ABSTRACT
In this chapter and the next I will address some different but related aspects of global education policy, aspects which are almost totally ignored in the current literatures on policy transfer and policy mobilities. That is, the role of policy itself as a profit opportunity for global edu-businesses – both the ‘selling’ and picking up the theme of philanthropy from the previous chapter, the giving away of policy and education services, and the participation of these businesses in national and international education policy communities and in the work of policy mobility. As Holden argues: ‘The literature on policy transfer has paid insufficient attention to the role of commercial interests in the transfer of policy’ (Holden, 2009, p. 331). As in previous chapters, I will focus on some specific examples of the business activities of multinational education businesses (MNEBs)1 and business philanthropies in relation to policy, as part of what Larner (2002) calls ‘a new specialist elite’. Again the point is to attend to how ‘actually existing’ neo-liberalism gets done – or what Brenner and Theodore (2002, p. 351) refer to as ‘the contextual embeddedness of neo-liberal restructuring projects’. Thus, I will explore the changing relationships between business, education policy and nation states, and again the increasingly important role of business and corporate philanthropy in ‘solving’ education policy problems, and again touch upon the concomitant changes in the form and modalities of the contemporary state. These developments reinforce the point made previously, that education policy analysis can no longer sensibly be limited to within the nation state – the fallacy of methodological territorialism – and extend this to argue that policy analysis must also extend its purview beyond the state and the role of multilateral agencies and NGOs to include transnational business practices. The privatisation(s) referred to here are complex, multifaceted and inter-
related. They can be understood in relation to the development of a set of complex relationships between: (i) organisational changes in public sector institutions (recalibration and ‘improvement’); (ii) new state forms and modalities (governance, networks and performance management); (iii) the privatisation of the state itself; and (iv) the interests of ‘restless’ capital and processes of commodification (public services as a profit opportunity
and the provision of ‘effective’ public service provision). I shall try to indicate how each of these processes is embedded in the other and will return to a consideration of their interrelationships in the concluding discussion. What is being argued here is that the participation of businesses within
policy is a key mechanism, and a beneficiary, of education reform and the reform of the state, but not always an end in itself; rather, it is part of a ‘judicious mix’ of political strategies and a changing balance of relations among different kinds of institutions, apparatuses and agencies ( Jessop, 2002, p. 50). On the one hand, there may well appear to be a logical inevitability to the processes of privatisation(s) in current political circumstances, a ‘seemingly irresistible pressure’ (Larbi, 1999, p. 5) towards the ‘obvious’, the doxa, of privatisation as a solution to state problems, as I shall indicate later. On the other hand, not all experiments in privatisation are successful or sustainable. Nonetheless, it is important to attend to the increasing variety of ‘business opportunities’, including new forms of outsourcing, contracting and public-private partnership, which are emerging as more of the business of the education state is divested and ‘privatised’ or ‘shared’ with business. The trends in each form of privatisation are different and need to be considered separately and together.2 I will proceed by examining more or less briefly three interrelated layers of policy and their privatisations. The plural here is important in signalling the variety of forms of privatisation involved. I shall also try to indicate the same mix of ideological and material neo-liberalism in each layer. They are:
Organisational recalibration, ‘selling’ improvement and mediating policy The colonisation of the infrastructures of policy Exporting and ‘selling’ policy: a global market in policy ideas
One of the forms of the privatisation of education which has received very little attention, despite the fact that increasingly education businesses are an integral part of the education policy process as policy is enacted within the workaday world of schools, colleges and universities, is the retailing of policy solutions and ‘improvement’ to schools. Here the ‘cultural circuit’ of capitalism (Thrift, 2005, p. 118) touches very directly upon the daily activities of schooling and its social relationships.
