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Vocationalism, work and the future of higher education Terry Hyland

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Bolton Institute , United Kingdom Published online: 20 Dec 2006.

To cite this article: Terry Hyland (2001) Vocationalism, work and the future of higher education, Journal of Vocational Education & Training, 53:4, 677-684 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13636820100200184

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Journal of Vocational Education and Training, Volume 53, Number 4, 2001

REVIEW ARTICLE

Vocationalism, Work and the Future of Higher Education

Downloaded by [221.122.79.51] at 17:28 21 March 2014

TERRY HYLAND Bolton Institute, United Kingdom

Working Knowledge: the new vocationalism and higher education COLIN SYMES & JOHN McINTYRE (Eds), 2000 Buckingham: SRHE/Open University Press 181 pp., ISBN 0335 20571 2, £65.00 (hb) Context The vocationalisation of education and training at all levels has been the leitmotif of developments from school to university over the last two decades or so. Starting with the youth training schemes in the 1970s and continuing with the establishment of the National Council for Vocational Qualifications in Britain in the 1980s, this process – incorporating the commodification of knowledge and the marketisation of its production and distribution – has travelled downwards into schools from the postschool sector and upwards into higher education. Contemporary lifelong learning policy, which is dominated almost entirely by economistic talk about employability skills, continues this simplistic utilitarianism into the new century. Universities were the last institutions to be influenced by these vocationalising tendencies, a phenomenon which was recorded accurately and analysed critically by Barnett (1990) in The Idea of Higher Education. What Barnett describes as the ‘growing clamour from industry for the graduates it employs to have more work-related skills’ (p. 158) was explained in terms of the undermining of the value background of higher education, epistemologically, through relativistic theories of knowledge and, sociologically, through the loss of academic autonomy as a result of the increasing influence of the state, industry and other

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agencies over what goes on in universities. More recently – in analysing the last major survey of higher education by Lord Dearing in 1997 – Barnett (1998) described the resultant conception of the learning society as principally an economic one in which ‘individual learning and development are to be welcomed ... for their contribution to the growth of economic capital’ (p. 15).


New Vocationalism and the Knowledge Society Given Barnett’s work in this field it is appropriate that he should supply the foreword to this Australian collection of papers charting the impact of the ‘new vocationalism’ on the life and work of universities at the start of the new millennium. The main themes and arguments of the book are summarised by Barnett through the use of the key concept (linked with ‘work-based’ learning and repeated ad nauseam throughout the various papers) of the ‘knowledge society’, which is said to consist in the fact that the ‘production of knowledge and its transmission – even high status knowledge – is not confined to a special institution such as the university but is, by definition, distributed throughout society’ (p. ix). In particular, universities are challenged by various forms of private sector corporations, and it is the knowledge produced in this sphere of activity – working knowledge – that the book sets out to describe, analyse and evaluate. The opening chapter by Symes & MacIntyre provides a solid contextual background to the collection by mapping the rise to ascendancy of neo-liberal economic policies, the globalisation of the market and its information and communication mechanisms, and the resultant impact of these forces on human capital theory, learning and the work of educational institutions. What implications for higher education institutions (HEIs) has the ‘knowledge economy to which education at the policy and practical levels is now responding with alacrity’ (p. 2)? A number of interesting answers are supplied by Boud & Symes, who discuss the central concept of ‘work-based learning ... an idea whose time has come’. Work-based learning has: come to be used as a description of accredited university courses in which a significant proportion of study, if not all, is undertaken in the workplace whose issues and challenges form the principal focus of study. (pp. 14-15) In spite of the centrality and far-reaching implication of these new trends, it comes as no great surprise when Boud & Symes admit – with a far degree of regret and without reserving judgement about the conservatism, backwardness and luddism of recalcitrant educators – that some (many?) ‘elite institutions ... have resisted these modernising trends, and that the ‘advocacy of work-based learning has tended to be

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VOCATIONALISM, WORK AND THE FUTURE

strongest in ... former polytechnics or institutes of technology’ (p. 16). Since the development of higher vocational and professional learning was the raison d’etre of polytechnics, this bias is not exactly remarkable. What is surprising, however, and worth questioning in this context is why polytechnics in Britain – given the excellent job they were doing in terms of their original vocational mission (see, for example, Robinson, 1968; Pratt, 1997) – were ever allowed to stray from this remit and try to emulate universities so much that, in the end, it became (educationally and politically) impossible to prevent the full transmogrification. Turning this around, a pertinent and intriguing question is why universities should now try to be like the institutions – the former polytechnics – which government deemed only a few years ago to be in need of university status? The reality is that – admitting all the various, economic, social and political pressures noted by the writers in this collection – only a few state universities (Boud & Symes mention Portsmouth and Middlesex), designed colleges of technology and the (legitimately and justifiably) corporate universities have been required to bring about any wholesale changes in respect of work-based learning pressures. There are, in fact, quite a number of successful corporate HEIs in existence – the British Aerospace Virtual University, the University of Lloyds TSB and the American Express Quality University (Jarvis, 2000) – and these are, quite properly, privately financed, and dedicated to bespoke staff development and employee training. It is quite another thing to argue that publicly financed state universities (wherever they are based) should concern themselves with similar activities. Although the organisational and macro-institutional implications of work-based learning need to be noted, the really interesting philosophical questions – concerning the nature of knowledge and pedagogy in relation to the new arrangements – are also discussed in this collection by experienced and well-informed commentators in the field. Taking up Boud & Symes’ recommendation that – based on the distinction between Mode 1 (disciplinary) and Mode 2 (useful to government, industry and society) knowledge, noted in Gibbons et al (1994) – Symes argues cogently that the currently dominant ‘instrumentalist’ approaches should not allow other discourses to be ‘usurped by a rampant vocationalism where everything is subsumed to work’. Symes quite rightly observes that ‘vocationalism is but one of a number of discourses that have helped to frame the university’; it is also worth remembering that the ‘university has always provided a grounding for work, either in the professions or in the public service’ (p. 42). Paul Hager – now Professor of Education at the University of Technology, Sydney where many of the contributors work – provides a fascinating philosophical analysis of the challenges to ‘academic knowledge’ posed by the knowledge economy. Hager argues forcefully for an interpretation of work-based learning, which is underpinned by

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‘knowledge as judgement ... which is proposed as a replacement for the Cartesian-inspired academic knowledge’ (p. 61). In concentrating on the ‘knowledge which resides in individuals, teams and organisations’ and on ‘abilities and learned capacities such as bodily know-how, skills of all kinds’ as ‘components conceivably involved in making and acting upon judgements’ (ibid.), Hager provides for genuinely novel insights into the nature of work-based learning. This account links very neatly with the paper by Hager’s colleague, David Beckett, on the ‘eros of learning’, in which it is argued that – since current pressures on HEIs are tending towards ‘lonely and disembodied learning’ – learning at work can provide an antidote since its ‘hot action’ occurs in the ‘here and now, in real time, and in real space, with real bodies present’ (pp. 72-73). There are, however, still quite a few serious questions to be asked about the way knowledge is re-engineered in the new work-based discourse. Defining knowledge in terms of workplace judgements or by switching the debate to learning, rather than knowing does not obviate the need to satisfy the conditions of knowledge in terms of public criteria. The question here is not about the (long overdue) breaking down of the false divisions – between body and mind, theory and practice, contemplative or productive knowledge – which Dewey (1916/1966) rightly identified as underpinning the subordinate status of vocational studies. Whether it is theoretical, practical, pure, applied, factual or conceptual, for knowledge to be knowledge [i.e. justified true belief (Scheffler, 1965)] certain subjective and objective conditions have to be satisfied. If it is claimed that workplace knowledge – because it is existential, spontaneous, transitory and the like – needs only to meet subjective criteria, then the attempt to upgrade VET and work-based learning will fail. Favouring Dewey’s pragmatic conception of knowledge does not exempt us from epistemological justification in terms of public standards. All the sophisticated analysis of vocational learning and knowledge in this collection may be described – using a phrase employed in a later chapter on workplace restructuring and identities by Chappell et al – as ‘talking up vocationalism’ (p. 141). If this leads to that upgrading of vocational studies that has been long overdue in Britain and other postindustrial nations with the resultant parity of esteem for vocational and academic subjects, then all such discourse is valuable and justifiable. Whether taking workplace learning seriously will actually have this result is entirely another matter. Symes’ conclusion that the recent developments in work-based learning have served to accentuate the largely spurious nature of ‘the distinction between a liberal or vocational education’ (p. 42) is more wishful thinking than a description of reality. The fact is that the ‘vocationalisation of everyday life’ (Avis et al, 1996, p. 165) in recent years has had not a few counter-vocational effects in terms of the downgrading of vocational studies in schools and colleges,

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the ‘McDonaldisation of education and training’ (Hyland, 1999, pp. 11ff.) and the de-skilling of many occupations. Globalisation


The fact that the forces shaping the knowledge economy have also generated a large number of counter-vocational – indeed countereducational – trends needs more acknowledgement than they receive in this collection. In particular, there is not enough critical analysis of globalisation whether this appears in its cultural, economic or educational guises. The ‘dark sides’ (Symes & MacIntyre, p. 4) of these developments are paid lip service only, and there is far too much acceptance of globalisation as something to which states, citizens and educators have to react passively, rather than actively to develop creative strategies of response. It is true that MacIntyre & Solomon – in discussing the policy environment of work based learning – do offer a deep analysis of different forms of globalisation. Their conclusion is that: intensified relationships between the academy and the workplace are becoming an everyday lived experience for many academics as globalisation has its impact both in the academy’s construction of new discourses of corporatism and commercialization and the emerging discourses of the humanization of the workplace. (p. 95) I am not sure that the ‘everyday lived experience’ applies to many academics (outside of corporate universities and, of course, the University of Technology Sydney), but I think the last bit about humanising the workplace needs more emphasis than it is currently given. Gray’s (1998) account of the contemporary global economy is instructive in this respect; he argues that: In every country, the new and more volatile strain of capitalism is transforming economic life. The impact of anarchic global markets on the economic cultures of continental Europe institutionalizes high levels of structural unemployment. In these societies the principal source of social division is unequal access to work. (p. 74) The worst results of all this in terms of human misery are graphically illustrated by Bales (2000) in his account of the ways in which the global economy has increased slavery and child prostitution in many countries. What needs to be stressed here is that the mechanisms of the global economy are not inevitable and immutable givens to which nations have to respond in the best way they can. As Gray (1998) explains:

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The free market is not – as today’s economic philosophy supposes – a natural state of affairs which comes about when political interference with market exchange has been removed ... Regulated markets are the norm, arising spontaneously in the life of every society. The free market is a construction of state power. (p. 211) What has been constructed can be de-constructed, and it is in the gift of nation states – through their systems of education, employment and welfare – to ensure that, as Ormerod (1994) puts it, the ‘power of markets [is] harnessed to the wider benefit of society’ (p. 205).


Conclusion: criticism and collusion This collection of papers on the challenge to HEIs posed by the knowledge economy and workplace learning is a useful addition to the growing literature in this sphere (e.g. Boud & Solomon, 2001) and provides the opportunity for committed professionals to engage seriously with these crucial issues. In the end, however, I am bound to say that I was rather disappointed by the lack of critical interrogation of the major themes of the book: the global economy, work-based learning, the knowledge society and the role of HEIs in making sense of these developments and offering – what should after all be distinctive about academic work at this level – robust and searching analyses with a consideration of rival and alternative perspectives. What Avis et al (1996) has called the ‘post-Fordist myth’ appears to have been swallowed hook, line and sinker by many of the commentators in this collection. Garrick & Clegg’s observation that ‘we live in a performative era in which knowledge is legitimised insofar as it will enhance productivity and improve economic competitiveness’ (p. 166) correctly represents the impoverished instrumentality of the new discourse about the role of education and training. Why, however, should any of us accept such a notion uncritically? The emphasis placed on the so-called new ‘knowledge workers’ and the new ‘knowledge production’ throughout the book (see, for example, pp. 48-50, 94-95, 129-130) is an overt and telling illustration of the uncritical acceptance of the increasingly elaborate and sophisticated mythology in this sphere. The demand for high-level knowledge or knowledge workers is grossly exaggerated and often with dubious ulterior motives in mind. Most workers in post-industrial societies require (and will continue to require) only basic skills to function effectively in most jobs. As Sieminski (1993) has observed ‘it will only be sectors of core workers who will need opportunities to acquire new skills’ (p. 98). For the majority of workers, low-level competence-based VET will suffice and will have ‘more to do with maintaining social control and obtaining compliance’ from ‘those who will occupy an uncertain future being assigned to the periphery of 682


the labour market’ (Sieminski, 1993, p. 99). Coffield (2000) has recently examined these issues in a critical evaluation of lifelong learning policy in Britain. He argues that: Government rhetoric about developing a competitive edge by building the knowledge driven economy is overplayed ... Reich reports that only 7% of American workers can be called ‘symbolic analysists’ or knowledge workers, while the DfEE’s own website records that 75% of all those employed in the UK are in the service industry and the biggest areas of employment growth are in hospitality and tourism. The knowledge economy is a myth, whose main function is to feed fears of future mass unemployment and so spur millions of learners on to new and still higher levels of attainment. (p. 241, emphasis added)


Against this background, all the rhetoric about ‘knowledge workers’ and workplace educators as ‘discourse technologists’ and ‘change facilitators’ (pp. 143, 147) is, at best, pure whimsy and, at worst, fatuous nonsense. When we get into the area of talking about the ‘learner/worker’ as an ‘entrepreneur of the self’ (p. 126), I reserve the right to fall back on the Wittgensteinian logic of ‘whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent’! Correspondence Terry Hyland, Faculty of Arts, Science & Education, Bolton Institute, Chadwick Street, Bolton BL2 1JW, United Kingdom ([email protected]). References Avis, J., Bloomer, M., Esland, G., Gleeson, D. & Hodkinson, P. (1996) Knowledge and Nationhood. London: Cassell. Bales, K. (2000) Disposable People: the new slavery in the global economy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barnett, R. (1990) The Idea of Higher Education. Buckingham: SRHE/Open University Press. Barnett, R. (1998) ‘In’ for ‘For’ the Learning Society, Higher Education Quarterly, 52, pp. 7-21. Boud, D. & Solomon, N. (Eds) (2001) Work-based Learning: a new higher education? Buckingham: Society for Research in Higher Education/Open University Press. Coffield, F. (2000) Lifelong Learning as a Lever on Structural Change? Journal of Education Policy, 15, pp. 237-246. Dewey, J. (1916/1966) Democracy and Education. New York: Free Press. Gibbons, M. et al (1994) The New Production of Knowledge. London: Sage.

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Terry Hyland Gray, J. (1998) False Dawn: the delusions of global capitalism. New York: New Press. Hyland, T. (1999) Vocational Studies, Lifelong Learning and Social Values. Aldershot: Ashgate. Jarvis, P. (2000) The Corporate University, in J. Field & M. Leicester (Eds) Lifelong Learning: education across the lifespan. London: Routledge-Falmer. Ormerod, P. (1994) The Death of Economics. London: Faber & Faber. Pratt, J. (1997) The Polytechnic Experiment 1965-1992. Buckingham: SRHE/Open University Press. Robinson, E. (1968) The New Polytechnics. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Scheffler, I. (1965) Conditions of Knowledge. Chicago: Scott, Foresman & Co.


Sieminski, S. (1993) The ‘Flexible’ Solution to Economic Decline, Journal of Further & Higher Education, 17(1), pp. 92-100.

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