Starting with Michel Foucault's formulation in The Birth of Biopolitics (2008), which describes neoliberalism as a new form of government, sociological and anthropological studies have established that neoliberalism does not narrow down to the global policies applied by multinational companies and international agencies; rather, it involves technologies of power and practices of self-governance that shape the life and behavior of global society. In Latin America, the debt crisis of the 1980s, delayed the spread of cultural and social effects of neoliberalism until the 1990s, when the privatization of public utility and energy companies, among other liberal reforms, eliminated the last barriers to the arrival of the new market economy led by foreign multinationals.

The reconfiguration of social and political relationships under the neoliberal view carried out by popular segments reinforces the overall supremacy of biopolitics as the governance form of today's capitalism, whose strength lies in the fact that it is embraced, repurposed, and applied by the very victims of neoliberalism. By pushing free initiative, entrepreneurship, self-management, and self-accountability among the poor, neoliberalism transfers social responsibilities from the governments and corporations to individuals—whether workers, citizens, or the poor.

Elana Shever's book relies on this approach, but it also looks for common ground among the decisions and strategies of large players in the global economy and those of small agents and communities hurt by neoliberal economic policies. To this end, Shever looks into a hallmark case: the privatization of Argentina's state-owned oil company, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF), and its corporate effect on the identity forms of the company's former workers.

Why was YPF's case so exemplary? The company was the flagship of oil nationalism in Argentina, as it was Latin America's first state-owned oil company. As a result of its performance and of the role played by oil to replace other energy resources, YPF became a primary tool in Argentina's economic development and integration, even if it failed to ensure the country's energy self-sufficiency. Defunding and management issues drove the company to its operating bankruptcy in the 1980s and paved the way for its privatization during the Peronist administration of Carlos Menem. The transformation of YPF into a private corporation, the sale of its shares, and, finally, the transfer of its controlling stock to the Spanish company Repsol from 1992 to 1999 caused a greater outcry than did the privatization of other state-owned companies.

Shever's ethnographic work focuses on two very different realms. The first part of her book probes the creation of new subjectivities by the YPF workers residing at Plaza Huincul and Cutral Có, two towns built around oil-extraction operations in Argentina's Patagonia, after the company's privatization. For YPF workers who for generations had relocated to the solitude of Patagonia's harsh landscape, working in oil fields there for a long period, the company's privatization radically changed their living and working conditions. The workers who were not laid off had to either take retirement packages or start self-managed ventures to provide services to YPF as partners. Thus, their identity—formerly based on their filial relationship with a paternalistic state-owned company—was upset.

The author analyzes the building of the privatized public domain in the protests headed by thousands of laid-off YPF workers, known as La Pueblada, in 1996; in the creation of the Patria Association to claim former workers’ legal rights to own stock in the privatized company; and in the new ventures that provided oil services to the new company. These initiatives were all undertaken to ensure former YPF workers’ social inclusion and to strengthen their rights to ownership and work. The cases proved that the identity reorganization under the neoliberal paradigm of self-government reshaped the old kinship ties to build new corporate-community partnerships.

The second part of the book describes the creation of a new neoliberal subjectivity prompted by the change in Shell's public relations policy towards those living in a settlement next to the multinational company's refinery in Dock Sud, a city in Buenos Aires Province, in the years following the 2001 crisis. The crisis was the consequence of the neoliberal reforms adopted in the 1990s that increased unemployment rates to 18 percent, causing poverty to rise to 38 percent. In addition to low commodity prices, massive capital outflow, caused by an overvalued exchange rate, deepened the economic crisis as the International Monetary Fund suspended assistance to the country. By the end of 2001, social conflicts became worse and people gathered in the plazas all over the country to ask for the resignation of president Fernando de la Rúa. The Congress appointed a provisional president, Eduardo Duhalde, who introduced the first emergency programs to mitigate the crisis, the worst crisis in Argentinian history.

At that moment, waste from Shell's refinery was polluting the lands surrounding its plant, where thousands of families lived in precarious conditions. The company's traditional policy, based on delivering food and materials in response to the demands of Dock Sud residents, was replaced by a strategy focusing on sharing the responsibility with those impoverished families in terms of seeking solutions to their poverty and social exclusion. Shell's public relations department launched a number of projects through which to cofund preventive health-care programs, with resource availability depending on the withdrawal of public complaints and political affiliations by project-promoting families in the neighborhood.

In both cases, the failing ventures driven by oil multinationals to mitigate the social exclusion they caused do not hinder the view of successful neoliberal entrepreneurship programs intended to create corporate-community partnerships as promoted by the companies. In other words, the programs initiated by Repsol-YPF and Shell did not achieve the goals set forth in either case, but they did manage to quash collective complaints about labor and community relations against the companies, by promoting self-managed ventures among the working class.

I would like to point out two noteworthy features of this work. First, the author relies on a wealth of ethnographic research to rigorously characterize the living conditions, labor practices, perceptions, and expectations of former YPF workers who live in Patagonia as well as those of the people living in Dock Sud's precarious settlements. Second, her depiction of Argentina's economic and social policies includes an objective characterization of every administration, revealing a smart understanding of Argentinian politics and society. This is particularly noteworthy, as it is rare to find unbiased interpretations of historical processes that bear a direct impact on the current political setting, including Peronism. The workers’ identity reformation based on the notion of political citizenship with access to social rights, as underscored by Shever, is useful in understanding current Argentinian politics—even more so, considering that in 2012 another Peronist Argentinian government seized control of Repsol's stake in YPF.

Resources for Reform will appeal both to readers who are interested in assessing the strategies of multinational companies in different host economies from an anthropological approach and to those interested in a thorough analysis of the cultural and social conditions that determine class-consumption patterns and support the application of specific economic policies in Latin America.