Schooling, Literacies and Biopolitics in the Global Age

Abstract

This article examines how particular dynamics of globalization, including pressures to restructure economies for informational labor, shape and are shaped by processes of public schooling and the development of diverse literacies (understood here as the control of certain forms of life). More specifically, this article analyzes how, in an era of globalization and high-stakes “biopolitics”, both workplace and school-based literacies and the literacy sponsorship offered by employers and state-run schools change, compete, increase and decrease in value, and interact with differential power relations in society. Such analysis, it is argued, is a requisite part of the development of powerful literacies necessary both for securing productive, rewarding labor in global informational economies and for reshaping socio-economic orders in accordance with principles of justice and strong democracy.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Scot Barnett for his work on the initial draft of this article. We would also like to thank the Friday Seminar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as Deborah Brandt, for their comments on earlier drafts of this piece. A briefer analysis of the issues we treat here can be found in Gallegos, Tozer, and Henry (in press).

Notes

1. We use “capital” here as a stand-in for more-or-less organized business interests. While different factions within this group have different concerns and commitments, we argue that it is possible to identify basic and general similarities in the sub-groups’ beliefs and objectives. For differently-accented and differently-nuanced articulations of the dominant corporate narrative of globalization and the emergence of the informational economy, see Friedman (2006), Norberg (2003), and Wolf (2004). For versions of this narrative that emphasize the role of schooling in developing human capital, see the Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy & Policy and Global Affairs (2006), Friedman (2006), and Gates (2005). For critiques of such accounts, see Apple (2006), Brown & Lauder (2001), Lauder, Brown, Dillabough, & Halsey (2006), and Lipman (2004).

2. Throughout this paper, we describe the structures and performance of ideal industrial and fast capitalist enterprises doing business in advanced industrial nations. The structures and performance of actual firms, of course, are always shaped through interactions of dominant, residual and emergent organizational forms.

3. Such forms of life are not inherently valuable, but valuable because they can be exploited for profit by capital. That is, as argued below, valuable forms of life—the control of which may be considered valuable literacies—are those forms of life that help workers generate new, profitable knowledge and engage in cooperative labor with other employees and with customers.

4. Although in the following analysis of these changes and struggles we discuss first economic transformations, we do not argue that changes in the economy wholly determine changes in social and political spheres (nor vice versa). Rather, we argue that activity in each of these spheres has relative autonomy from, yet interacts with, activity in other spheres.

5. These analyses, argue Hardt and Negri (2000), apply to a range of workers in the informational economy: symbolic analysts collaborating in ad hoc teams and mining and synthesizing information from disparate semiotic domains to create and design new products for new niche markets; laborers engaged in informationalized manufacturing who work in shifting teams with diverse colleagues to produce and to refine processes for making customized goods; and service workers embodying the “official” values and interests of their companies so as to create senses of well being in customers from particular niche markets.

6. There is some truth to the argument that welfare state public service providers were not/are not responsive to the needs of marginalized groups. Indeed, neoliberals have achieved success in the political realm in part through speaking to citizens’ real concerns (e.g. the unresponsiveness of welfare state public service providers to marginalized groups) and providing seemingly-practical solutions (e.g. the privatization of public services). We argue that progressives must interrupt such rightist discourses and must provide alternate solutions that are both practical and consistent with principles of strong democracy (see Apple, 2006).

7. Certain neoliberals are “willing to spend more state and/or private money on schools, if and only if schools meet the needs expressed by capital. Thus, resources are made available for “reforms” and policies that further connect the education system to the project of making our economy more competitive” (Apple, 2001, p. 41). See the final section of this paper for a discussion of school reform proposals premised on enhancing competitiveness in the emerging informational economy.

8. These trends within the neoliberal state informational economy are consistent with Anthony Giddens’ (1991) observations that in late modernity, citizens in post-industrial and post-traditional states are called upon more and more to engage in “reflexive life planning”. Giddens (1991) argues that “because of the ‘openness’ of social life today, the pluralization of contexts of action and the diversity of ‘authorities’, lifestyle choice is increasingly important in the constitution of self-identity and daily activity. Reflexively organized life-planning, which normally presumes consideration of risks as filtered through contact with expert knowledge, becomes a central feature of the structuring of self-identity” (p. 5; see also Gee, 2004).

9. The International Centre for Prison Studies (2005) notes in its World Prison Population List for 2005 that in the United States, 714 out of every 100,000 citizens are imprisoned. This gives the United States the highest imprisonment rate in the world.

10. Also involved in the struggle over public schools’ endorsement of nonstandard knowledge and practice are groups on the Right, including: neoliberals in favor of constructing a competitive regulatory state that audits schools through measuring students’ control of standardized knowledge; social conservatives and authoritarian populists who endeavor to standardize in public schools’ curricula and instructional processes their own (and at least slightly different) forms of “traditional” knowledge, values and habits; and managerial workers with professional commitments to measuring disparate work practices. We wish to emphasize here the importance of analyzing the actions of multiple groups working in the political sphere (as well as other spheres) to shape processes of schooling. Too much of the educational literature on fast capitalism, we argue, fails to theorize the role of the state as a set of institutions serving in part to mediate social and economic dynamics. Indeed, much of this work neglects to take up the important matter of how the occupation of particular positions within the state by actors of certain classes helps (re)create “official” networks of sponsorship for certain classed modes of identity formation and literate practice (see Apple, 2006).