The Dearing Inquiry as Process – Delegated Thinking and the Limits of Expert Advice

The Dearing Inquiry into Higher Education is assessed in terms of its contribution to a style of policy-making which has lain dormant for two decades. The paper questions the effectiveness of national inquiries in general, and asks whether there is a case for anticipating further inquiries as proposed by the Dearing report. The Inquiry itself is examined as part of a critique of state-sponsored delegated thinking, in which the state delegates but does not abdicate its policy-making function. Tensions between academic experts and the elite policy-making community are also analysed. The paper concludes that inquiries have less to do with inquiry, and more to do with the legitimation of state policy options. A way is cleared for a further paper which explores the alternatives for higher education.     

Team modes and power: supervision of doctoral students

Currently, team supervision in doctoral studies is widely practised across Australian universities. The interpretation of ‘team’ is broad and there is evidence of experimentation with supervisory models. This paper elaborates upon a taxonomy of team modes and power forms based on a recent qualitative study across universities in a number of states and territories in Australia. Team modes, described as de facto dyad, segmented and collaborative are defined, explained and presented in diagrammatic forms. Team modes are understood as being fluid, oscillating along a continuum according to particular contextual factors such as thesis stage and personal/professional circumstances of team members. Operating parallel to team modes are forms of power, defined as ‘power to’, ‘power over’ and ‘power with’. The article concludes that to maximise collaborative knowledge making within team supervision it is necessary to background social status. As the performance of social status is diminished the focus of the team endeavour is the creative exchange of ideas, creating ‘power with’. The intention of this article is to provide more information to supervisors and doctoral students on team structure so that the needs of all parties might be met more reliably and productively during the intense and sustained period of thesis production.     

The new spatial politics of (re)bordering and (re)ordering the state-education-citizen relation

One outcome of more than three decades of social and political transformation around the world, the result of processes broadly referred to as globalisation, has been the emergence of a complex (and at first glance, contradictory) conceptual language in the social sciences that has sought to grasp hold of these developments. Throughout the 1990s, theorists began to emphasise a world in motion, deploying concepts like ??liquid modernity?? (Zygmunt Bauman) to signal rapid and profound changes at work in the social structures, relations, and spatialities of societies (Neil Brenner) that were reconfiguring state-citizen relations (Saskia Sassen). Recently, however, researchers have concentrated on the study of borders and containers as a corrective to the preoccupation with mobility, arguing it is not possible to imagine a world which is only borderless and de-territorialised, because the basic ordering of social groups and societies requires categories and compartments. This paper focuses attention on processes of bordering and ordering in contemporary education systems, suggesting that comparative educators ?C whose main intellectual project is to understand how (different) education processes are re/produced within and across time, space and societies ?C would get much greater purchase on transformations currently under way.