Neo-liberalism: an over-worked concept?

Neo-liberalism has to be one of the most frequently used terms in the social sciences. Barely mentioned at the end of the 1980s, it was pretty popular by the turn of the century, and is now commonplace. But what does it mean – and particularly why is it so common in educational research?

I should probably start by justifying my claim that the term is commonly used. A text search of the Journal of Education Policy since 1997 shows 196 items that use the word ‘neo-liberal’, and 53 in the British Educational Research Journal. This may reflect a British tendency to engage in policy commentary, as there were only 23 such items in the Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, and only five in the American Educational Research Journal.

If I had enough time, I’d look systematically at how the word is used. But here are my impressions, based on ways in which I’ve noticed people using the terms at conferences and in their publications.

First, and foremost, neo-liberalism is usually denotes something bad; it is a highly normative term, and it is almost always meant to be derogatory. The (usually unstated) understanding is that neo-liberalism is to be contrasted with social democratic welfarism, which is the implied positive to neo-liberalism’s negative.

Second, the word is rarely defined. In a review of 148 articles on neo-liberalism in politics and development journals in 2009, two political scientists found not one that focused on the definition and usage of the term. The same is true of many other social sciences, and if there is any such definitional discussion in educational studies, I’ve yet to encounter it.

Third, people who use the term rarely provide any references to neo-liberal writers and thinkers. Like Stephen Ball in his recent book, if they identify any sources at all, then the reference is to thinkers who share their negative view of neo-liberalism. This strikes me as poor scholarship, and something we criticise our students for when they do the same. But not naming the writers means that you don’t need to discuss their ideas.

Fourth, you then don’t need to discuss how they came to exert any influence. Neo-liberalism is an abstraction. Like ‘globalised/globalisation’, it serves as a floating adjective, or a disembodied force.Neo-liberal stuff happens. Well, yes, perhaps it does, but why did these ideas become popular and who puts them into practice? Who resists them, or fails to resist them, and why?

And finally, the term is so loose that it gets applied to any policy or approach one chooses. New Labour in Britain, Merkel in Germany, Clinton and Bush, the World Bank and Alex Salmond – all can be viewed, and have been, through the furry lens of neo-liberalism.

Of course, these are all generalisations. I’ve come across plenty of exceptions, such as Simon Marginson’s powerful analyses of markets in higher education: he references Milton Friedman, the anti-Keynesian who led the Chicago School of Economics (who defined himself, if anything, as a ‘classical liberal’ – nothing ‘neo’ about him!).  And Marginson sort of defines the term, if rather loosely, as a ‘discourse’ that promotes the role of markets. Otherwise, he neatly fits my portrait, using ‘neo-liberal’ as a floating adjective (most frequently, ‘neo-liberal discourse’ and ‘neo-liberal imaginary’).

In an interesting paper some years ago, the Marxist Chris Harman said that the problem with ‘neo-liberalism’ was that it obscured an important distinction: it became unclear whether the author or protester who used the term was objecting to capitalism as such, or only to a particular regime of capitalism. Harman himself doubted whether neo-liberalism really had any substance, arguing that there was little evidence of a rolling-back of the state, and plenty of evidence of continued faith in Keynesian government spending funded by borrowing.

Without buying into all of Harman’s critique, I think he hit on something important. Slippery concepts serve a purpose, and neo-liberalism is nothing if not slippery. It allows us to scorn that which we are against without scrutinising why these ideas found any purchase, and without saying what we would like to see instead: weak scholarship and watery politics.

Why I’m not writing a chapter about lifelong learning

I’ve just rejected an invitation to write an entry for the International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences. The editors wanted me to write 5,000 words covering life course approaches to education and learning. It’s an easy enough task, and it is important to ensure that our field is well represented in multi-disciplinary collections like this, so normally I’d have been happy to get on with the job.

Earlier this year, I joined a growing group of academics who are taking action against commercial publishers who block public access to research. Elsevier, who are publishing this Encyclopedia, are a particular focus of attention because they have so actively lobbied governments, especially in the USA, to enact legislation blocking the free exchange of information. They also charge exorbitantly high prices for subscriptions to individual journals, then offer discounts to libraries who buy ‘bundles’ of journals (many of which they do now want).

This is an enormously profitable business. In 2010, Elsevier reported a profit margin of 36% on revenues of $3.2 billion. Very little of this makes its way back to academics or their universities. Like most people, I never expected to make money from academic publishing, so let me be very clear that I am not boycotting Elsevier because I want a fatter slice of the pie.

The first edition of this Encyclopedia is still available, apparently, at the price of €7,360. Elsevier offered me a fee of $100 for my chapter – just 2 cents a word, or 1 cent after tax (and we could write pages about that as well).

There’s nothing wrong with making a living. But academic research is largely funded from the public purse – yet commercial publishers ensure that the public never get to see most of it, except in the garbled form of a press report. According to the specimen contract, Elsevier allow authors ‘the right to post the Contribution on a secure network (not accessible to the public) within your institution’.

Note that qualification – not accessible to the public. In short, those who have paid for my research. I find this abhorrent, and that is why I am a supporter of open access publishing, which makes academic research available online. It isn’t the answer to all our prayers, and it doesn’t resolve the problems of ensuring that our research is understood and accessible. That is another challenge. In the meantime, I’m supporting the Cost of Knowledge movement, and encourage others to do likewise.

For details of the Cost of Knowledge boycott, see: http://thecostofknowledge.com/

Michael Gove and the future of educational research in Britain

How will the Government’s plans for teacher training affect research? Like a number of other countries, teacher training in England will involve an expanded role for schools. Michael Gove expects universities to work in close partnership with 500 designated teaching schools; he will designate a number of University Teaching Schools, which will combine teaching with teacher training and research. It also looks as though the Government intends to take an even closer role in setting approved numbers for initial teacher training, and meanwhile it is considering ending the requirement for lecturers in further education to possess a teaching qualification.

Almost everyone expects these changes to lead to significant reductions in teaching funding for university education departments. How else can the new partnerships be funded? And the new policies will be implemented in a context of austerity, where colleges and schools are looking to make savings in their training and development budgets, and where we are all wondering how potential applicants will view the new tuition fees. Finally, teacher education and development is already pretty turbulent: funded student numbers can go up and down, and one bad inspection report can jeopardise a whole programme.

Reductions in teacher training numbers, cuts in funding, and increased unpredictability: all of these will lead some universities to review their involvement in education. The most globally-minded have the least to lose in cutting education altogether; as they see it, the subject is volatile, poorly funded, attracts few overseas students, and does nothing for their global league table performance. Those universities that struggle to recruit at the best of times, on the other hand, may be keen to dance to any tune Gove calls, but are unlikely to fit his definition of excellence.

Elsewhere, there will be choices to be made, based on a range of criteria. I worked at a reasonably distinguished university that was deeply disappointed at the research performance of its education department, but took the view that links with a hundred local schools and their teachers were a valuable strategic asset. I know of other institutions where the decision will be much more finely balanced.

Even at best, we can expect many education departments to lose funding for their teaching. This will inevitably have consequences for their research. The reason is that hardly any university department, in any subject, can do decent research on the basis of its funding council grant for research. If it loses significant levels of teaching income, then the University will look to make savings. They can maintain research if the cuts are small, but if they are large enough, then they will have to cut back on core staff numbers.

Hence the impact on research. The recent fate of adult education research in British universities is a signal of what can go wrong. Most of the researchers were partly financed through the teaching grant, based either on their role in teacher education (mostly masters’ level courses) or in adult education (mostly part-time). Once the teaching went, the research income alone was not enough to sustain their activity. While there is still a body of research, it is much smaller than a decade ago – and much more fragmented, with much of it taking place outside education departments.

Should we care? There is a case for arguing that the education research community – expected to be the second largest discipline in the next Research Evaluation exercise – is artificially inflated by the presence of initial teacher education in the universities. The ESRC’s review of the health of the social sciences showed that many lecturers come from the field of teaching, and become active researchers at a relatively late stage of their careers. I have certainly heard it said that many of the late entry researchers have experienced a narrow and weak research training, and I’ve also heard it said that the discipline has a long tail of writing that is parochial, uncritical and lacking in rigour. So you could conclude that educational research is ripe for a cull.

Yet at its best, educational research in Britain is highly regarded. The latest QS world university rankings place four British (Cambridge, Oxford, the Institute of Education and King’s College) in the world’s top twenty. Nine come from the USA, three from Australia, and one each from Hong Kong, Canada, Singapore and Japan. This ranking is of course methodologically limited: it is often criticised for rewarding size, favouring systems with high levels of international staff, ignoring the ‘halo’ effect of prestigious universities, and relying on citations accounts that are biased towards English. But it is supported by other evidence suggesting that for its size, Britain’s educational research community is pretty strong.

Will the changes in teacher training damage this track record? Based on the recent experience of adult education research, I think it highly likely that it will lead to a significant erosion of research capacity. Whether this matters, other than to the individuals involved, depends of course on your view of what educational research contributes to the wellbeing of our society.

How far should universities go to avoid engaging with their local communities?

 

A senior member of a major British adult education provider told me last week that he was disappointed by the higher education sector, finding it aloof and unresponsive. This had not always been his experience, so he was wondering whether I thought the universities were now out of the adult learning field altogether. His view was that this was largely caused by research assessment regimes, which have rewarded academics who impress other academics, while discouraging any wider engagement in the community.

This is probably a reasonable indictment of the old Research Assessment Exercise. Or, more accurately, it is a fair description of how many academics and their managers chose to respond to the old RAE. Nor is this simply a British phenomenon. In many countries, academic research is measured either by the numbers of times that their work is cited by other academics, or by the number of papers that they publish in journals that are highly regarded by other academics.

This is even worse than the old RAE. It leads to entirely predictable games-playing, as academics are clever folk who will devise the most effective ways of achieving high citations, or getting into those highly-rated journals.  Governments appear to be satisfied with this, as they invariably either boast about the number of “our scientists” who perform well on this measure, or berate their nation’s scholars for failing to measure up. But whichever system was used, the result has been to turn academics inwards, encouraging them to speak above all to their own peers, and to ignore the wider community (with the obvious exception of those organisations who pay for and commission various commercially driven projects).

This seems to me entirely counter-productive. If we cannot explain our research to the wider community, and justify it to the public, then we cannot expect our research to command public support. Rather, we should expect much of the public to mistrust academics, viewing them either as self-indulgent and wildly out of touch, or as in the pay of large vested interests. Over time, this is bound to undermine the political consensus in favour of publicly funded academic research.

I am therefore moderately encouraged by a number of recent developments. The first is the inclusion of ‘impact’ in the new research assessment system. This requires academics to show that high quality research has in some way influenced the wider public, and has had benefits for them. This will explicitly include the measurement of impact on civil society and third sector organisations as well as on the public and private sectors. This is certainly not without its problems – not the least of which is that the sector has limited experience of assessing the impact of research on people who are not other academics. But it is a step in the right direction.

The second is the decision of several universities to appoint professors specialising in the public understanding of science. Marcus du Sautoy is probably the best known of these, thanks to his broadcasting collaboration with the comedian Dara O’Briain. Sheffield has gone a step further, appointing Angie Hobbs as professor in the public understanding of philosophy. Again, this seems to me to be a sensible decision by those universities that are far-sighted enough to recognise that an informed public opinion is in their long term interests as much as anybody’s.

The third is the growing willingness of academic researchers to engage with those who criticise and protest against their work. In the most recent case, scientists at Rothamsted Institute of Arable Crops Research offered to meet a direct action group of anti-GM protesters to discuss their concerns. The protesters in turn called for an open debate, which the two sides are now arranging. It is unlikely that this dialogue will resolve all the differences, which run deep, but it is a world away from the violent police-led responses of the past.

These are welcome developments, though it probably goes without saying that I’d like to see them become the norm rather than the exception. If universities are public institutions then why would they not expect all of their researchers to promote public understanding of their work? Perhaps it should be a requirement of all public research funding that the researchers should be willing to communicate their findings to the local community, and indeed listen to what the community thinks of it.

 

Should educational research be irrelevant?

Recently I received the further particulars for a post in a Swedish university who want to recruit a professor of higher education. The university has a strong scholarly tradition, and likes to mention in a quiet Swedish way that it ranks rather well in European league tables.  As you might expect, the FPs duly emphasised research proficiency and documented teaching excellence. And they also stated that ‘strong emphasis’ was placed on the candidate’s ability to ‘collaborate with the surrounding society and to inform about the work of research and development’.

By coincidence, I had just been reading the outraged responses of social scientists to Aditya Chakrabortty’s report from the 2012 conference of the British Sociological Association. Chakrabortty had suggested that British social scientists had become a bit too complacent, a tad too inward-looking, even a spot too self-referential – or perhaps he meant self-reverential. Why, he asked, were social scientists failing to leap into the gap left behind by the collapse of mainstream economics? Why were sociologists or political scientists worrying about trivia, “through a Foucauldian lens”, rather than tackling international finance or the collapse of social support? Foucault, let me add, often seems to speak through his lens.

These criticisms might also be made of much educational research. If we take the 2011 SCUTREA conference as a case study, then research into the current economic crisis was remarkable only for its absence. Not a single presenter used the words ‘recession’, ‘riot’, ‘poverty’, ‘inequality’, ‘unemployment’ or ‘unemployed’ in the titles of their papers; the economic crisis did not feature in any of the presentations.

I do not for a minute think that this indicates that none of the conference participants were interested in these issues, or saw them as having no connection with adult learning. And I acknowledge that there is excellent educational research which goes engage with wider public and policy concerns. I’ve just been reading two such studies – a thrilling and challenging inquiry into white middle class families who send their children to local state schools in London, and a penetrating analysis of the ways that education and other factors help shape social cohesion in different types of society.

Nor am I opposed to researching trivia. I heard the other day that one of my former colleagues is now studying spitting, and why not? Researchers can only help us understand everyday life, and the meaning we attach to it, if they investigate everyday practices and beliefs. If the work is well designed and the topic carefully chosen, then analyses of trivia can become microcosms of our social world.

All the same, I fear that Chakrabortty has a point. Many academic researchers in education now view their work, and increasingly so, as separate from the major political and cultural debates that go on ‘out there’. Two recent trends seem to me to be associated with this rejection of wider political and cultural debate. The first is the technical preoccupation with figuring out “what works”, and packaging it in handy tool-kits. I like a reliable tool-kit as much as the next teacher, but a bit of experience teaches us that “best practice” works well in one context and not so well in another. And there’s more to life than best practice.

Second is the theoretical turn in educational studies. This approach scorns “what works” research, and sometimes it scorns any empirical work whatsoever. Working with theory has a number of advantages; it doesn’t cost much, it doesn’t involve talking to strangers, and it doesn’t involve the risk of inconvenient encounters with the messy world of practice.

At its best, theoretical insights can completely refashion how you understand the world. At worst, and too often for comfort, you end up sitting in a conference listening to a rather pedestrian and formulaic reworking of Theoretician X in relation to Educational Issue Y. To quote my colleague Gert Biesta, it’s like asking “What would Foucault say”?

Again, I like a good theory as much as the next reader of Kurt Lewin (in case you’ve forgotten, he once said there was nothing as practical as a good theory), but I fear that those take the theoretical turn have sometimes lost sight of good theory. Rather, they are mesmerised by new theory, though invariably each new theory soon becomes old hat. In time, the latest and greatest theory will be as modish as a kipper tie – a warning that should be issued to all newly-fledged academics at the start of their career.

Perhaps you can hear the distant rasping sound of an old fart, and it is true – my undergraduate experience in sociology began with Gramsci, who was then dumped in favour of Althusser, who in turn was overthrown by Foucault – all to be followed by the pleasure of reading, as a doctoral student, Edward Thompson’s enjoyable and destructive, but now largely unreadable The Poverty of Theory.

Research with a wider social purpose seems to me to have fallen in popularity, at least inside the academy. There’s some much more impressive work these days going on in some of the think tanks, as well as in the networked groups of scholars and others who come together often online in forums such as Uneconomics. The problem with the think tanks is that they depend on some fairly soft funding, and the problem with the online groupings is that they are rather disparate and fragmented; they also let the established academics off the hook.

So I rather welcome the idea that professors of education should be required to explain their research to the local community, and indeed listen in turn to what they think about it. I’m not all that familiar with Scandinavian societies, but I found this requirement admirable. Sweden is a relatively small country, but it funds its universities generously, and also provides comparatively high levels of student support.  The idea that universities are morally obliged to give something in return was, I need hardly add, the founding notion behind extra-mural education, and it’s good to see any sign that it is being renewed.

Aditya Chakrabortty, Economics has failed us: but where are the fresh voices?, Guardian, 16 April 2012 – http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/16/economics-has-failed-us-alternative-voices

Andy Green and Germ Janmaat, Regimes of social cohesion: cocieties and the crisis of globalisation. Palgrave

Diane Reay, Gill Crozier and David James, White middle-class identities and urban schooling, Palgrave Macmillan