Reimagining Globalization and Education

Fazal Rizvi, Bob Lingard, Risto Rinne, Fazal Rizvi, Bob Lingard, Risto Rinne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000587487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book brings together leading scholars in Global Studies in Education to reflect on how various developments of historic significance have unsettled the neoliberal imaginary of globalization. The developments include greater recognition of inequalities and the changing nature of work and communication; the emergence of new technologies of governance; a greater awareness of geopolitical shifts; the revival of nationalism, populism and anti-globalization sentiments; and the recognition of risks surrounding pandemics and climate change. Drawing from a range of disciplinary perspectives, the chapters in this collection examine how these developments demand new ways of thinking about globalization and its implications for education policy and practice — beyond the neoliberal imaginary.

1 Reimagining globalization and education: an Introduction

Fazal Rizvi, Bob Lingard, and Risto Rinne

DOI: 10.4324/9781003207528-1

The imaginary of a globally connected world is not new. Most of the world’s major religious traditions have long imagined the world as a whole, along with a concept of universal humanity. Incipient global consciousness was evident in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinking. In the nineteenth century, industrial developments enabled capital to go in search of new markets tied to colonial exploits around the world. Within the context of complex articulations between capitalism, colonialism and industrialization, global integration of the world became a distinct possibility. This led early sociologists, such as Saint-Simon, Comte and Marx, to envisage an increasingly interconnected world in which national identities would no longer be so important. In the twentieth century, Weber’s account of the processes of rationalization referred to the global spread of systems of rational action and organization. After the Second World War, a range of international organizations emerged to coordinate interactions across national borders; for example, relating to trade and travel. In the 1970s, World Systems Theory understood capitalism as a single, interconnected, global system in which events on the periphery were structured around the core (Wallerstein, 1974).

From the 1980s, the term ‘globalization’ became widely used to describe the rapidly expanding scope, speed and intensity of global interconnectivities. Driven largely by the revolutionary developments in technology, globalization pointed to the possibilities of capital, people and ideas moving across national borders to an unprecedented extent. People were now able to develop complex social and commercial networks across vast distances, within and beyond national and cultural boundaries. Advances in communication and transport technologies transformed the nature of capitalism with the emergence of transnational modes of production and distribution of goods and services, along with new methods in the coordination of economic exchange. International organizations acquired greater significance, not only in the governance of economic activity but also in the development of public policy and management transformed by a changing perspective on the role and responsibilities of the state. These changes were based on, and promoted, a particular ideological understanding of the nature and scope of global interconnectivity that favored the interests of global capitalism.

By the end of the twentieth century, this understanding became globally hegemonic. It transformed the meaning of the traditional concept of liberalism and rearticulated it into a register. As a political ideology, the traditional notion of liberalism emphasized the freedom of individuals regarding religion, association and thought. It represented a philosophy that treated individuals as the bearers of certain rights, recognized within a system of sovereign law. Neoliberalism, in contrast, is best understood as an ideological construct that sought to reinvent liberalism within the late twentieth century, capitalist context, and emphasized the need to rethink the idea of freedom in economic terms. It looked to the state to remake society in market terms, shaping the ways in which economic freedom should be defined and instantiated. It abandoned the distinction between political and economic realms of life and, instead, highlighted competition as the most important feature of capitalism.

Intellectually, the conceptualization of neoliberalism gained momentum, initially in the 1960s, through the work of economic theorists, such as Hayek and Friedman, as well as a growing number of politically-motivated think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Foundation. These intellectuals suggested that social democracy and the ideas associated with Keynesian economics were far too inefficient and no longer appropriate for a rapidly globalizing economy since they prevented a culture of enterprise and entrepreneurialism from flourishing by subduing economic freedom. They highlighted the importance of competition as the major driver of social mobility and progress, as well as national development. Since the 1970s, the highly ideological notions of neoliberalism succeeded in getting a firm grip on governments and multilateral institutions and have been widely sanctioned and implemented by aid agencies, both national and global, as conditions of loans and grants associated with structural adjustment schemes.

During the 1980s, the neoliberal policies of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom (UK) and Ronald Reagan in the United States (US) sought to apply the core ideas of neoliberalism to almost all spheres of life. Preaching the gospel of small government, they privatized many public services and encouraged public institutions to embrace the operational principles of corporate governance. Such principles were embedded within the new public management theories incorporating assumptions of rational choice theory and audit culture. These ideas were furthered consolidated by the ‘Third Way’ (Giddens, 1998) politics of Bill Clinton in the US and Tony Blair in the UK. They had already begun to be embraced by countries around the world, including many large socialist states, such as China and Vietnam, as well as economically troubled states, like India and Argentina, which had previously resisted the lure of neoliberalism.

By the turn of the century, neoliberal sentiments had become globally hegemonic, acquiring the status of what Michael Apple (2014) refers to as ‘a new common sense’. Using Foucauldian theoretical resources, Wendy Brown (2015, p. 36) argues that, within this neoliberal rationality, human capital has become “both our ‘is’ and our ‘ought’ – what we are said to be, what we should be, and what rationality makes us into through its norms and construction of environment”. This rationality has become so influential that, as Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel (2012) shows, almost everything is now regarded as an object or activity that could be ‘commodified’, acquiring exchange value. Education has not been exempted from this logic of neoliberalism. Systems around the world have applied the assumptions of neoliberalism to reframe the purposes of education, linking them to the requirements of the globalizing knowledge economy, as well as the governance of education. This occurs through attempts to corporatize and privatize the provision of education within a regulatory framework through which the states can steer institutional practices from a distance, often toward more competition.

In 2010, drawing on the work of Charles Taylor and Arjun Appadurai, Rizvi and Lingard (2010) published a book, Globalizing Education Policy, that portrayed neoliberalism as a social imaginary. They argued that, in terms of spatio-temporal specificities, the notion of global interconnectivity was now widely understood in neoliberal terms, as a way both of describing the world and of prescribing how it ought to be. Through a range of examples, they showed how the neoliberal social imaginary of globalization was now used around the world to rearticulate the imperatives of educational reform. Subsequently, Pasi Sahlberg (2011) referred to these imperatives as constituting a ‘Global Educational Reform Movement’ (GERM). GERM highlighted the operational principles of competition as a tool of producing better outcomes for students; school autonomy; freedom of parents to choose; and the necessity of information systems to enable comparisons of the patterns of achievement across students, schools and systems of education. Each of these ideas of reform advocated educational policies and practices with potential to increase economic competitiveness among individuals and nations alike.

Ten years after the publication of Globalizing Education Policy, the contradictions of the neoliberal imaginary of globalization have now become evident, as have its associated educational prescriptions. GERM has failed to produce the outcomes it promised. While the number of students attending school has increased markedly, globally, the quality of educational performance remains uneven. Inequalities of educational opportunities have increased, as educational outcomes are now increasingly linked to the ability to pay. A rapidly growing, privatized education sector has been able to make massive profits while the much-needed resources for public institutions have failed to keep with up with demand. International organizations have become more influential than ever before. These organizations oversee comparative programs of student assessment within the terms of which national systems of education conceptualize their efforts to reform curriculum pedagogy and assessment, and, more importantly, techniques of governance.

As the promise of some of these reforms in education remain undelivered, a number of historically significant developments have taken place over the past decade that have also unsettled the neoliberal imaginary of globalization. These developments include: the greater recognition of inequalities within and across nations; innovations in mobile technologies and shifts in communicative cultures; growing awareness of environmental issues and climate change; the rise of Asia and the changing geopolitics of the world; ‘datafication’ and the consolidation of audit cultures and new modes of governance; developments in artificial intelligence and biotechnology; and the revival of nationalism, populism and anti-globalization sentiments. The recent pandemic associated with COVID-19 has also resulted in new ways of thinking about the state and its role not only in the management of risks but also in coordination of social institutions such as education.

These developments have created conditions whereby the emerging forms of global interconnectivity can no longer rely on the assumptions of the neoliberal imaginary of globalization. Such an imaginary had re-cast the purposes and governance of education in human capital terms, while promoting individual self-interests in an increasingly competitive society. Contemporary conditions have intensified demands for cooperation and collaboration. A new way of interpreting global interconnectivity and interdependence, beyond globalization’s economic possibilities, is required; with the potential for a normativity that is underpinned by the moral and intercultural concerns of education. The neoliberal imaginary has hollowed out public spaces within which education takes place and also helps create. The need to work for the recreation of these spaces, within and across national borders, toward common goods is now greater than ever before. New versions of public spaces are required as a way of ensuring the world does not continue to slide into ever-increasing levels of inequalities, distrust and social conflict.

The essays contained in this book take up the educational challenges to which the emerging historical conditions have given rise. Using the arguments that were presented in 2010 in Globalizing Education Policy as a point of reference, these essays consider how the cultural and political authority of the neoliberal imaginary of globalization can no longer be taken for granted: the idea of globalization itself needs to be reimagined, along with its implications for thinking about educational policy and practice. Each essay in this collection takes up a particular issue or a particular instance of historical transformation and considers how an analysis of this transformation demands new ways of thinking about globalization and its implications for education policy, beyond the neoliberal imaginary. The main aim of this book is thus to promote wide-ranging debates about the shifting conditions under which education now takes place, and the ways in which its purposes and governance may now be reimagined.

The chapters

The chapters in this collection variously describe some of the most critical transformations that have taken place over the past decade, how they have demanded new ways of imagining global interconnectedness and the new educational challenges emergent therefrom. In Chapter 2, Simon Marginson provides a granular account of the changing practices of what he calls ‘communicative globalization’, facilitated by the advent of the Internet, resulting in major shifts in the nature of global capitalism and the ways in which knowledge is now created and utilized. He shows how these shifts have transformed the policy terrain of higher education policies around the world. His discussion focuses on three aspects to this transformation; namely, neoliberal models of national regulation of higher education and internationalization, the Anglo-American hegemony in the organization of knowledge in a one-world science system, and related global practices that embody White Supremacy.

Jane Kenway and Debbie Epstein also address the crises facing systems of higher education. In Chapter 3, they argue that the crises in universities are not simply related to changing manifestations of globalization. Instead, they insist on the need to understand crises in broader historical, spatial and comparative terms. They use Stuart Hall’s notion of ‘conjunctural analysis’ to understand how universities managed what they call a deluge of crises before the COVID-19 pandemic hit them, and how these crises have now been compounded and extended.

In Chapter 4, Johanna Kallo also addresses the ways in which national systems of education have addressed the challenges relating to the COVID-19 crisis, and how they have utilized the knowledge resources provided by Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs). She notes that, while IGOs have been central in the post-Cold War period in circulating global education policy discourses, their claims to epistemic authority have never been static. In recent decades, much of the epistemic authority of IGOs, such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), has been derived from the assumptions of the neoliberal imaginary of globalization. This authority, she shows, was unsettled by the global financial crisis of 2007 and may be further diminished by the global COVID pandemic, the management of which has required nation states to reassert some of the authority they had lost with the knowledge claims of the IGOs. She explores how IGOs might now rethink and reposition their authority, retaining some of assumptions of the neoliberal imaginary while abandoning others.

In recent decades, the claims to technical expertise that the IGOs make have enabled them to provide technocratic information helpful to the national systems of education interested in comparative performance and in identifying policy solutions to complex problems of educational governance. Recent developments in computational technologies have expand their role in policy processes. Chapters 5 and 6 examine how recent developments in datafication and digitalization and in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are giving rise to various new policy concerns in education. In their chapter, Steven Lewis, Jessica Holloway and Bob Lingard argue that these developments are altering the ways in which policies are now developed and analyzed. Kalervo Gulson demonstrates, in his chapter, how the growing usage of AI by educational systems is concerned with what he calls anticipatory governance, an attempt to control the future, as a complement to existing approaches to policy production. He shows how attempts to regulate this usage are, at best, partial and thus constitute a new policy problem for education systems.

In Chapter 7, Hugh Lauder also explores the connections between education and labor markets, both national and global. He shows how claims to meritocracy were always difficult to maintain but have now become even more unsustainable because of dysfunctional labor markets. The discourses of human capital theory and the knowledge economy, circulated by the OECD as necessary frames for education policy can no longer be justified. What is required, he argues, is not only a universal basic wage but a new form of liberal education aimed at producing citizens able to critically think about issues such as the climate emergency and threats to democracy.

Issues of regulation are central to Adriàn Zancajo, Toni Verger and Clara Fontdevila’s analysis in Chapter 8 of the swelling spaces of educational privatization. They interrogate the growing expansion of educational markets through public–private partnerships in education, along with the so-called government-funded, autonomous, free schools and, in developing nations, low-fee, for-profit schools. They argue that, since the research evidence globally is strong in its conclusion that privatization of education in its various forms exacerbates inequalities, there is a need for regulatory frames that recognize the context-sensitive nature of privatization in different national systems.

In Chapter 9, Tero Järvinen documents the growth in inequalities within and across nations but argues that the nature of these inequalities cannot be adequately understood without appreciating their impact on the identity formation of young people. He insists that redistributive education policies need to deal with questions of social inequalities and identity in tandem, recognizing, at the same time, how they are locally experienced within the context of shifting global transformations.

In Chapter 10, Suvi Jokila, Arto Jauhiainen, and Marja Peura pick up the theme of the global mobility, focusing on the mobility of researchers and students. They look at how this has been disrupted by the experiences of COVID-19. They ponder wha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• 1 Reimagining globalization and education: an Introduction
• 2 Globalization in higher education: The good, the bad and the ugly
• 3 The crisis deluge and the beleaguered university
• 4 Rethinking the authority of inter-governmental organizations in education
• 5 Emergent developments in the datafication and digitalization of education
• 6 Artificial Intelligence and a new global policy problem in education
• 7 Education and shifts in the global economy: Meritocracy and the changing nature of work
• 8 Educational privatization Expanding spaces and new global regulatory trends
• 9 Thinking about social inequalities and marginalization in education under shifting global conditions
• 10 Rethinking academic mobility through emerging global challenges
• 11 Global biopolitics of climate change: Affect, digital governance, and education
• 12 Reconfiguring education reform in nordic countries under ever-changing conditions of globalization
• 13 The Rise of China and the Next Wave of Globalization: The Chinese Dream, the Belt and Road Initiative and the ‘Asian century’
• 14 The complexities and paradoxes of decolonization in education
• 15 Education and the politics of anti-globalization
• Index