Introduction

In recent decades a political economic discourse promoting liberal, highly competitive and principally knowledge-based economies has won a vast influence and launched institutional reform across much of the developed world. Businessled demands for ever-modernizing efficiencies, advanced technological applications, production growth and competitive advantage in a globalizing economy have stimulated intense emphasis on continual innovation in product and process, flexibility of production organization and demand for liberalization of market regulation. These transformation pressures, as economists view these events, generate increased complexity, risk and uncertainty. They attract much debate in social and economic arenas. Amid the diversity of views, there is agreement that the implications of these socio-economic dynamics for national economies, welfare states, civic communities and persons are immense. An academic interest in institutional varieties of capitalism finds useful, informative divergence among national responses. But, it must be said, a convergence toward adoption of neo-liberal governance models to facilitate dynamic competitiveness and expansive marketization is readily evident, certainly across the European welfare state countries. The neo-liberalization of capitalism has yielded a wildly uneven distribution of the advantages and costs that have ensued. The governance regime of liberalized markets and rationalization of other

social institutions to facilitate market economic dispersion shows little sign of alteration at the present time, even as the 2008 financial crisis brought the near collapse of global liberal capitalism. These patterns raise many serious concerns especially as institutional pathways may set future policy dependencies and limit or delay other options. Most immediately affected by these continuing transformation pressures are the spheres of work and of education. Economic and political demands promote a “learning society” to accompany

the knowledge-based economy. The key to successful competitiveness and expansion of the knowledge-based economy, it is widely believed, lies in accelerated educational expansion and skills development. Education, which has been undergoing a massive expansion occurring at a varying pace through the twentieth century, is now charged directly with servicing a privileged economic agenda of normalizing across the population the attainment of

higher-level skills for application in labour market participation. This wide-spread policy development, which is especially salient in higher education, accords particular values to the qualities of human life – of learning and working – that have long been the bearers of more diverse and plural qualities in cultural life. A generation ago, many thought that expanding the provision of education,

especially higher education, to a much wider populace would lead to substantively more than economic expansion. It would lead to a vitalized and sophisticated democracy, a culture of participation and power distribution and rich human cultural development among many more people in society. Yet it now appears that education’s social, cultural and personal good, like that of work, is being powerfully subordinated to the interests of economy. Learning for employment skills acquisition has come to assume a role beyond its due portion in a culturally rich human life. It appears now elevated as the primary composite task of the good citizen, the learner-worker of the learning economy/society. In this respect, as in others, economic policy has come to exert an inordinately influential role in social and cultural life. The sphere of work has, for much longer than education, been subject to

forces of economic rationalization. For many people, work is regarded virtually exclusively as an economic activity substantively devoid of other rationalities except as decorative remnants. Education, however, persists in being much more difficult to subjugate and control. Nonetheless, there is now intensifying and systematic pressure upon education to yield to economic rationalization and governance. Higher education appears in the vanguard of that programme of transformation. The increasing dominance of economic rationalities in shaping education, as well as work, raises serious questions not only for education, but also for the ways in which democratic societies may act to govern economic institutions and market activity in society. In response to these concerns, many social critics are searching anew for

viable prospects for a renewal of education’s cultural dimensions and role in personal and social life. That search at the present time seems as fearsomely daunting as it is urgent. Nonetheless, in continuing the groundwork task of criticism necessary to that search, accompanying questions gain renewed force. Just as the university’s corporate assimilation must be challenged, are there vital dimensions of work that are – or ought to be – irreducible to the economically rational? What are the prospects for a revitalization of these dimensions even as work appears to be an exhaustively rationalized sphere? Has the particular neo-liberal economic turn, which many put forward as the “new economy” of twenty-first century capitalism, triumphed over cultural spheres that were formally insubordinate to the imperatives of markets and business interests in the shaping and ends of human life? What are the prospects for collective, social, action in shaping these ultimate matters? These questions concerning the conditions and prospects for work and education critically connected to economy orient the searching discussions in this book. The book takes up a twofold principal task. The first is to critically inquire

into the current neo-liberal restoration of the privileging of elite interests in

economic action, to trace its outcomes and effects, and to probe its salient contradictions in relation to education and work. A profoundly influential iteration of the neo-liberal turn has been the promotion of a knowledge-based economy which has been imagined as both the irrefutable successor to Keynesian managed capitalism and as normatively attractive to people in society. That discursive construct and its effects are the first main focus of attention. The second task is to offer some reflections in response to the problems and dilemmas the economic incursion now presents to socially interested citizens. This exploration considers sources of cultural innovations that may offer renewed scope for a revitalized social regulation of economy and a more imaginative horizon for both work and education. The route to this renovation is the intractably fraught yet necessary discrimination of the cultural tasks of education, and of work, from the rationalities of economy, technique and productivism. Its project is a regeneration and re-imagination of collective, public discourse on education, work and economy. It is the social refusal to render solely unto economy what cannot belong there.