibilization critiqued by the editors? Absolutely, the understanding of 

what responsibility is and who in fact is responsiblized is very nuanced; but what about the flip 

side of responsiblization, de-responsiblization, beyond the state (or the corporate)?  What about 

situations where responsibility is taken away from citizens? This takes me to my last question, Can 

responsibility also be a good thing, something empowering – for instance when responsibility 

comes with rights, e.g. for (corporate) board members (to oversee) or for union members or even 

just citizens (to vote)?  

 

Despite some of the – necessary – question marks the volume leaves open, it surely in its entirety 

makes one point very strongly: not all responsibility is the same – and it is certainly not all 

neoliberal; there is a multiplicity of forms reinforcing, undercutting, existing alongside, conflicting 

and intersecting the ‘classic’ neoliberal form (p. 22). This empirically grounded volume is overall 



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very strong in increasing our theoretical vocabulary and analytical prowess to overcome repeating 

the same critique of neoliberalism and contemporary capitalism.  

 

Dr. Johannes Lenhard is the Centre Coordinator of the Max Planck Cambridge Centre for the 

Study of Ethics, the Economy and Social Change (Max Cam). While his doctoral research was 

focused on the home making practices of people sleeping rough on the streets of Paris, his new 

project involves fieldwork with venture capital investors in Berlin, London and San Francisco. 

Find him on Twitter at @JFLenhard. 

 

 

 

© 2021 Johannes Lenhard 

 


