Understanding the mechanisms of neoliberal control: lifelong learning, flexibility and knowledge capitalism

Abstract

This paper argues that Foucault’s conception of governmentality provides a powerful tool for understanding learning and education and links the organisation of learning to both politics and economics in developed Western societies. What is offered by Foucault’s conception, I will argue, is a new version of superstructural sociology, which provides a means of understanding how educational and economic practices mutually condition and adapt to each other while avoiding the excesses that plagued Marxist analyses in the later 20th century, which represented such processes as the outcome of a necessary determination. Lifelong learning will be identified as a specifically neoliberal form of state reason in terms of its conception, emergence and development. Although it has manifested a uniformly consistent – albeit not exclusive – concern of serving dominant economic interests, the prospects for moving beyond it depend, I argue, on whether the structures of learning created can be harnessed for other ends; that is, whether embryonic within the discursive programme of lifelong learning is the possibility of linking the discourse to a progressive emancipatory project based upon egalitarian politics and social justice.

Notes

1. The English Translator states that ‘Foucault is playing on the double meaning in French of the verb conduire – to lead or to drive, and se conduire – to behave or conduct oneself, whence la conduite, conduct or behaviour.’ (See Foucault 1982a: 221, note 2).

2. My analysis relies on Lemke (1997, 2001) and on Foucault (1997b).

3. Taylorism characterised wage/labour relations that slowly emerged in industry during the later years of the 19th century based on fragmentation and competition, while Fordism describes relations that became dominant since the 1950s, which prolonged the Taylorist mode through mechanisation and factory organisation (see Boyer 1988).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark Olssen

Mark Olssen is Professor of Political Theory and Education Policy in the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies, University of Surrey, UK. He author of many books and articles in New Zealand. More recently he is author of Michel Foucault: Materialism and education (New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1999). He has published articles in the UK in the Journal of Education Policy, Policy Futures in Education, The British Journal of Educational Studies, Educational Psychology, The British Journal of the Sociology of Education and Educational Philosophy and Theory. Released in 2003 from Peter Lang, New York, he is a co‐editor with Michael Peters and Colin Lankshear of Critical Theory and the Human Condition: Founders and praxis, and from Rowman and Littlefield, New York, Futures of Critical Theory: Dreams of difference, also with Michael Peters and Colin Lankshear. Released in 2004 is a major sole authored book (with John Codd and Anne‐Marie O’Neill) from Sage, titled Education Policy: Globalisation, citizenship, democracy, and an edited volume titled Culture and Learning: Access and opportunity in the classroom.