Neoliberal epistemologies are grounded in a temporal paradox. To prosper, you have to know how actions taken now will pay off in the future. But you can’t know that—the future is uncertain and unknowable. In this context, qualitative inquiry becomes less a matter of explanation or interpretation than of feeding information into efforts to collapse the temporal horizon and format the future in a form that you can dominate. This article examines manifestations of this approach in the qualitative research practices of two key institutional sectors of neoliberalism: the corporate and military.
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