Code of practice for the pastoral care of international students: making a globalising industry in New Zealand

Abstract

Export education in New Zealand has grown rapidly since 1990, earning significant foreign exchange and underwriting the finance of domestic education. As principal owner of education institutions, the national state is the primary investor. Previous governments treated the ‘industry’ as both windfall and cash‐cow as they advanced the neo‐liberal project of disentangling state from economy and making education providers self‐regulating. The current ‘Third Way’ inspired government has adopted a more prominent management interest in the making of this globalising industry. A new Code of Practice enacts multiple technologies of control from quality control to standard setting, benchmarking, certification and audit. Legitimated by a discourse of concern for the pastoral care of school‐aged students, it requires institutions to provide detailed information. The Code makes ‘the industry’ visible, makes a market, controls brand NZ education, regulates through consumer assurance, and imposes direct disciplinary controls on institutions. The Code of Practice makes apparent the ambitions and governmental technologies of the ‘augmented’ neo‐liberal state, and is a pivotal structure in the constitution of the industry and of the globalising processes that define it. The paper uses governmentality analysis to uncover these technologies of control and to consider their part in the constitution of both industry and globalisation.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology.

Notes

* School of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand. Email: [email protected].

The subjection of policy and constitutional restraints embedded in traditional practice to the law (Teubner, 1987).

For Giri (2000), however, this remains a potential, i.e. there is in audit ‘…no acknowledgement of the need to cultivate appropriate virtues and appropriate moral and ethical commitments’ (Giri, 2000, p. 176). Giri challenges us to use the space for ethics that audit creates to seek truth through education as a responsibility, attaching audit to a broader notion of accountability.

Seventeen of 36 public tertiary providers, for example, operated off‐shore in 2001, delivering 63 programmes to 2200 students, compared to six programmes and 380 students 5 years ago, meaning that 13% of our international tertiary student market is located off‐shore (Ministry of Education, 2002b).

In doing so, it has also introduced the term ‘industry’ into the language of education provision in New Zealand, where it was rarely, if ever, used and lacked any purchase (Lewis, 2002).

Product–place relations are always open and are linked to and part of our daily cultural practices. As Lockie (2001) notes in his analysis of the making of Rockhampton as the beef capital of Australia, ‘…we do not have to put bovine concrete or flesh in our mouths to consume the meanings associated with “Beef Capital”’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicolas Lewis *

* School of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand. Email: [email protected].