Putting higher education in its place in (East Asian) political economy

ABSTRACT

This article relates changes in higher education (HE) and research in East Asian societies to recent trends in political economy and, in particular, the reorientation of developmental states (DSs) in the region. The DS is oriented to catch-up competitiveness and, as the horizon of development shifts, so do its appropriate institutional forms and strategies. Catch-up competitiveness is guided by economic imaginaries, often linked to geoeconomic, geopolitical, and broader societal imaginaries, whose hegemony depends on particular discursive and disciplinary practices. The shift in the roles of HE and research is related to the reorientation of DSs from export-oriented, investment-led growth to knowledge-intensive, investment-led growth, supplemented in some cases by efforts to create international financial hubs to exploit a global trend towards financialisation. These themes are explored through comparison of selected East Asian economies/societies. The article ends with some general conclusions about the state's continuing role in HE and its internationalisation in the region.

KEYWORDS:

• Catch-up competitiveness
• developmental state
• higher education
• knowledge-based economy
• internationalisation
• neo-liberalism
• neo-mercantilism
• research

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Terri Kim for the invitation to submit this paper to the special issue and to participants in conferences on the Developmental State at Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, 16–17 December 2013, and on Academic Capitalism at Jena University, Germany, 16–18 March 2015, for feedback for some of the ideas presented here. Terri Kim and an anonymous reviewer provided critical but encouraging feedback on the first draft. Ngai-Ling Sum has been a co-author on related research and Eva Hartmann, Norman Fairclough, Poul Fritz Kjaer, Susan L Robertson, and Andrew Sayer also gave useful feedback on versions of the argument.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Bob Jessop is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Cultural Political Economy Research Centre, Lancaster University. He studied Sociology at Exeter University (1967) and obtained his PhD from Cambridge University (1972). He is best known for his contributions to state theory, social theory, critical political economy, the study of welfare state restructuring, and, most recently, cultural political economy. His most recent book is The State: Past, Present, Future (2015).

Notes

1. On cultural political economy, see Sum and Jessop (2013); on variegated capitalism, Jessop (2015); and on developmental states, Jessop (2005, 2016).

2. Dubai illustrates the less common resource-intensive DS strategy directed towards long-term economic security and competitiveness in other areas (Joshi 2012).

3. The OECD's reports on its Tertiary Education for the KBE project justify the need for HE reform and growth in terms of its public benefits. Yet, when discussing who should fund for this expansion, HE is constructed primarily as a private benefit (Hunter 2013, 719).

4. Olssen and Peters mention Anglo-American capitalism, European social market capitalism, French state capitalism, the Japanese model and an emergent model based on China's market socialism (2005, 339). The present article also indicates variegation in East Asia itself.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this paper was not supported by a funding or grant-awarding body but undertaken during my normal duties at Lancaster University, UK. It is based in part on research undertaken under the auspices of the Institute for Advanced Studies and the Cultural Political Economy Research Centre, Lancaster University.