Susan L. Robertson

GATS and the Education Service Industry: The Politics of Scale and Global Reterritorialization

One consequence of the hype around globalization and education and debates on global political actors such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO—is that there has not been sufficient attention paid by education theorists to the development of a rigorous set of analytic categories that might enable us to make sense of the profound changes which now characterize education in the new millennium. 1 This is not a problema confined to education. Writing in the New Left Review, Fredric Jameson observes that debates on globalization have tended to be shaped by “…ideological appropriations— discussions not of the process itself, but of its effects, good or bad: judgements, in other words, totalizing in nature; while functional descriptions tend to isolate particular elements without relating them to each other.” In this paper we start from the position that little or nothing can be explained in terms of the causal powers of globalization; rather we shall be suggesting that globalization is the outcome of processes that involve real actors—economic and political—with real interests. Following Martin Shaw, we also take the view that globalization does not undermine the state but includes the transformation of state forms; “…it is both predicated on and produces such transformations.”3 Examining how these processes of transformation work, however, requires systematic investigation into the organization and strategies of particular actors whose horizons or effects might be described as global.

Re‐imagining and rescripting the future of education: global knowledge economy discourses and the challenge to education systems

Using critical discourse analysis as a methodology for analysis, this paper sets out the nature and form of the challenges directed to the compulsory schooling sector by the knowledge economy that is contained in key policy and related documents put out by the OECD, the World Bank and the UK government. The OECD and the World Bank’s policy agendas are increasingly important in setting policy and programme agendas for the developed and developing countries respectively; however there are important differences between the two institutions regarding how education should be redesigned. The World Bank’s redesign of education favours the market and individualism as the means for developing knowledge and skills for the knowledge economy. The OECD, however, while concerned with human capital formation, rejects the market model in favour of an institutionally embedded liberalism to overcome the problems posed by tacit knowledge. The UK, on the other hand, has promoted the idea of personalized learning. The paper suggests that this idea is particularly problematic for developing a system of innovation for the economy that is dependent on high levels of social interaction. The first half of the twenty‐first century will, I believe, be far more difficult, more unsettling, and yet more open than anything we have known in the twentieth century. I say this on three premises; none of which I have time to argue here. The first is that historical systems, like all systems, have finite lives. They have beginnings, a long development and finally, as they move far from equilibrium and reach points of bifurcation, a demise. The second premise is that two things are true at these points of bifurcation; small inputs have large outputs (as opposed to times of the normal development of the system, when large inputs have small outputs); and the outcome of such bifurcation is inherently indeterminate. The third premise is that the modern world system as a historical system has entered into a terminal crisis and is unlikely to exist in 50 years. However, since its outcome is so uncertain, we do not know whether the resulting system (or systems) will be better or worse than the one in which we are living, but we do know that the period of transition will be a terrible time of troubles, since the stakes of the transition are so high, the outcome so uncertain, and the ability of small impacts to affect the outcome so great. (Wallerstein, 1999, p. 1)

Placing Teachers in Global Governance Agendas.

This article examines the focus on teacher policies and practices by a range of global actors and explores their meaning for the governance of teachers. Through a historical and contemporary reading, I argue that an important shift in the locus of power to govern has taken place. I show how the mechanisms of global governance of teachers are being transformed from “education as (national) development” and “norm setting” to “learning as (individual) development” and “competitive comparison.” Yet despite tendencies toward a convergence of agendas, there are important differences between them. I conclude by examining the limits and possibilities of governing at a (global) distance, as well as the contradictions inherent in neoliberal framings of teacher policies to realize the good teacher.

Interview with Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Professor of Sociology, School of Economics, University of Coimbra and Distinguished Legal Scholar, Law School, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also director of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra. Santos is one of the outstanding theorists of our time. His extensive and expansive corpus of work engages with pressing social and political questions: of social structures, institutions, imagination, movements and change. His seminal work—Toward a new legal common sense—engages in a series of sociological analyses of law in order to illustrate the need for a profound theoretical reconstruction of the notion of legality based on locality, nationality and globality. This work was preceded, surrounded and followed by research concerned, ultimately, with states, economies and societies, especially in the semi-periphery. As Santos made clear in our interview with him, the insights into our condition are more likely to come not from the centres of power but rather from the margins and the periphery, from those who on a daily basis experience domination, poverty and social injustice. Santos is concerned, always, to show how developments, including supra-state organisations such as the European Union, and international human rights law, can be given their proper place in the sociology of law. Boaventura’s substantial engagements with the phenomenon of our time—globalisation—has led him to challenge its assumed unitary force and hegemonic nature. We must talk about globalisations, he says, not globalisation. We must also talk about globalisations not just from the centre, or above, but from below. Working always to generate an emancipatory map as a way of imagining and living new and different possibilities, Boaventura de Sousa

Local States of Emergency: The contradictions of neo-liberal governance in education in New Zealand

In the present paper, we argue that neo-liberal governance regimes are deeply contradictory and that these contradictions are increasingly evident within the education sector. Drawing on a case study of the consequences of restructuring in education in New Zealand, arguably a paradigm case of neo-liberal governance, we suggest the state is faced with a dilemma about how best to manage these tensions and contradictions within the framework of the political rationality itself. One strategy is to isolate and localise these problems in order to contain and manage the risks associated with them. We identify five variants we argue can broadly be viewed as local states of emergency.

The EU, ‘regulatory state regionalism’ and new modes of higher education governance

Jayasuriyas conceptualisation of ‘regulatory regionalism’ is particularly useful for examining the presence, significance and effect of new higher education governance mechanisms in constituting Europe as a competitive region and knowledge‐based economy. In particular he argues that we need to take sufficient account of the role of domestic political economies in constituting regions, on the one hand, and the role of governance mechanisms, on the other, and the constitutive role of these processes in region‐building. Focusing on the current moment of this regionalising and globalising project in Europe, I argue that ‘regulatory regionalism’ can be further nuanced if it takes into account ‘extra‐regional’ dynamics that have effects on region‐building through the way they thicken and embed new structures, processes and social relations within and beyond the region. I conclude by arguing that in the case of Europe, this current moment of regulatory regionalism through higher education might also be conceived of as part of a wider project around statehood called ‘regulatory state regionalism’.

The social justice implications of privatisation in education governance frameworks: a relational account

This paper explores the social justice implications of two, ‘linked’, governance developments which have been instrumental in reshaping many education systems throughout the world: the ‘privatising’ and ‘globalising’ of education (Klees, Stromquist, & Samoff, 2012). We argue that such education governance innovations demand an explicit engagement with social justice theories, both in themselves, and as offering an opportunity to address issues of social justice that go beyond the re/distribution of education inputs and outputs, important though these are, and which take account of the political and accountability issues raised by globalising of education governance activity. To do this we draw upon Iris Marion Young’s concept of ‘the basic structure’ and her ‘social connection model’ of responsibility (Young, 2006a,b) to develop a relational account of justice in education governance frameworks.

Stirring the Lions: Strategy and Tactics in Global Higher Education.

In many parts of the world, higher education is viewed as a prime ‘motor’ for the development of a knowledge‐based economy. Under the banner of this ‘new economy’, higher education policies, programmes and practices have been increasingly co‐opted and shaped by wider geo‐strategic political and economic interests. This paper explores three, interlinked, higher education policy spaces – in Europe, the United States, and Australia. It explores how the growing range of educational initiatives at the European level has affected – both directly and indirectly – American and Australian policymaking in higher education. The European higher education project, which is increasingly perceived as having some significance to the global economy, has set off a series of dynamic reactions in both Australia and the United States, which is leading to multiple new logics and new imaginaries about the global higher education landscape. Through this, a more integrated and relational global system of higher education is emerging.

Beyond Methodological ‘ISMS’ in Comparative Education in an Era of Globalisation

Gavin Smith’s pithy insight takes us straight to the heart of the methodological – but also the substantive – problems posed to comparative education by ‘globalisation’. We do not need to defi ne globalisation very precisely to recognise that it has brought about major challenges to comparative education’s objects of study, and the terms and concepts it uses – and this means, we will argue, that it has also brought about changes in the meaning of comparative education itself. In this chapter we will be suggesting that recognising the nature and extent of this problem is one of the most important requirements of being comparative in education in an era of globalisation, for a major consequence of globalisation, not just for comparative education but more generally, is that while it has profound effects on the key features of the economic political and social worlds we inhabit, we remain tied to the concepts with which we described and understood the world prior to globalisation. We will focus here on both the changes brought about by globalisation in the core objects of study of comparative education, ‘national’ ‘education’ ‘systems’ and their consequences for the area of study, both methodological and ‘political’. In terms of the fi rst, we will suggest that the three central elements of the fi eld of comparative education, respectively directly related to those three core objects of study, are in danger of becoming somewhat ossifi ed and of thereby restricting, or even obstructing, rather than expanding, our opportunities to come to terms with globalisation and the ways in which institutional and everyday life has been transformed. We will suggest that the danger can be summed up by suggesting that the ways of approaching the central elements of comparative studies of education, national systems, state-run, of education, are in severe danger of becoming ‘isms’. We may be confronted by, or reliant on, not just methodological nationalism, but methodological statism and methodological educationism. In each case the ‘ism’ is used to suggest

Absences and imaginings: the production of knowledge on globalisation and education

In his paper ‘Grassroots globalization and the research imagination’, Arjun Appadurai challenges academics to develop ways of researching and engaging with the victims of globalisation. A key objective of Appadurais is to sketch out the problematic and build up the terrain on which a democratisation of research about globalisation might take place. I argue that in order to proceed in ways that are productive for developing a critical research imagination, we must begin by first interrogating the conceptual tools we use to understand globalisation. I identify three absences that are evident in current approaches by researchers working on globalisation and education which seem to me to be particularly pressing; first, the absence of a critical spatial analytic; second, the absence of subaltern or alternative knowledges; and third, the absence of research reflecting on the altered terrain and politics of democratic representation as a result of global processes. In the concluding section I return to the idea of a social imaginary and introduce several experiments with the development of dialogical approaches to knowledge production based on participatory parity.