Education Policy

Globalization, Citizenship and Democracy

Mark Olssen, John A Codd, Anne-Marie O?Neill, Anne-Marie O?Neill, Anne-Marie O?Neill, Anne-Marie O?Neill, Anne-Marie O?Neill

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781446233498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

`Education policy is now a global matter and all the more complex for that. Mark Olssen, John Codd and Ann-Marie O?Neill do us an invaluable service in producing a carefully theorised guide to current issues and key concerns - this is an important, erudite and very practical book? - Stephen J Ball, Education Policy Research Unit, University of London

`Given the global reach of neoliberal policies, we need cogent books that enable us to better understand the major effects such tendencies have. Education Policy is such a book. It is insightful and well written--and should be read by all of us who care deeply about what is happening in education in international contexts? - Michael W Apple, Author of ?Educating the "Right" Way and John Bascom Professor of Education University of Wisconsin, Madison

`I really am taken with the book, the range and depth of analysis are truly impressive. This book is a magnum opus and everyone in the area should read it?- Hugh Lauder, University of Bath

`In their insightful and comprehensive book on education policy Mark Olssen, John Codd and Anne-Marie O?Neill wrestle with the big questions of citizenship and democracy in an age of globalization. They argue that ducation policy in the 21st century is the key to security, sustainability and survival. The book, anchored in the poststructuralist perspective of Michel Foucault, traverses the whole territory of education policy not only methods and approaches of policy analysis and the dominant political perspectives that influence policy-classical liberalism, social democracy and neo-liberalism--but also those policy areas that require the closest scrutiny: markets, trust, professionalism, choice, diversity, and finally, community, citizenship and democracy. This is the new policy bible for educationalists - it is at once systematic, provocative and instructive? - Michael A Peters, Research Professor, University of Glasgow

?It is rare indeed for books with such ambitious scope as this one to appear within educational scholarship... This is an important book for any graduate student who is undertaking work on any aspect of education policy? - Education Review

This book provides an international perspective on education policy, and of the role and function of education in the global economy. The authors present a Foucauldian perspective on the politics of liberal education, within a theoretical framework necessary for the critical analysis of education policy.

The authors set out the analyses necessary for understanding the restructuring in education and social policy that has occurred in many countries affected by the resurgence of neo-liberal political theory. They examine education policy in relation to globalization, citizenship and democracy. The authors argue that globalization is an extension of neoliberalism and is destructive of the nation state, community and democracy. They show the importance of education in building strong democratic nation states and global communities based on cultural identity and inter-cultural awareness.

This book is essential reading for students of education policy studies and social policy analysis.

1

Reading Education Policy in the Global Era

The thesis at the centre of this book is that education policy in the twenty-first century is the key to global security, sustainability and survival. The events of 11 September 2001 (9/11) have shown that the era of global interdependence and interconnectivity is also an era in which human survival is threatened not only by the actions of states with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) but also by the actions of transnational networks of individuals perpetrating acts of terrorism (AOT). Thus, the era of globalization brings urgency to the need for a new world order in which nation-states can develop policies that will contribute to and sustain forms of international governance. We argue in this book that education policies are central to such a global mission.

Globalization, we contend, is not a new phenomenon but it is becoming more complex and more pervasive with the advent of new technologies and the expansion of global markets. Contrary to what some would argue, nation-states, in our view, are not disappearing. However, internally they are changing in their spheres of control, while externally they are radically unequal in the extent of their international influence. Global governance, we argue, is necessary for global survival, but such governance cannot be established and maintained without the support of strong democratic nation-states. This has been clearly evidenced in the Iraq crisis of 2002–03, where the authority of the United Nations has been challenged both by Iraq, as an undemocratic ‘rogue state’ and also, paradoxically, by the USA and Britain, ostensibly democratic states that have been unwilling to concede to the majority view of the United Nations Security Council. Thus, the disparities of power amongst states can undermine processes of global governance and prevent the attainment of solutions to major crises. Because inter-state democracy at the global level is not viable, it is necessary to build durable democratic institutions within nation-states. The problem is, however, that the neoliberalism of recent times has seriously eroded the process of democracy within most ostensibly ‘liberal democratic’ states.

Our argument is that a deep and robust democracy at a national level requires a strong civil society based on norms of trust and active responsible citizenship and that education is central to such a goal. Thus, the strong education state is necessary to sustain democracy at the national level so that strong democratic nation-states can buttress forms of international governance and ensure that globalization becomes a force for global sustainability and survival.

Reading education policy

The book sets out a broad theoretical framework for a critical reading of state produced educational policy texts. To this end, it shows the inadequacy of earlier approaches to policy that have their origins in the hegemonic dominance of liberalism underlying traditional educational discourses. The development of the policy sciences, which sought to derive so called ‘objective’, value-free methods for the writing and reading of policy, represent an attempt to give technical and scientific sophistication to the policy process in order to buttress its intellectual legitimacy. Such approaches to policy-making and policy analysis, in our view, serve to legitimate forms of liberal and neoliberal state hegemony.

This study demonstrates the conceptual complexity of reading state-produced policy discourse. It argues that reading neoliberal educational policy is not just a matter of understanding its educational context or reading it as the ‘pronouncements’ of ‘the policy-makers’. It requires an understanding of the dynamics of the various elements of the social structure and their intersections in the context of history. Policy documents are discursive embodiments of the balance of these dynamics as they underlie social relations at particular points in time. It is for this reason that the discursive formations they contain constitute a highly politicized form of public rhetoric; symbolic systems which await decoding. If official policy texts are political, cultural and economic as much as they are educational treatises, the meanings of the discourses embedded in these texts await decoding so as to reveal the real relations that this specifically cultural form of official discourse helps to construct, reconstruct and conceal. In the analysis of educational policy, this theoretical decoding has been done in different ways, depending upon the philosophical assumptions entailed within the theories used.

There was a time when educational policy as policy was taken for granted and policy-making was seen more as a democratic consensual process than a political one. Policy analysis, if it were even identified as such, was taken to be a somewhat sterile and invisible activity carried out by statisticians and officials in government departments. Clearly that is no longer the case. Today, educational policies are the focus of considerable controversy and overt public contestation. The analysis of such policies, moreover, is an activity undertaken both by officials within the system, who now call themselves policy analysts, and various commentators or critics outside the system who also presume that what they do is policy analysis. Educational policy-making has become highly politicized.

In the past 25 years, critical educational scholarship has endeavoured to place the formulation, meanings and real effects of educational policy within the wider theoretical context of critical theory. Indeed, 20 years ago, Prunty (1984: 3), in articulating the importance of what he called the ‘critical-perspective’, spoke of venturing ‘onto an intellectual landscape with few paths and signposts … a new social terrain’. The ways that critical theorists have traversed this landscape have varied according to their intellectual concerns and political commitments. For example, in a paper addressing the construction of inequality in state produced reports on education, Apple (1986: 174) argued that such texts were important ideological constructions, not only as indicators of shifts in rationales but as ‘part of the cultural production of such altered public discourse and as such (they) need(ed) to be seen as constitutive elements of a particular hegemonic project’. Likewise, in a discussion on the development of a political sociology of educational policy-making, Torres (1989: 83) reiterated the need to situate such production within the context of a theory of politics. Thus, he argued for the application to policy of a critical theory of power, one which interrogated the role of bureaucratic organizations, interlinked to a theory of the state.

Recognizing the political nature of educational policy, this book argues for the need to reject the dominant liberal/idealist inclination of education studies and the technicist theories of the policy sciences. In essence, our argument is that education policy must be contextualized both nationally and globally as a transformative discourse that can have real social effects in response to contemporary crises of survival and sustainability, such as those that follow the events of 9/11. Primarily, this implies a rejection of their pervasive reliance on positivist epistemologies and positivist methodologies as well as many of the dominant insights in the liberal conception of the political system. In opposition to both classical liberal and neoliberal conceptions of policy, this study advocates a critical orientation to educational policy deriving theoretical and methodological insights from critical social theory, and more specifically from the work of the French post-structuralist, Michele Foucault. Central to such foci is a conception of policy as a politically, socially and historically contextualized practice or set of practices. Rather than aiming to present a detailed account of the whole field of educational policy, what we aim to do in this study is elucidate an approach to the critical ‘reading’ of educational policy. In other words, what we aim to present the reader with is a way of understanding, conceptualizing and analysing educational policy: what it is, why it is important and what it means. The meanings of policy texts, we will argue, do not reside unproblematically in the text itself as something to be ‘discovered’ or rendered ‘visible’, but in the relationship between the text and the social structure. The meaning and significance of policy at any particular historical juncture is something that must be rendered intelligible through a process of interrogation, by ascertaining the way that discursive contexts inherent within the social and historical process manifest themselves in and through textual production, formulation and articulation.

Although our analysis in this study is relevant to policy restructuring in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries such as the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, our particular approach is dictated more by a concern with the supranational contexts of policy formulation and development than it is by particularized concerns with understanding policy development within specific national contexts. Notwithstanding certain tendencies within both recent postmodernist and ‘older-styled’ positivistic studies to emphasize the ‘local’ and the ‘specific’ as against the ‘interrelatedness’ of the ‘political’, ‘economic’, ‘cultural’ and ‘social’, our study seeks to illuminate how discursive practices and assumptions which operate supranationally come to effect specific national policy developments. Where we do focus on particular national contexts our examples seek to illuminate general processes at the level of nation-states and their interrelations. These include how discursive ideologies come to influence policy developments within a particular nation-state, and how the nation-state as a specific bounded region can no longer protect national community life from supranational influences, as the events of 9/11 have so dramatically shown. In this sense, the nation-state is ‘too small’ to be entirely effective and ‘too large’ to be entirely irrelevant. Yet a further issue concerns how the existence of dominant discursive contexts of policy development are, if not truly international, common to more than one country and how the patterns of this commonality must be understood historically, culturally, politically and economically.

Theories of globalization

Globalization theorists have emphasized the ‘new’ ways in which the individual nation-state is influenced by the international world order. Broadly these can be considered in relation to economic, cultural and political categories, each of which is interrelated. Moreover, the different forms of globalization have been shaped by technological progress. Thus the rapid development in the past 30 or so years of communication and transport technologies has reduced the possibility of individual nation-states maintaining separate economic policies. As a consequence of these new technologies, it is suggested that markets, governments and independent political groups within specific nation-states become ‘more sensitively adjusted’ to each other (Held, 1991: 145). As the patterns of interaction and communication typically cross-cut national boundaries, so the cultural identities traditionally defined within these boundaries are increasingly undercut (Wallerstein, 1974).

Economic globalization

Economic globalization is about processes that enable the free flow of goods, services, investments, labour and information across national borders in order to maximize capital accumulation. Thus, global capitalism involves the com-modification of all kinds of human endeavour in order to produce surplus value and profit. The transnational corporation is the main vehicle through which this surplus value is appropriated and accumulated as profit. It also occurs through the medium of financial and share markets. Many transnational corporations have more power and are larger economic entities than a number of nation-states. In 1998, for example, there were 29 such corporations with larger economies than New Zealand (Rugman, 2001: 58). Moreover, as Kelsey (2002: 16) points out, ‘the top 200 transnationals account for over one quarter of the world’s economic activity, but employ less than one percent of its workforce’.

At an economic level, there is a major incongruence between the boundaries of the nation-state and the systematic interests of economic units within the international community. This relates centrally to the internationalization of production investment and exchange, and of financial transactions between international banks and investment houses which have little to do with, and which frequently are disjunctive with, the interests, goals and strategies of individual nation-states. Both multinational enterprises and financial institutions plan and execute their operations with a world economy in mind. As a consequence, the monetary and fiscal policies of individual nation-states are increasingly dominated by developments in international financial markets and by the decisions of the international financial and business community.

The well-known and controversial journalist, John Pilger (2002: 2) describes ‘global economy’ as a modern Orwellian term, such that:

On the surface, it is instant financial trading, mobile phones, McDonald’s, Starbucks, holidays booked on the net. Beneath this gloss, it is the globalization of poverty, a world where most human beings never make a phone call and live on less than two dollars a day, where 6,000 children die every day from diarrhoea because most have no access to clean water.

Predictably, economic globalization has strong opponents (Chomsky, 1999; Gray, 1998; Mander and Goldsmith, 1996) and equally strong advocates (Cable, 1999) as well as those who are cautiously sceptical (Soros, 2002; Stiglitz, 2002). Political parties that champion the so-called ‘third way’, such as New Labour in Britain and New Zealand’s Labour-led government since 1999, consider economic globalization to be a reality that has to be accommodated with a mixture of enthusiasm and pragmatism.

Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and winner of the 2001 Nobel prize for economics, has recently argued (2002: 214) that although economic globalization has the potential to be a force for good, it has not worked for millions of people. He lays much of the blame for this squarely on the transnational economic institutions:

Globalization has brought better health, as well as an active global civil society fighting for more democracy and greater social justice. The problem is not with globalization, but with how it has been managed. Part of the problem lies with the international economic institutions, with the IMF, World Bank, and WTO, which help set the rules of the game. They have done so in ways that, all too often, have served the interests of the more advanced industrialized countries – and particular interests within those countries – rather than those of the developing world.

Anthony Giddens, arguably the most influential theorist of third way politics, suggests that ‘Economic globalization, by and large, has been a success. The problem is how to maximize its positive consequences while limiting its less fortunate effects’ (Giddens, 2000: 124). In support of this claim, Giddens refers to improved global levels of employment and improved living conditions in some Asian countries. But Giddens (1999: 12) also acknowledges that globalization is ‘a complex set of processes, not a single one’. Thus, globalization has cultural and political dimensions as well as economic dimensions (Burbules and Torres, 2000).

Cultural globalization

At a cultural level, globalization involves the expansion of Western (especially American and British) culture to all corners of the globe, promoting particular values that are supportive of consumerism and capital accumulation. Because culture is what makes life meaningful for people, global images and symbolic representations, such as those contained in marketing or advertising texts, popular music or films, can influence people’s sense of identity and belonging, their values, beliefs and aspirations. While it is important not to conflate global culture and the communication technologies through which it is transmitted, there can be no doubt that such technologies have made possible the complex connectivity of cultural globalization (Tomlinson, 1999).

Cultural globalization is largely transmitted by the expansion of the transnational enterprises, such that, as the 1998 Nobel prize-winning economist, Amartya Sen (1999: 240), has commented:

The contemporary world is dominated by the West, and even though the imperial authority of the erstwhile rulers of the world has declined, the dominance of the West remains as strong as ever – in some ways stronger than before, especially in cultural matters. The sun does not set on the empires of Coca-Cola or MTV.

This cultural hegemony that pushes the values of consumerism and standardization also invokes forces of resistance and movements for the assertion of local interests. Many indigenous groups, therefore, view globalization as a renewed form of colonization, threatening to destroy their cultures and exploit their peoples. Jane Kelsey (2002: 10) gives a biting account of these effects, as follows:

Global capitalism reduces the natural and spiritual world to tradeable commodities and rationalizes its (and their) exploitation. This destroys the enduring relationships and balance between economic, social, cultural and spiritual life and denies their responsibility as the guardians of that lifeworld. Exclusion from, or exploitation on the periphery of, this global economy compounds the powerlessness, poverty and dispossession of previous eras.

As with economic globalization, cultural globalization is closely linked to the development of new information technologies. The Internet, for instance, has enabled the growth of mass communications that can reach to all corners of the planet. But this does not mean that all people have access to these forms of communication. The ‘digital divide’, both within nations and globally, has given rise to a new kind of structural inequality. While there is increased cultural interconnectedness across nations as a result of the mass media, and also as the result of greater movements of people in migration, tourism and the growth of global economic and political institutions, there is also a heightened awareness, if not understanding, of cultural differences. Hence, there is no tendency towards a single integrated global culture. On the contrary, cultural globalization has contradictory or oppositional effects, providing an impetus for the revival of local cultural identities. As Giddens (1999: 13) points out:

Most people think of globalization as simply ‘pulling away’ power or influence from local communities and nations into the global arena. And indeed this is one of its consequences. Nations do lose some of the economic power they once had. Yet it also has an opposite...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Reading Education Policy in the Global Era
• 2 The Post-structuralism of Foucault
• 3 Critical Policy Analysis: A Foucauldian Approach
• 4 Policy as Text and Policy as Discourse: A Framework for Analysis
• 5 Classical Liberalism
• 6 Social Democratic Liberalism
• 7 The Ascendancy of Neoliberalism
• 8 Neoliberal Theories of Institutional Restructuring
• 9 Markets, Professionalism, Trust
• 10 Discourses of Choice, Inequality and Social Diversity
• 11 Democracy, Citizenship and the ‘Thin’ Community
• 12 Globalization, Democracy and Education
• Bibliography
• Index