Exploring alternatives to the ‘neoliberalism’ critique: new language for contemporary global reform

Introduction

In this Special Issue, we focus our attention on critiquing ‘neoliberalism’ as a conceptual and analytical tool within education research. The notion of the ‘neoliberal’ or ‘neoliberalism’ is frequently taken up, as a theoretical framework, tool or concept, across a wide range of geopolitical, social and cultural contexts. The aim of this Special Issue is to illuminate how neoliberalism as keyword is fashioned to contour to any person, place or thing, and raise potential alternative frameworks and tools for the analysis of education reform. We acknowledge the problematic premise of this undertaking, in that by critiquing neoliberalism as a concept, we may be inadvertently silencing the critique of uneven forms of power, and it is not our intention to do so.

The Special Issue came about following a symposium at the American Education Research Association meeting in 2017 (initially this included Radhika Gorur). When we released the call-for-papers later that year, we received over fifty abstracts from researchers located across various contexts, from the United States, Zimbabwe, China, Australia, Finland, Spain, Brazil and many more. The volume and diversity of submissions, particularly in terms of the claims and assertions raised, reflect a growing area of interest in this subject, in the field of education.

Our central argument is elaborated upon in our opening article, ‘Templates, typologies and typifications: neoliberalism as keyword’ (Rowe, Lubienski, Skourdoumbis, Gerrard, & Hursh, 2019). We trace the relative explosion of neoliberalism as keyword in the social sciences (Peck, 2010), and the critique of neoliberalism in education research (Rowlands & Rawolle, 2013) and the social sciences more broadly (Peck, Theodore, & Brenner, 2010; Springer, 2015; Springer, Birch, & MacLeavy, 2016; Venugopal, 2015). We explore the archival context and genealogy of neoliberalism, in order to problematise application and functionality, and how it is employed in educational research. We propose ordo-liberalism, neoliberalism and post-neoliberalism as three waves to challenge the idea of neoliberalism as monolithic, and assert the importance of time and space contextualisation (Ong, 2006).

The importance of a context-sensitive approach is raised throughout the papers, with Windle (2019) pointing out that the ‘neoliberal critique is largely a product of the global North’. Taking up an example from Brazil, Windle writes that further work is required to ‘complicate the view of neoliberalism as an all-encompassing force that spreads across the globe, imposing a uniform logic of economic rationality’. Bamberger, Morris, and Yemini (2019) demonstrate that a ‘neoliberal framing does not explain the nature of internationalisation of Higher Education in many nations’, by pointing to examples located in China, Israel and Cuba. In their discussion of ‘data-intensive governance instruments’ across various geopolitical sites in Europe, Verger, Fontdevila, and Parcerisa (2019) posit that the evolution of these instruments ‘needs to be seen as context-sensitive, contingent and path-dependent’.

Whilst each of the papers point to the problematic decontextualization of neoliberal critiques, they mutually share an interest in the role of policy in shaping education reform, illuminating how policies are contingent upon a political and cultural milieu. The papers recognise the convergence of global education policy, but they simultaneously highlight the unevenness of economic logic as applied to education reform, and the ‘struggle over ideas and values’ (Malin, Hardy, & Lubienski, 2019, emphasis in original). Malin et al. (2019) explore the role of the media and ‘mediatization’ in driving education reform, particularly in relation to voucher-style programmes, and the dominant role of the media in constructing particular ethical and moral positions.

As a collection, the papers are generative for the conceptualisation of neoliberalism. In their paper, ‘The dark mirror of capital’, Means and Slater (2019) define neoliberalism as a ‘socio-political rationality and historical phase of capitalism that has entered into a period of crisis and historical mutation’ (emphasis in original). Malin et al. (2019) raise the potential of Peck’s ‘neoliberalization’ to explore an ‘ongoing, never-finished, political project that involves contradictory support for regulatory restructuring to attain the ends of a more market-oriented approach’. Neoliberalism suffers from ‘conceptual stretching’ (Ertas & McKnight, 2019) and offers ‘an insufficient analytical model’ (Windle, 2019) in accounting for global convergence and divergence in education reform.

Blackmore (2019), in her paper titled ‘Feminism and neo/liberalism’, accounts for neoliberalism as a process of stripping away positionality, and rendering the individual as

race-less, gender-less and age-less … free to choose regardless of their material conditions, exemplified in the concept of human capital which promotes a view of merit and skill as neutral and value free. (Blackmore, 2019)

The papers in this Special Issue are organised in such a way to foreground a political and cultural perspective, such as the post-Trump era (Means & Slater, 2019), or the interplay between feminism and neoliberalism (Blackmore, 2019), colonialism and imperialism (Windle, 2019); and in the latter stages shift to an emphasis on education policy, such as internationalisation (Bamberger et al., 2019), mediatization of the voucher debate (Malin et al., 2019), or policy process theories – the advocacy coalition framework (ACF) and the narrative policy framework (NPF) (Ertas & McKnight, 2019). Verger et al.’s (2019) paper integrates an analysis of policy and politics, in their systematic and in-depth review of policy instruments across various socio-political sites, asserting ‘two critical moments of educational policy change, first, the adoption of new policy instruments and, second, the evolving uses assigned to these instruments once they are being enacted’. The adoption of new policy instruments, as these authors write, ‘is a very political moment that does not always follow technocratic and pragmatic logic’ (Verger et al., 2019). The final paper ‘Capitalism without capital’ aims to generate a final provocation in considering the role of the intangible economy in education reform (Rowe, 2019). By organising it in this way, the aim is to foreground the assemblage of policy across divergent social and cultural contexts and examine various drivers in how education policy reform is propagated and circulated. This is not to elide the ways in which neoliberalism conceptually yields a certain logic and rationality, underpinning a set of assumptions around power, rights and agency. But, as we argue within this collection of papers, within these logics and set of assumptions around power and agency, exist a multitude of drivers which may at times co-exist in contradictory and contrary ways. The purpose is to critique our theoretical toolbox and generate alternative ways for conceptualising, theorising and investigating education reform.

Acknowledgement

The editors would like to sincerely thank and acknowledge the expertise of many external reviewers who reviewed papers in this Special Issue and contributed their intellectual energy to the project.