Complicating the entrepreneurial self: professional Chinese immigrant women negotiating occupations in Canada

A core mode of governance in the era of neoliberalism is through the production of ‘entrepreneurial self’. This paper explores how the ‘entrepreneurial self’ is produced for 21 Chinese immigrant women in Canada. The women displayed extraordinary entrepreneurialism by investing in Canadian education. Becoming entrepreneurial, however, is more than an individualised ‘choice’. It is imbricated with the ideology of meritocracy cultivated in China, the ‘credential and certificate regime’ in Canada, and the gendered expectations in the host labour market and at home. Given the ideological confluence, and the material conditions the women lived, a feminized and racialized labour is reproduced.     

The limits of learning: homelessness and educating the employable self

Across national contexts, in the attempt to develop and buttress ‘knowledge economies’, increasing pressure is placed on the need for flexible lifelong learners capable of constant knowledge and skills renewal. In this paper, I explore the impact of this broader sociopolitical context on the policy approach to poverty and, in particular, homelessness in Australia. Examining the ways in which education and learning for adults are increasingly at the centre of public policies, I trace the uses of education and learning in homelessness policy. Contextualising this within a consideration of recent shift towards a ‘skills agenda’ in the adult education sector, I argue that the purported power of education in homelessness policy must be understood in light of structural inequalities in the labour market and in the society more broadly.     

The adaptive professional: Teachers,school leaders and ethical-governmental practices of (self-) formation

This article analyses the relations that teachers and school leaders establish with themselves and with others—especially those who would seek to govern them—through the professional and personal–professional activities that increasingly accompany pedagogical and administrative practice today. Specifically, the article seeks to analyse the conditions under which such ‘ethical-governmental’ relations have become possible and to clarify the lines of power, truth and ethics that are in play within them. In this way, it is argued, their intelligibility may be recovered; their contingencies disclosed. The article first posits a non-psychologised, ‘enfolded’ notion of the self on which analysis rests before turning to an analytics of (self-) government of the conditions themselves. An important element within this entanglement of diverse events, discourses, practices and foldings is the ensemble of policies and practices developed by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. The article argues that the programmes of this national agency are a salient and widespread force for acting upon teachers’ and school leaders’ self-constitution as a subject of their own actions—a subject which, in consequence, is enjoined to be more agile, self-reliant, engaged and entrepreneurial than its ‘routine-bound’ predecessors; a subject we describe as the ‘adaptive professional’.     

Principal self-government and subjectification: the exercise of principal autonomy in the Western Australian Independent Public Schools programme

The launch of the Independent Public Schools (IPS) programme in Western Australia (WA) in 2010 reflects the neoliberal policy discourse of decentralisation and school self-management sweeping across many of the world’s education systems. IPS provides WA state school principals with decision-making authority in a range of areas, including the employment of staff and managing school budgets. Using an analytical toolkit provided by Michel Foucault and Foucauldian scholarship, this article examines how the IPS programme functions as a regime of government and self-government. Data collected from two IPS principals is used to examine the subjective effects of power as it is exercised in the IPS regime. The article finds that the IPS initiative introduces new possibilities for principals to actively participate in practices of self-formation, through which these principals self-steer, exercise their freedom and govern themselves and their schools. It illustrates how governmental mechanisms depend on, harness and shape the autonomy of these principals, and how their individual practices of self-government align with neoliberal governmentalities.     

Shaping entrepreneurial citizens: a genealogy of entrepreneurship education in Sweden

ABSTRACT

The focus of this article is the discourse of entrepreneurship education in Sweden. Drawing on a genealogical approach, the analysis draws attention to how this discourse is shaped in the curriculum today, and how it has come to emerge. Focusing on two key events that constitute this discourse, responsibility and problem-solving, and tracing these events back in time, the analysis illustrates how the discourse on entrepreneurship education today shapes a specific kind of citizen, one who is responsible for themselves and who has developed a constant will and desire for learning, thus being able to adapt to the constant changing future. Such a citizen is distinctly different from the one emerging in the 1960s and 1980s, where a citizen that shows solidarity with others, and especially the weak, and who develops problem-solving skills in order to actively engage in the development of society, emerges. These results can be related to wider trends in education policy, where neo-liberal rationalities have become more central, in Sweden as well as in other countries, where there has been a shift of focus, from an understanding of education as a common good, to an understanding of education as a private good.     

Constructivism and the Neoliberal Agenda in the Spanish Curriculum Reform of the 1980s and 1990s

This article challenges the assumption underlying most education reforms that constructivism is politically neutral and intrinsically democratic. It makes this argument by examining the curriculum reform in Spain during the 1980s and 1990s in light of the neoliberal politics that the country was experiencing at that time. This study employs the poststructuralist analytical lens of governmentality developed by Foucauldian scholars. Accordingly, it claims that, the psychological version of constructivism adopted by the official curriculum reform failed to deliver promises for democracy because it was crafted within the same neoliberal political rationality that redefined the terms of government in the late 1980s, a redefinition that decontextualized the learner from his/her social context and adopted the logic of the market.     

The (bio)politicization of neuroscience in Australian early years policies: fostering brain-resources as human capital

Abstract

At the present, human capital theory (HCT) and neuroscience reasoning are dominant frameworks in early childhood education and care (ECEC) worldwide. Popular since the 1960s, HCT has provided an economic understanding of human beings and offered strategies to manage the population with the promise of bringing improvements to nations. Neuroscience arguments added new ways to regulate human beings, and thus another ‘hopeful ethos’ and investment into the future. In this paper, we examine different positive, life-improving, and hopeful takes on early childhood as forms of biopolitical government, which are closely related to the enhancement of individual capacities and the shifting problems of the neoliberal state. Curiously, this process, grounded on biological fatalism and naturalizing arguments, has led to new class categorizations and ways of social discrimination. We hence argue that even though a ‘hopeful ethos’ is offered through the (bio)politicization of neurosciences, it has led to eugenic arguments by re-inscribing social and economic differences into differences in brain architecture. Finally, we aim to demonstrate that ECEC policy offers an example of how current policies govern through scientific evidence and softer forms of ‘government by example’, at the same time moving the government of population into the home, and with that privatizing and personalizing self-investment.     

Against neoliberal pedagogies of plants and people: mapping actor networks of biocapital in learning gardens

This paper attempts to answer this question: what should ecoliteracy mean in a biocapitalist society? The author situates his analysis of this question within the general context of the neoliberal reconstruction of education in the US. Specifically, focus is given to the shared model of governmentality GE food industries and education policies both utilize to manage life in the field and classroom – one where optimizing the value of plants and people for ‘flat world’ economic competition is the defining goal. Given this landscape, I suggest that what some environmental educators have called ‘ecological literacy’ or ‘critical ecoliteracy’ must now include a dimension that rejects the ways both human and nonhumans are progressively being implicated into biocapitalist enterprises. I offer an example of how biocapitalist industries educate market understandings of life by looking at how the GE food industry’s educational projects attempt to teach students and the public to think of nature and themselves as entrepreneurial actors. In the final section, I provide an example from my research using actor network theory in learning gardens as a way to develop a theory and practice of ecoliteracy that is capable of identifying and resisting the ways both human and nonhuman life are being captured and reconstructed within biocapitalist development ventures.     

Counter-conduct in creative university research: deliberations on freedom

This article describes how a political assemblage currently at work in higher education is re-articulating academic subjectivities. This assemblage draws together entrepreneurial and humanist concepts of creativity into an intellectual resource that can change national economies. Academics are urged to use their creativity to counteract the narrowing funding base of the university. The article first introduces a history of the concept of creativity and explains how governmental agendas for creative industry and creativity in education emerged. Second, it describes a practice-based research project that grapples with the difficulties of knowledge transfer between the ‘creative’ and ‘social science’ academic disciplines. This raises questions about creative knowledge and reveals some ethical tensions in the performance of academic research. The research project is then positioned as a ‘counter-conduct’, used to short-circuit the procedures implemented for the conduct of creative research in the creative, entrepreneurial university.     

PhD by Publication: innovative approach to social science research,or operationalisation of the doctoral student … or both?

ABSTRACT

The PhD by Publication offers doctoral students an opportunity to focus on publishing during their candidature. A considerable body of literature has explored questions of legitimacy, consistency and quality of this model of scholarship, while students have reflected on how this approach helped build a publishing track record and develop skills associated with writing scholarly articles [Jackson, D. (2013). Completing a PhD by publication: A review of Australian policy and implications for practice. Higher Education Research & Development, 32(3), 355–368; Robins, L., & Kanowski, P. (2008). PhD by publication: A student’s perspective. Journal of Research Practice, 4(2), 1–20]. However, there is a need to explore how this approach both shapes and reflects the student experience of doctoral studies. This auto-ethnographical article analyses my own experience of the PhD by Publication. On the one hand, this method suited my multidisciplinary research topic and approach to research and assisted the flexibility and creativity of my research. On the other, I began to view my value as a researcher and the value of my research, in terms of the quantitative performance metrics of research in output, citation counts and h-index. Concept of performativity, I analyse how the PhD by Publication potentially reshapes what it is to be a doctoral student, and how the value of doctoral students is construed by themselves and others within their university.     

Saving the world through neoliberalism: philanthropic policy networks in the context of Spanish education

This article analyses the processes of ‘neoliberalisation’ in education as directed by Teach For All. Specifically, we explore the case of Empieza por Educar, the Spanish policy network included in Teach For All. The first section seeks to clarify what we understand by the term neoliberalism, using a theoretical dimension through different perspectives. The second section explores the meaning of the new philanthropy. Methodologically, in the third section, the piece of research is categorised under what is defined as ‘Network Ethnography’, an approach which unifies social network analysis with some traditional ethnographic methods. The fourth section explores the meaning Teach For All and its foundation in Spain (Empieza por Educar) as a philanthropic foundation which is changing the political arena. The fifth section explores how Neoliberalism (with big ‘N’) is constructed by means of a complex interconnection of actors and policies that establish the policy network within the Spanish context. The sixth section analyses how neoliberalism (with small ‘n’) is implemented in the curriculum through three aspects: hegemonic truths; the conduct of the conduct (performativity culture); and the modes of formation of the subject with practices of oneself (entrepreneur of oneself).     

The governmentality of childhood obesity: Coca-Cola,public health and primary schools

In this paper, we examine the emergence of what might seem an unexpected policy outcome – a large multinational corporation, frequently blamed for exacerbating childhood obesity, operating as an officially sanctioned driver of anti-obesity initiatives in primary schools across the globe. We draw on Foucault's notion of governmentality to examine the pedagogical work of two international programmes devised and funded by Coca-Cola. We demonstrate how these programmes work simultaneously as marketing campaigns and as governmental strategies to position children as responsible for their own health, conflate (ill)health with body weight and strategically employ the concept of energy balance. We argue that these programmes not only act to unite the interests of corporations, governments and schools, but also seek to use schools to reshape the very ideas of health and a ‘healthy life’. We conclude by considering two sets of ethical and political issues that come sharply as corporations like Coca-Cola continue to exploit the policy space created by the ‘obesity epidemic’.     

Regimes of performance: practices of the normalised self in the neoliberal university

Universities today inescapably find themselves part of nationally and globally competitive networks that appear firmly inflected by neoliberal concerns of rankings, benchmarking and productivity. This, of course, has in turn led to progressively anticipated and regulated forms of academic subjectivity that many fear are overly econo-centric in design. What I wish to explore in this paper is how, emanating from prevailing neoliberal concepts of individuality and competitiveness, the agency of the contemporary academic is increasingly conditioned via ‘regimes of performance’, replete with prioritised claims of truth and practices of the normalised self. Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s writings on governmentality, and Judith Butler’s subsequent work on subjection, I use findings from a series of in-depth interviews with senior university managers at National University of Ireland, Galway to reflect upon the ways in which academics can respond effectively to the ascendant forms of neoliberal governmentality characterising the academy today. I contemplate the key task of articulating broader educational values, and conclude by considering the challenge of enacting alternative academic subjectivities and practices.     

Developing governmentality: conduct3 and education policy

Educational reforms and legislative initiatives in Australia and internationally during the late 1980s imposed new political solutions on to the problems experienced in educational settings. This paper aims to explore the significance of education to politics, through a brief history and reference to comparative studies. While schools in western democracies have always operated within a political context, the paper argues that the radical conservatism of the 1990s makes it even more important that educators take on an assertive policy role. One possibility is identified through reference to a research‐based procedure identified as ‘pragmatic policy development’.     

The UK National Student Survey: An amalgam of discipline and neo-liberal governmentality

The UK National Student Survey (NSS) has high status on the agenda of UK universities. Its rise in status is linked to its influence on national rankings and associated funding streams referenced to the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). Consequently, many universities have implemented further assessments of student satisfaction, thereby putting additional internal performative pressures on courses and individual lecturers. The research contribution of this article comprises an analysis of the NSS through Foucault's notion of ‘governmentality’, with a particular focus on his work on ‘discipline’ and ‘neo-liberal governmentality’. More specifically, by utilising qualitative data from interviews, research diaries and observations, it will be demonstrated how the NSS functions as a ‘disciplinary’ technology of government which subjects lecturers, departments and universities to intersecting panoptic gazes and perpetual ratings. In addition, the NSS can also be considered ‘neo-liberal’ in that it governs the academic population through narrow conceptions of ‘freedom’ and omnipresent competition. The article proposes that it is through the amalgamated forces of intersecting panoptic gazes, on the one hand, and neo-liberal free-market principles, on the other, that student feedback develops its power to govern.     

新自由主义治理性视角下的全球化教育改革运动

美国操作一些国际金融机构对国际社会放送国际竞争力话语,以凸显教育问题作为一种危及社会前景的社会风险,并运用效能之名吹捧商业解决方案的功用。此种情境开启政策网络,使得商业、慈善、社会机构等构成混杂性科层统治方式,政府得以远离责任,但又通过设定标准与目标进行远程操控。同时,资本家得以介入教育决策,将教育服务商业化。其创新性的集体智慧被吹嘘成确保社会繁荣的万灵丹,这种社会贡献等同于实践社会的道德责任,慈善更进一步美化这些商业团体的利益行径。由此而言,效能是全球化教育改革运动的催化剂,市场逻辑是构成社会新思维的媒介,这促使许多政府运用效能、国际竞争力、创新性集体智慧与社会前景等话语,来塑造社会大众的自我知识,从而获得大众对这些话语的主动认可甚至支持。这种社会治疗学是统治艺术的实践,因为它引导他们如何思考与如何行动,这是新自由主义治理性的明显特征。