The epistemic culture of the OECD and its agenda for higher education

ABSTRACT

The rise of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as a global actor has been attributed to its capacity to create and redefine the boundaries of knowledge through powerful discursive concepts, such as the idea of a knowledge economy. The organisation’s reviews, forecasts and statistics have been perceived as producing multifarious effects within and beyond its member countries while shaping the perceptions of policy alternatives or lack thereof. The shared views and arrangements of knowledge creation within the organisation, from which the organisation produces its artefacts, have nevertheless received minor attention. This article approaches the OECD and its agenda for higher education from the perspective of organisational cultures and knowledge creation within organisations. The article investigates the changes that have taken place in the OECD and its higher education agenda. Moreover, it examines whether any dominant narratives on higher education emerge from the interview data and the OECD reports, and if so, what their differing or opposing narratives are. Lastly, the article aims to understand the dynamics of the changes by analysing whether an epistemic culture exists within the OECD, and if so, what kind of culture it is.

KEYWORDS:

• OECD
• higher education
• organisational culture
• epistemic culture
• epistemic community

Acknowlegement

The author would like to thank the anonymous referees, Professor Fazal Rizvi, Dr. Vera Centeno, and Professor Christian Ydesen for their insightful comments on the earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Johanna Kallo

Johanna Kallo (PhD) is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Education, University of Turku. Her research focuses on comparative higher education, especially on the work of international organisations in the area of higher education. She is interested in the modalities of construction of shared beliefs and the arrangements of knowledge creation within international organisations.