Neoliberalism, Performativity and Research

This paper provides a critical analysis of New Zealand’s Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF). The first section sketches the development and implementation of the PBRF. The second section evaluates the scheme, concentrating on three themes: the relationship between privatization, competition and research performance; the standardization of research; and motivations for research. The paper acknowledges the thorough work completed by the Tertiary Education Advisory Commission and other policy groups in laying the foundation for the adoption of performance-based research funding in New Zealand. It is argued, however, that when viewed in its larger context, the PBRF constitutes a continuation of neoliberal trends already well established in New Zealand’s tertiary education system.     

Performativity,Performance and Education

This article explores Lyotard’s notion of performativity through an engagement with McKenzie’s analysis of performance as a ‘formation of knowledge and power’ that has displaced the notion of discipline as the tool for social evaluation. Through conditions of ‘performance’ capitalism, education is to conform to a logic of performativity that ensures not only the efficient operation of the state in the world market, but also the continuation of a global culture of performance. I further trace Lyotard’s postmodern aesthetic of experimentation through performance as an ‘event’ in an analogous attempt to track the process of cultural production in terms that acknowledge the temporality of the event so as not to reduce the artwork to a commodity, knowledge to information, and ‘performance’ to be managed. Where this has critical traction is in education, a site that deals with the intersection of politics, art, theory, philosophy and history—in short, a site where all aspects of ‘performance’ are fully realized. This article engages with the key ideas of these thinkers’ approaches to notions of performance, and assesses their relevance for an understanding of the ambiguities of ‘performance’ in contemporary education institutions.     

Performativity,Post-modernity and the University

The article identifies, comparatively, the crisis of the contemporary university as both government policies, in several countries, and the post-modern critique, notably Lyotard's, highlight the reconstruction of university systems around 'performativity' in an increasingly competitive international economic world. The comparative motif of the article is sustained less around concepts of 'mass' and 'elite' higher education systems than around the aggressive interventions in the definition of university knowledge by governmental insistence on a certain kind of 'product' from universities, and careful measures of their 'productivity'. The immediate consequences, as far as they are yet known, for university cultures are identified, especially the corrosive effects of the redefinition of 'quality control' and the displacement of academic leadership by a culture of 'management'. The final argument in the article is that the university in several systems of higher education is undergoing a process of 'attenuation' in its financial, pedagogic, personnel and research relationships.     

Performativity,guilty knowledge,and ethnographic intervention

This paper applies Dennis’ [(2009 Dennis, B. 2009. “What Does It Mean When an Ethnographer Intervenes?” Ethnography and Education 4 (2): 131–146. doi: 10.1080/17457820902972762[Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]). “What does it Mean when an Ethnographer Intervenes?” Ethnography and Education 4 (2): 131–146] modes of ethnographic intervention to a fieldwork experience of an observed secondary school lesson in England. Ethnographic research raises numerous ethical dilemmas, in the face of which ‘intervention’ is unavoidable. The observed lesson – in which a teacher was judged as ‘Requiring Improvement’ – left me with ‘guilty knowledge’. The performative nature of observed lessons constructs highly charged events. Drawing particular attention to the power imbalances between observer and observed, ethical deliberation about the event is considered, and subsequent ‘interpersonal’ and ‘administrative’ intervention is presented. As ethnographers, it is impossible to avoid intervening in some sense. I conclude that performativity raises ethical issues which may demand particular responses from ethnographic researchers, whose empathetic intention places them well to explore – and critically engage with – the workings and effects of performativity.     

Performativity and enjoyable learning

This paper takes critical lenses to interpret what students find enjoyable in their learning in specific ‘subject’ environments within the prevailing socio-economic climate in higher education. It considers student dispositions that emerged from dialogues with two groups of students attending a non-traditional university and taking vocational degrees within England, UK. We argue that although each higher education institute can become its own destiny, it can only do so within the boundaries of state policy and its technologies. Higher education, when affected by cultures of ‘performativity’, is arguably focused less on knowledge for ‘emancipation’ and its own sake and more on the ‘use value’ of its products. This paper argues that what is valued by these particular students in their learning and what gives them positive feelings as they engage with this process of learning is not altogether independent of the current governances shaping higher education.     

Performativity,fabrication and trust: exploring computer-mediated moderation

Based on research conducted in an English secondary school, this paper explores computer-mediated moderation as a performative tool. The Module Assessment Meeting (MAM) was the moderation approach under investigation. I mobilise ethnographic data generated by a key informant, and triangulated with that from other actors in the setting, in order to examine some of the meanings underpinning moderation within a performative environment. I argue that in this particular case performativity has become entrenched in teachers' day-to-day practices, and not only affects those practices but also teachers' sense of self. I suggest that MAM represented performative and fabricated conditions and (re)defined what the key participant experienced as a vital constituent of her educational identities – trust. From examining the case in point, I hope to have illustrated for those interested in teachers' work some of the implications of the interface between technology and performativity.     

科斯与新自由主义的分歧与矛盾

科斯认为,社会制度安排所应遵循的首要原则是确保效率,而新自由主义认为是应该确保自由。在科斯理论框架内,科斯的效率首要原则的贯彻,不仅意味着要容许国家把强制行为广泛地扩展到新自由主义的自由原则所能容忍的范围之外,而且还会要求否定作为新自由主义的自由原则之本质的财产私有制原则。可见,科斯与新自由主义之间存在着深刻的不一致和对立,认为科斯是新自由主义者是不科学的。科斯的效率首要原则表明,认为科斯是效率主义者,更符合其经济思想的整体的实际。     

新自由主义、全球化与高等教育发展

高等教育的存在与发展具有两种特性:理智特性和社会特性。这两种特性的演变在不同的历史阶段都受到不同思潮的影响。新自由主义和全球化是影响当今高等教育发展的两大主要思潮。新自由主义通过强调高等教育所传授知识的可交易性、效率性、个体性、竞争性和自由化来重塑高等教育发展的理智特性,全球化则从时空、制度和组织三个维度影响高等教育的社会特性。应对新自由主义和全球化的挑战,需要扭转通过拥抱市场、放弃公共利益来推进高等教育的做法,但也必须抓住机遇使本国高等教育融入全球知识经济。     

Neoliberalism, globalization, and creative educational destruction in Taiwan

In this article, the authors argue that educational technology is chiefly and increasingly being used as a tool for the privatization of education and the commodification of people by way of top down evaluative structures put in place by governments in collusion with neoliberal interests. This analysis began as a study that sought to illuminate the reasons why teachers in Taiwanese technical colleges have been reluctant to integrate educational technologies for actual instruction. However, what the authors actually found was that teachers in Taiwan are experiencing a forced obsession with top down evaluations and these evaluations are locking teachers in what may be called an amplifying causal loop. By looking up the proverbial food chain of the top–down evaluations, the authors found socio-political and economic forces at work that were less Taiwanese and more global in scope and character and less about teachers and classrooms and more about the rise of educational administration for neoliberal advancement. This article argues that a collusion between neoliberal interests, an obsession with evaluation, and the uninterrogated implementation of educational technologies are giving rise to processes that are wreaking havoc on the Taiwanese education system and similar processes are at work throughout the world.     

新自由主义与美国大学科研市场化取向的演变

20世纪80年代,受西欧(德国)及日本崛起的经济竞争力挑战,美国里根政府一改之前对大学科研资助过度国防化的政策,不断挖掘大学科研的民用价值,并由此形成了白宫、国会及司法部门的竞争力联盟,以致力于通过促进大学科研市场化重新实现美国经济霸主之位.为此,在里根时代,联邦政府兴起新自由主义理念,逐步放松专利管制,颁布 《贝赫—多尔法案》 等一系列法案,激活大学投入科研市场化的意识;与此同时,受联邦资助增长的乏力及产业界对大学研究的资助的涌入,"象牙塔"也不断迎合里根政府自由主义式的科学政策,不断面向市场,加快科研专利化.然而,在里根市场化政策的引导下,一方面激发大学科研积极性与竞争意识,建立与完善了大学、产业界及联邦政府之间的互动体系;另一方面则使得大学陷入学术资本主义的泥潭,在科学和社会的关系并未回归到瓦尼尔·布什报告的"纯粹"研究之信仰.     

Neoliberalism,the public sphere,and a public good

This essay considers the challenges that neoliberalism raises for conceptual models and practices of a multiple public sphere. Engaging difference and attending to inequality, a multiple public sphere facilitates the circulation of a dynamic public good that may articulate mutual standing and relationships among people to enable the construction of a collective “we” for coordinated action. Weakening relationships among people and devaluing coordinated action, neoliberalism envisions a public of atomistic individuals who compete with one another for comparative advantage. Flattening difference and obscuring inequality, a neoliberal public presumes a universal subject that obscures its own particularity and discounts the uneven burdens faced by those who cannot seamlessly identify with its mode of subjectivity. Further, for a neoliberal public, inequality serves as the condition and end of competition. Resistance to neoliberalism may arise in the networked locals of a multiple public sphere, as advocates reclaim connections that neoliberalism seeks to deny.     

Performativity and pedagogising knowledge: globalising educational policy formation,dissemination and enactment

Critical policy scholars have increasingly turned their attention to: (1) the work of policy actors engaged in globalised and globalising processes of policy formation, (2) the global flows or movements of education policies across multifaceted, hybrid networks of public–private agencies, and (3) the complex politics of global–national policy translation and enactment in local school contexts. Scholars have emphasised firstly, the economic turn in education reform policies, a shift from a social democratic education orientation and secondly, policy convergence towards a dominant neoliberal political agenda. This paper suggests that Bernstein’s concepts of the totally pedagogised society (TPS) and the pedagogic device, as the ensemble of rules for the production, recontextualisation and evaluation of pedagogic discourses may add to this corpus of critical policy scholarship. It does this by firstly reviewing the take up of Bernstein’s concept of the TPS in the critical policy sociology literature, arguing that this interpretation presents a largely dystopian account of globalising educational policies. In contrast, the paper argues for and presents an alternative open-ended reading and projection of Bernstein’s concept of the TPS and pedagogic device for thinking about globalised processes and devices of the pedagogic communication of knowledge(s).     

操演理论简述

操演理论是最近二十年新的理论领域,虽然是近二十年的产物,但是追本溯源是二十世纪五十年代J.L奥斯汀发表的著作首次提出的操演话语这一概念。之后多位学者为操演理论的发展贡献了自己的力量。其中以朱迪斯·巴特勒的性别操演最为有代表性。本文将梳理操演理论的发展历史,以及操演理论下其他领域的操演理论建设的活力性。     

Neoliberalism, Social Darwinism, and Consumerism Masquerading as School Reform

Education reform policies harvested from neoliberalism, social Darwinism, consumerism, and free-market ideologies have begun to replace the pragmatic progressivism of the pre-World War II era. In this article, I use three federal and state education reform policies and programs—No Child Left Behind Act, Common Core State Standards Initiative, and national standardized testing—as examples of market-oriented ideologies embedded in the reforms. Further, I rely on Critical Social Theory, following Freire, as a framework to examine how the education policies and programs intersect to potentially impede access to quality education opportunities for children from impoverished backgrounds. I use Freire’s conception of Critical Social Theory because of his focus on how education should be used as a transformational mechanism to improve lives rather than a tool to train and inculcate children to imitate and be subservient to the dominant culture. I argue that some federal education policies enacted since 2002 provide examples of the confluence of ideologies that are creating a new meritocracy-based system. The meritocracy-based system will disproportionately penalize poorer students who have less access to out of school experiences that prepare them for formal schooling. Based on punishment triggers embedded in state and federal education policies, a cycle of educational austerity ensues when a student does not achieve a mandatory achievement benchmark. The cycle of austerity can doom some students to under-achievement in the short term and to becoming under-educated in the long term.     

Neoliberalism,internationalisation and higher education: connections,contradictions and alternatives

ABSTRACT

We explore the role of neoliberalism within portrayals of internationalisation in higher education (HE). Through an analysis of four features of internationalisation, we suggest that they embody a complex entanglement of neoliberal categories and assumptions with other, primarily progressive humanitarian ideals. This framing of internationalisation has three affects. One, humanitarian ideals coupled with neoliberal categories normalise inequalities, turning internationalisation into a meritocratic global race, focusing on celebrating the possibility of the few who can achieve, instead of the embedded inequalities within the system, which disadvantage the many. Two, this allows neoliberal practices to be advanced through the discourse of internationalisation and its association with progressive humanitarian values. Three, this neoliberal framing does not explain the nature of internationalisation of HE in many nations; we demonstrate this by analysing internationalisation in China, Israel and Cuba. We suggest that internationalisation in HE cannot be adequately explained by analyses which rely on neoliberalism.     

在激进与保守之间--新自由主义评析

介绍并评析目前流行于西方世界的新自由主义思潮,揭示其危害性,提出我们应自觉抵制新自由主义,坚持中国特色社会主义.