Nicolas Lewis

Code of practice for the pastoral care of international students: making a globalising industry in New Zealand

Export education in New Zealand has grown rapidly since 1990, earning significant foreign exchange and underwriting the finance of domestic education. As principal owner of education institutions, the national state is the primary investor. Previous governments treated the ‘industry’ as both windfall and cash‐cow as they advanced the neo‐liberal project of disentangling state from economy and making education providers self‐regulating. The current ‘Third Way’ inspired government has adopted a more prominent management interest in the making of this globalising industry. A new Code of Practice enacts multiple technologies of control from quality control to standard setting, benchmarking, certification and audit. Legitimated by a discourse of concern for the pastoral care of school‐aged students, it requires institutions to provide detailed information. The Code makes ‘the industry’ visible, makes a market, controls brand NZ education, regulates through consumer assurance, and imposes direct disciplinary co...Export education in New Zealand has grown rapidly since 1990, earning significant foreign exchange and underwriting the finance of domestic education. As principal owner of education institutions, the national state is the primary investor. Previous governments treated the ‘industry’ as both windfall and cash‐cow as they advanced the neo‐liberal project of disentangling state from economy and making education providers self‐regulating. The current ‘Third Way’ inspired government has adopted a more prominent management interest in the making of this globalising industry. A new Code of Practice enacts multiple technologies of control from quality control to standard setting, benchmarking, certification and audit. Legitimated by a discourse of concern for the pastoral care of school‐aged students, it requires institutions to provide detailed information. The Code makes ‘the industry’ visible, makes a market, controls brand NZ education, regulates through consumer assurance, and imposes direct disciplinary controls on institutions. The Code of Practice makes apparent the ambitions and governmental technologies of the ‘augmented’ neo‐liberal state, and is a pivotal structure in the constitution of the industry and of the globalising processes that define it. The paper uses governmentality analysis to uncover these technologies of control and to consider their part in the constitution of both industry and globalisation.

Place ‘From One Glance’: the use of place in the marketing of New Zealand and Australian wines

Abstract Associations between place and wine are historically deep. Past and current narratives of wine production are wedded to environment attributes of particular places, and in both the European and Australasian settings this has been codified by way of formal labelling requirements for the place of origin for wines. In this paper we explore the role of place references on the front labels of Australian and New Zealand wines through a small initial survey. The results reveal that the importance of place references is stronger for New Zealand wines. We argue that this reflects strongly the very different structures of the industries in the two countries, with the emphasis for New Zealand producers on high-quality wines for which origin statements are expected as opposed to the Australian focus on the production of bulk, value-driven wines dependent on the blending of wines across regions and places. This in turn has implications for the future development and marketing trajectories of the two industries.

Political projects and micro-practices of globalising education: building an international education industry in New Zealand

This paper examines the framing of globalising education as an industry in New Zealand. It traces the development of industry institutions to promote and regulate cross-border educational relations and practices. The paper argues that the making of a national ‘international education industry’ has framed entrepreneurial education providers, international students and other subjects and spaces of globalising education for a particular form of governance. Framed as an industry these subjects and spaces have been made available for, and mobilised in, political projects of globalisation, knowledge economy, and other after-neo-liberal political projects. The case is used to reflect on how education is being globalised as well as globalisation constituted.

Anchor organisations in Auckland: Rolling constructively with neoliberalism?

The city of Auckland has recently been reconstituted through the amalgamation of eight territorial authorities and their constituencies. The new city was designed to provide coordinated economic, infrastructural and resource management for a territorial social economy given form and meaning by economic and infrastructural connections and daily movements of people and things. In this paper, we examine how this rationale has been translated into a vision for making and performing Auckland as a unitary space and ask whether the initial excitement over the new city has been captured as potential for delivering a more progressive city. We explore the shift from sustainability to liveability as a guiding imaginary for a new Auckland and the formation of the Auckland Anchors network as a group that might play a leadership role in shaping it. We conclude that whilst the process of amalgamation undermined much of its potential to achieve a more coordinated metropolitan governance, it has revealed possibilities for the practice of a new constructive urban politics.

Governmental assemblages of internationalising universities: Mediating circulation and containment in East Asia

This paper critically appraises the internationalization practices currently embraced by some of East Asia’s leading universities. We examine the ‘governmental assemblage’ that constitutes the ‘international university’ with a particular focus on the ways in which this transformation has involved an increased circulation of international students. Mobile students are caught up in the desires of universities and national governments to craft ‘world-class universities’, cosmopolitanise campus spaces, achieve demographic renewal and harness the human capital of international graduates by implementing policies of internationalisation. Analyses of practices on-the-ground reveal that formulations to capture the potentialities from circulating international students rarely achieving the global teaching and learning experiences they aspire to. Instead, fragmented encounters with domestic students, ethno-cultural essentialisms and renewed tensions around the politics of language and learning, create the possibilities for container models of international education. At the same time, practices of self-government by international students can succeed in (re)working such containment logics by refusing to be seen simply as units of human capital. Our argument points to the importance of a more critical and engaged approach to internationalization in universities by policymakers and institutional leaders.

Food fights: irritating for social change among Auckland's alternative food initiatives

ABSTRACT This article explores alternative food initiatives (AFI) and their performances of benign transgression. Through collaborative activist-and-academic-storytelling we tease apart the divergent practices of AFIs to question what mediates these performances in the grey area between conventional and alternative practice. Grounded examples of AFIs performing alternative economy and related acts of ‘irritant’ civil disobedience show how subverting normative practices of power and authority can catalyse social reproduction of difference, and tangibly alter the conventional food system.

City renaming as brand promotion: exploring neoliberal projects and community resistance in New Zealand

ABSTRACT Proposals to change the names of entire urban centres are rare. We examine the case of Blenheim, New Zealand, where in 2016, representatives of local businesses campaigned for its renaming as Marlborough City, in recognition of the region’s wine industry. Although defeated the proposal threatened to over-write established settlement history. It presumed to rename Blenheim under the aegis of New Zealand Inc., a shorthand for the pervasive yet nebulous economic nationalism that seeks to yoke all local and national identity to enhancing export growth. Drawing on media reports, we interpret this example of toponymic commodification as a neoliberalized project of place-making. Ironically, Blenheim and Marlborough are colonial names that displaced a long-established Māori name. The proposal highlights both the perversities and the deeply contested claims-making that often underlie and animate toponymic politics. Ultimately, it illustrates some of the limits of rights claimed under neoliberalism.

Thinking forward from New Zealand from (and with) global restructuring

ABSTRACT Global Restructuring (Fagan, R., and M. Webber. 1994. Global Restructuring: The Australian Experience. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.) and the two-volume Changing Places project (Britton, S., R. Le Heron, and E. Pawson. 1992. Changing Places in New Zealand: A Geography of Restructuring. Christchurch: The New Zealand Geographical Society.); and Le Heron, R., and E. Pawson, eds. 1996. Changing Places—New Zealand in the Nineties. Auckland: Longman Paul. in New Zealand provide very different accounts of economic restructuring in Australia and New Zealand respectively in the early 1990s. Taken together they provide a statement of the prominence of economic geography within antipodean geography at the time. However, the demise of command-and-control economic management that they analysed was already bringing about a defining shift in the fortunes of the sub-discipline. The paper suggests that the two volumes shaped different pathways for economic geography in the two countries. It goes on to ask what this reading might tell us about how to revitalise economic geography in our classrooms and disciplinary debates and contribute new strengths to the discipline more broadly.