ABSTRACT
This special issue of Language and Intercultural Communication on ‘Education and the discourse of global neoliberalism’ has its origins in a two day symposium which was held at the UCL Institute of Education in 2014. Several presenters at the symposium, which focused mainly on education in the Anglophone world, have contributed to this special issue in which we have also incorporated papers addressing the educational situation in a range of Asian contexts. In doing this we aim to show that neoliberalism is a complex phenomenon which takes on local characteristics in diverse geopolitical, economic and cultural settings, while retaining a core commitment in all its manifestations to market fundamentalism. Despite the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent implementation of austerity in the massively indebted nations of the European Union, neoliberalism has shown itself to be a remarkably resilient and mercurial phenomenon. It is also much talked about and theorized across a range of disciplines. The editors’ preface to a recent book on the topic (Flubacher & Del Percio, 2017) points out that between 2002 and 2005 there were around a thousand academic articles a year being published in which the term was used, with a ninefold annual rise in usage in the years following the 2008 financial crisis. With such a profusion of commentary and theorization, it is only to be expected that opinions differ as to the nature of the phenomenon. Brenner, Peck & Theodore (2010) have described this intellectual climate, which is worth quoting at length, as follows:
[N]eoliberalism is understood variously as a bundle of (favoured) policies, as a tendential process of institutional transformation, as an emergent form of subjectivity, as a reflection of realigned hegemonic interests, or as some combination of the latter. Some scholars see these trends as signalling an incipient form of regulatory convergence or hegemony; others continue to call attention to significant flux and diversity, even if they cannot yet determine a singular countercurrent. The boldest formulations position neoliberalism as a ‘master concept’, or as a byword for an ideologically drenched form of globalization. Those more sceptical of such totalizing visions prefer to portray neoliberalism as a hybrid form of governmentality, or as a context-dependent regulatory practice. Perhaps not surprisingly, faced with these conflicting thematic evocations and methodological tendencies, others have concluded that ‘neoliberalism’ has become a chaotic conception rather than a rationally defined abstraction, and have thus opted to avoid using it altogether. (Brenner et al., 2010, p. 183)
They conclude however that neoliberalism, despite these varying perspectives, remains a useful term to describe the current phase of capitalism, and they argue that it is best understood as a ‘variegated’ phenomenon which is ‘simultaneously patterned, interconnected, locally specific, contested and unstable’ (Brenneretal., 2010, p.184). As editors of this special issue we subscribe to this assessment, while taking the view that neoliberalism is fundamentally a ‘class project […] designed to restore and consolidate capitalist class power’ (Harvey, 2010, p. 10). We also see neoliberalism – again following Harvey (2005, p. 2) – as ‘a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human wellbeing can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’ (although we feel that this relationship may be changing); and that it promotes in contradiction to its declared stance on market regulation a strongly interventionist state whose role is ‘to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices’ (ibid.).