Elizabeth Rata

The politics of knowledge in education

This article contributes to the growing social realist literature in the sociology of education. A world systems approach is used to explain the shift to the various forms of localisation, including the emphasis on experience in the curriculum, as a strategy of globalisation that contributes to the decline of universal class consciousness and progressive politics in the contemporary period. Limiting the curriculum to experiential knowledge limits access to a powerful class resource; that of conceptual knowledge required for critical reasoning and political agency. Knowledge that comes from experience limits the knower to that experience. The shift to localised knowledge fixes groups in the working class to a never ending present as schools that use a social constructivist approach to knowledge in the curriculum fail to provide the intellectual tools of conceptual thinking and its medium in advanced literacy that lead to an imagined, yet unknown, future.

Discursive strategies of the Maori tribal elite

The Maori tribal elite are identified and their political and economic ambitions discussed with reference to recent strategic documents. Framing and supporting those ambitions is an indigenous discourse that has been crucial to the elite’s success. Five discursive strategies are analysed: (1) constructing the indigenous collective as tribal Maori; (2) constructing indigeneity as ‘the logic of the gift’ in contrast to the ‘“Western” logic of the commodity’; (3) promoting indigeneity as an ahistorical primordial category to counter the social reality of ethnic fluidity in New Zealand; (4) promoting a vocabulary in order to control the meaning of key ideas; and (5) constructing indigeneity as a polity in opposition to the nation. A Treaty of Waitangi ‘partnership’ is promoted as the means by which the indigenous–colonizer dualism is brokered. Despite its efficacy to date, the discourse is undermined by inherent contradictions, including the elite’s privileged position as a capitalist class, the growing inequalities within the tribal collective and the incarceration of indigenous people in an ahistorical timelessness.

Encircling the Commons: Neotribal Capitalism in New Zealand Since 2000

This paper uses a neotribal capitalism approach to theorize the corporate Maori tribes’ economic and political strategies in New Zealand. I trace the current convergence between neoliberalism and the corporate tribe to the alliances and networks established in the inclusive bicultural stage of the 1970s. These alliances were later institutionalized in the exclusive bicultural stage through brokerage processes which, in the brokerage function itself, developed a political relationship between the corporate tribe and the government and established the brokers as self-interest class agents. The consequence of brokerage politics has been the consolidation of a system for the transfer of economic resources from public to tribal ownership and for the devolution of state services into tribal control. This has implications for New Zealand’s liberal democracy.

Leadership ideology in neotribal capitalism

The emergence of the Maori ruling elite of neotribal capitalism in New Zealand is located in the politicisation of culture that is a world-wide localised response to fundamental changes in global capitalism. A range of broke rage mechanisms enacted through culturalist discourse have enabled the elite to broker a neotraditional ideology into state institutions. This paper examines the brokers, the brokerage mechanisms, and the ideology of revived traditional leadership which have established this group as a capitalist aristocracy.

Localising neoliberalism: indigenist brokerage in the New Zealand university

The examination of indigenist interests in the New Zealand university is framed by a theoretical understanding of indigeneity as a strategy in regulating social organisation and resource management in neoliberal global capitalism. Three stages of the brokerage of indigenist interests are identified. These are: the production and representation of indigenous knowledge; the use of Treaty of Waitangi partnership and principles to connect the tribe and the university; and the use of specific policies and practices to put the Treaty principles into operation. Studies of the penetration of Treaty compliance into everyday university operations, exemplified in the analysis of indigenous knowledge discourse and university policy documents, are used to demonstrate the brokerage of indigenist interests and the tensions that result from that brokerage.

Theoretical Claims and Empirical Evidence in Maori Education Discourse.

Post‐Marxist critical sociology of education has influenced the development of indigenous (‘kaupapa’) Maori educational theory and research. Its effects are examined in four claims made for Maori education by indigenous theorists. The claims are: indigenous kaupapa Maori education is a revolutionary initiative; it is a cultural solution to Maori educational under‐achievement; it has reversed the decline of the Maori language; it provides a valid educational alternative for an ethnically and culturally distinctive population. The analysis suggests that the indigenous theory approach is representative of the position‐taking strategy that characterises post‐Marxist critical sociology of education, concluding that claims made in kaupapa Maori voice discourse are not supported by the empirical evidence which indicates a more complex social reality.

Public Policy and Ethnicity

Introduction: Of Mohammed, Murals and Maori Ceremony; E. Rata and R. Openshaw Freedom, Identity Construction and Cultural Closure: The Taniwha, the Hijab and the Weiner Schnitzel as Boundary Makers; E. Kolig The Politics of Ethnic Boundary Making; E. Rata Culturalism, Neoliberalism and the State: The Rise and Fall of Neotraditionalism Ideologies in the South Pacific; A. Babadzan The Paradox of Indigenous Rights: The Controversy Around the Foreshore and Seabed in New Zealand; T. van Meijl Ethnicity in Business: The Case of New Zealand Maori; M. Devlin Re-politicising Race: The Anglican Church in New Zealand; C. Tremewan Putting Ethnicity in Policy: A New Zealand Case Study; R. Openshaw Race and Ethnicity in United Kingdom Public Policy: Education and Health; L. Culley & J. Demaine Challenging Ethnic Explanations for Educational Failure; R. Nash Dogmas of Ethnicity; J. Clark Historical Revisionism in New Zealand: Always Winter and Never Christmas; G. Butterworth Public Policy and Ethnicity is a response to the growing concern in many democracies that ethnicity has become institutionalised as a political category. The book draws on a number of international studies, including New Zealand, to show that this process of public policymaking creates permanent divisions and boundaries. These artificial boundaries are fundamentally at odds with the social fluidity of modern societies and actually undermine the conditions required to promote social justice.

A critique of the role of culture in Maori education

Educational under-achievement by a section of the Maori population is a persistent problem for New Zealand. This article is a theoretical examination of the practice and consequences of a culture-based curriculum that is promoted as the solution. We develop the argument that not only is the ‘cultural solution’ at odds with the complex social reality in New Zealand, but it is itself a contributor to educational under-achievement.

A sociology ‘of’ or a sociology ‘for’ education? The New Zealand experience of the dilemma

The sociology of education in New Zealand, as in other countries, is affected by the dilemma inherent to the discipline, namely: is it a sociology of education or a sociology for education? In this article I analyse three factors in which the dilemma is played out: ‘cultural oppositionism’ in the indigenous (kaupapa Maori) approach, critical policy research and the role of empirical research. I argue that a sociology for education is fundamentally weakened by its politicisation, a flaw not helped by the difficulties in drawing political goals from moral imperatives. In contrast a sociology of education, which uses the strengths of empirical research and theoretical analysis, offers the better hope of renewal for, what is, in New Zealand, a moribund discipline.

The weight of inquiry: conflicting cultures in New Zealand's tertiary institutions

Considerable problems have arisen in New Zealand universities as a consequence of the conflict between the statutory role of the university as the ‘critic and conscience of society’ and the dominant intellectual orthodoxy of cultural essentialism. A number of examples are used to show the extent to which culturalist ideological conformity compromises the scientific and critical analysis of social phenomena, thereby limiting the universitys ability to serve as the critic and conscience of society. The New Zealand examples are located in the global context of culturalist orthodoxy. The writers claim that, as a consequence of the shift from class to identity politics that characterises multiculturalism, administrators and academics in a number of Western universities are now obliged to defer to politically powerful interest groups that derive their power to condemn from culturalist principles.