ABSTRACT
Again here I want to pick up some themes, loose ends and starting points from the previous chapter. Specifically, I will explore the role of philanthropy, or more precisely ‘new philanthropy’, and ‘social capitalism’ in fostering and promoting ‘market-based solutions’ to ‘wicked’ social and educational problems, and indicate some of the ways in which this fits within and fosters the neo-liberal imaginary. ‘New philanthropy’ and ‘social capitalism’ are explained below. I will also look a little more closely at the means and methods of networking within new global policy networks. Particular attention will be given to the work of the Clinton Global
Initiative and other fora and events – occasioned activities – and virtual groupings, as new sites of policy mobilization and ‘globalising microspaces’. These sites, events and activities, or ‘moments of encounter’ (Amin & Thrift, 2002, p. 30), and the social networks which join them up, operate between and beyond traditionally defined arenas of policy formulation, such as localities, regions and nations – on a different scale and in different spaces. As illustrated in the previous chapter, neo-liberal policy narratives and policy advocacy are founded within vibrant global social, political and financial relations which are maintained and extended virtually through email, Facebook, Twitter and blogs (see Box 4.1) but these relationships also have to be ‘activated’ and ‘re-embedded’, they have ‘to be performed, they have to come together from time to time especially to talk’ (Urry, 2004, p. 1). So here there is a dual focus on spaces and places, movement and fixity, immediacy and history, the virtual and the embodied, the stable and the fragile. However, as the chapter progresses I will try to use the distinction between space and place in a different way; as suggested by Rizvi and Lingard (2010, p. 66), ‘It is interesting to contemplate the significance of a conceptualization of the space of policy production and the place of policy implementation …’. That is, I will ‘follow the money’ involved in one example of a for-profit, low-cost, private school initiative. This will extend the sort of analysis begun in the previous chapter by
rendering the neo-liberal imaginary into a set of specific, located and embodied practices, both as policy and as business and philanthropy, rather
than as an abstract juggernaut of ideas. I will draw initially on McCann’s (2011) work on the international mobility of housing policies, in two ways. First, by looking at some policy nodes and sites of persuasion – meetings, seminars, symposia, workshops, forums and conferences – in which policy ideas and narratives are ‘continually enacted, performed and practiced’ (McCann, 2011, p. 27) and ‘are then assembled into a set of “actionable” ideas’ (p. 31). Second, by pursuing further the exploits of a policy entrepreneur and network ‘driver’ (Dicken et al., 2001), James Tooley. The aim here is to explore and develop:
A methodological lens that focuses simultaneously on specific sites and on global forces, connections and imaginaries and reflects a concern with how to theorise the relationships between fixity and mobility, or territoriality and relationality, in the context of geographies of policy.
