A Warm Embrace? New Zealand, Universities and the “Knowledge‐based Economy”

Abstract

This article deploys a cultural political economy framework to explore New Zealand’s “embrace” of globally‐sourced knowledge economy discourse. It argues that the diffusion of such knowledge in this locale has been mediated by electoral shifts and rising economic prosperity but in one of the few fields where some level of institutionalization has occurred––higher education––it has been used to increase state control of a highly marketized tertiary sector. The article then discusses the implications of this investigation for researchers in non‐metropolitan locales.

Keywords:

• Cultural Political Economy
• Discourse
• Higher Education
• Knowledge‐based Economy
• Postcoloniality
• New Zealand

Notes

[1] Jessop notes that while there is massive scope for variation in institutionalized patterns at a micro‐individual level, this scope narrows considerably at the institutional level of meso complexes and macro economic regimes such as Fordism (2004: 162).

[2] See, for instance, the analysis of a radio interview of former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Fairclough (1989).

[3] As Taylor and Saarenen note, “On the assembly line of knowledge, the intellectual produces print, which, in turn, produces the intellectual” (quoted in Westwood and Clegg, 2003: 15).

[4] The label “INL/Fairfax” references the fact that New Zealand’s major newspapers were sold by its then dominant newspaper group, INL (Independent Newspapers Ltd.), to the Australian newspaper company Fairfax during this period.

[5] An informal ministerial policy group chaired by bank chief executive and Air New Zealand director Ralph Norris (until recently CEO of Air New Zealand).

[6] Infotech Weekly ran a series of stinging editorials that queried the motives of such efforts, given the approaching general election, as compared with the previous lack of interest.

[7] There is an irony here as KBE advice claims that the road to economic riches is not down a path of repetition—such as industrial production—but down the path of innovation at the level of knowledge. The report does not take its own advice. It does not stop to look for innovation in the conceptual framework of KBE, but reproduces the same conceptual framework and adds local empirical “colour” and notes on the local policy context (I return to this in the text in relation to Jessop). Since the Knowledge Economy Report Fredericks has produced other similar reports that ranks New Zealand on the basis of entrepreneurial activity.

[8] See http://www.knowledgewave.org.nz/

[9] See http://www.knowledgewave.org.nz/

[10] See http://www.knowledgewave.org.nz/

[11] Benchmarking involves the selection and comparison of firms, organizations, or functions between non‐competitive sites performing the same operation/practice. For example, it requires institutions to identify where they are competing and against whom, and which processes make them distinctive.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Craig Prichard

Craig Prichard is employed by New Zealand’s Massey University to work with students studying organizational change. He spent eight years in Britain in the 1990s where, among other things, he wrote a PhD thesis on the dynamics of managerialism in further and higher education (subsequently published by the Open University Press as Making Managers in Universities and Colleges). His most pressing currrent research project is an attempt to develop an institutional Marxist analysis of organizations. He is also involved in work on organizational creativity, institutional discourse analysis, and music in the workplace.