New Zealand's 'embrace' of globally-sourced knowledge economy discourse. ..... Zealand director Ralph Norris (until recently CEO of Air New Zealand). 20 ...
A warm embrace? New Zealand, universities and the ‘Knowledge-based Economy’
Paper for a special issue on Higher Education for the Journal Social Epistemology
Abstract
This paper uses Jessop’s Cultural Political Economy framework to explore New Zealand’s ‘embrace’ of globally-sourced knowledge economy discourse. It argues that the diffusion of such knowledge in this locale has been mediated by electoral shifts and rising economic prosperity but in one of the few fields where some level of institutionalization has occurred - higher education – it has been used to increase State control of a highly marketized tertiary sector. The paper then discusses the implication of this investigation for researchers in non-metropolitan locales.
1
Introduction The sociologist Bob Jessop makes passing reference to New Zealand in his account of the global distribution of ‘Knowledge based Economy (KBE)’ discourse (2004). He notes that as a form of economic and political master narrative, that can be applied to states, fields and firm, the
KBE was warmly embraced . . . by other leading political forces . . . and individual national states . . . such as New Zealand. ( 2004: 170; my emphasis, see page 17 of this paper for full quotation).
Jessop doesn’t pause to illuminate the temperature or longevity of this ‘embrace’. But he does claim that
KBE has not only been selected from among the many competing discourses about post-fordist futures but is now being retained through a complex and heterogeneous network of practices across diverse systems and scales of action. (ibid.)
This paper does two things. It puts some empirical flesh on Jessop’s ‘embrace’ and ‘retention’ claims with respect to one nation state – New Zealand. On this point the paper supports Jessop’s empirical claims and shows how this locale ‘come[s] to be
2
articulated to form more global (general) sites and scales and how the latter in turn frame, constrain and enable local possibilities’ (ibid.:165).
And secondly, the paper reflects on the positioning of New Zealand as a case for both KBE, as a post-fordist economic vision, and for Jessop’s Cultural Political Economy (CPE). It discusses the neo-colonialist patterns that infuse both these discourses. It concludes with a discussion of the implication of this for researchers.
Cultural political economy The linguistic turn in the social sciences has focused attention on the discursive features of knowledge e.g. its narrative, semiotic and dramaturgical aspects. Jessop’s Cultural Political Economy (CPE) framework is a theoretical and institutional response to this (on the latter it is a collaboration between sociologists and linguists). As Fairclough notes (2005), it is part of an effort to develop a post-disciplinary mode of research that mixes the rich traditions of Marxism and critical linguistic scholarship (see Fairclough, Jessop and Sayer, 2003). Jessop’s own work (2004) mixes Marxian institutional analysis (regulation theory) with critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1992). Jessop’s particular project is to uncover the ecological interdependence of semiotic and material elements involved in the formation of a response to the crisis of Fordist accumulation regimes. In other words its analytical target is not the micro world of individual and group action, but change and stability at meso and macro ‘levels’. Jessop notes that while there is massive scope for variation in institutionalized patterns at a micro-individual level, this scope narrows considerably at the institutional level of meso-complexes and macro economic regimes (ibid.: 162). Such regimes are however subject to regular crisis. In response economic, political
3
and intellectual forces engage in attempts to redefine and shape meso and macro arrangements. Such forces operate in part through the mobilization of what Jessop identifies as ‘economic imaginaries’ that include strategies, projects and visions. The ‘Knowledge-based economy’ ( KBE) is one such imaginary which is identified as a response to the inter-related crises of mass-production/consumption ‘Atlantic Fordism’, East Asian export strategies and the import-substitution strategies of Latin America. KBE was developed by US interests and mobilized by various transnational institutions (World Bank, OECD etc). It includes semiotic resources (forms of knowledge, methods of interaction and ways of being) that attempt to frame economic events in particular ways and through this helps to reconstruct economic and political processes. As Jessop notes KBE has been translated into various visions in various institutionational sites and scales (‘information society’, ‘smart machines, ‘life-long learning’, ‘creative industries’, and ‘increased emphasis on intellectual property’). However the relative success or otherwise of this economic imaginary in redefining and reshaping economic activities depends on ‘a substratum of substantive economic relations and instrumentalities’ (ibid.: 163). In the case of New Zealand, and other small nation states, this substratum includes tensions between post and neocolonial cultural, economic and political arrangements.
CPE’s mix of Marxism and Critical Discourse Analysis provides a useful intellectual resource for unravelling the formation and deployment of forms of political economic knowledge. However, discourse analysis is not simply a tool kit to apply to Marxian institutional analysis. It is also, and perhaps more disturbingly, an inquiry into the trajectories of intellectual knowledge - critical or otherwise. Foucault’s work, which
4
has been so important to Fairclough’s elaboration of discourse analysis beyond sociolinguistics (1992), is emblematic here.
What Foucault’s work (1979; 1980) explores and problematizes is the interconnection between knowledge and power. The claim is that intellectual knowledge (ways of thinking) and organizing practices (ways of doing) follow similar principles or have a similar forms. For example modern forms organizing involve: the identification and drawing of boundaries around some space, the division of that space into grids that define elements or cases, and the examination of cases via some normalizing gaze (and perhaps the application of a training regime to each case). Modern intellectual practices mirror these. They include the identification of an object (delineation of space), the construction of authoritative speaking positions (the ‘knower’ and the ‘object of knowledge’) and the elaboration of prescriptions for the elaboration of knowledge about, or management of, that object (see Prichard, 2002; 2000).
Foucault’s work directs attention at the formation of a location ( e.g. of the ‘knower’ and object of knowledge) and relations in both conceptual and material terms. Fairclough’s particular work (1992) can be regarded as a means of marshalling the analytical precision of linguistics to elaborate on these dynamics (of knowledge and practice) at the level of the particular text or activity1.
From this perspective, texts such as policy reports or academic articles are not expressions of an individual grappling with a practical problem or of an academic grappling with an intellectual one. Rather they are regarded as moments in the 1
See for instance analysis of a radio interview of former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Fairclough (1989).
5
production of the position of the practitioner (e.g. manager) or intellectual as a subject position in intellectual and material space2. Obviously this production is not only textual. It involves a diverse range of institutional processes that support the actual people who take up these positions/practices. Such a perspective encourages us to see how patterns of thinking, speaking and writing (by sociologists or economic policy practitioners) are part of colonial and imperialist economic and political relations. For example, this approach sensitizes us in particular ways to the application of the ‘Knowledge-based Economy’ discourse in non-metropolitan locale, such as New Zealand. It also sensitizes us to the reproduction of such patterns in critical knowledge ( e.g. CPE). This form of discourse analysis poses the question of whether critical knowledges, such as Jessop’s CPE, also traces over and reproduces colonial and imperialist formations. It raises the question of whether CPE relies on such formations to reproduce theoretical centres (of critical knowledge) and margins ( e.g. nonmetropolitan locales).
Jessop’s text uses discourse analysis as a tool kit for unpacking the discursive elements that produce the economic imaginaries of the KBE. Here CPE does an admirable job to sensitize us to the hegemonic processes by which particular political economic formations are produced and distributed. But it fails to apply these same elements to itself. Jessop’s CPE analysis of KBE makes reference to the intellectual resources mobilized in the service of hegemonic projects such as Fordism and ‘Knowledge-based Economy’. It does not identify itself as an intellectual resource and seems to assume that it already contains the necessary elements to qualify as a counter-hegemonic resource. 2
As Taylor and Saarenen note, “On the assembly line of knowledge, the intellectual produces print, which, in turn, produces the intellectual.” (quoted in Westwood and Clegg, 2003).
6
Almost all locations in the global ‘south’ carry with them a history of colonial relations that shape economic, political, social and intellectual endeavours. The very notion of ‘New Zealand’ and its actual location cannot be understood without a knowledge of colonial and postcolonial processes. This history makes ‘location’ an epistemological concern. Location bears on the production of knowledge in powerful ways. The question is can cultural political economy grasp this? I suggest it cannot. Jessop’s work fails to include the very element of discourse analysis that makes it a compelling epistemological project and is largely unable to explore its relation to colonialist and imperialist agendas which are – ironically – its ultimate target. I return to this point below. I now present analysis of New Zealand ‘embrace’ of the KBE discourse using CPE as a guide to analysis. The argument here is that even at the level of empirical details CPE is unconvincing.
‘Touch-down’ While internationally the ‘KBE’ vision was widely dispersed in Northern Hemisphere nations by mid-1998, it was not widely elaborated in New Zealand until 1999 ( figure 1).
Figure 1 here
A closer analysis of the use of the term in the popular press shows that until later 1998 the phrase was largely the preserve of computer industry advocacy groups ( e.g. New
7
Zealand Software Association). Much of this is found in the computer supplement InfoTech Weekly published by the Wellington-based newspaper, The Dominion. These stories position NZ as outside the ‘knowledge economy’, and call for action to move NZ toward a ‘knowledge economy’. Such stories typically draw on comments from (often visiting) knowledge economy ‘experts’. Seemingly in response to this, the Science and Technology Minister’s IT advisory group (1) commissioned (in late 1998) a special report on New Zealand and the ‘knowledge economy’. This work went to a recently installed American academic, Professor Howard Fredericks, of Victoria University.
In retrospect, 1999 can be read as the year of ‘touch down’ of the ‘KBE’ in New Zealand. As part of the run up to the November general election the then (conservative) Government tagged the ‘knowledge based economy’ phrase to a series of re-election initiatives, regional business forums and research and scholarship programmes3. A range of other groups and organizations such as employment agencies, universities, scholarship awarding bodies also claimed the term during this period. During 1999 draft elements of Professor Fredericks report found their way into newspapers prior to its August release. Policy advisors working behind the scenes report a struggle with Fredericks over the report itself and over his publicity-garnering efforts. Advisors claim they rewrote significant sections of the final report particularly around economic policy and the position of Maori ( New Zealand’s indigenous Polynesian people) in the knowledge economy. Published in late August (three months prior to the general election), the ‘Knowledge Economy Report’, is the first extended written elaboration of the KBE discourse for a New Zealand audience. At 3
Infotech weekly ran a series of stinging editorials that queried the motives of such efforts, given the approaching general election, as compared with the previous lack of interest.
8
the report’s launch Fredericks is reported as saying that the report would be: ‘the Bible from which everyone can preach about how New Zealand must transform itself from a commodity exporter into a knowledge exporter’ (Wells, 1999:4). He also referred to the ‘knowledge economy’ as ‘a new religion’ that had already come to countries like Ireland, Wales, Finland and Canada (ibid.).
‘Elaboration I’ Apart from some rhetorical differences, Fredericks’ Knowledge Economy Report (1999) is a repetition of globally distributed KBE discourse produced by other Governments and economic monitoring agencies such as the OECD 4. The rhetorical difference here is that the author is not speaking from afar [ about an ‘it’ (New Zealand)] but takes a position as one of ‘us’. The report then is written from the position of an ‘us’ who audits ourselves ( New Zealand and New Zealanders) against the vision of the ‘information society’ and compares the results with those of other nations5. Two features of the report’s reception are worth noting here.
The most uncomfortable element of the report for the then government was its advocacy of interventionist economic policy. At the core of the report is the claim that the Government should actively intervene in the development of the ‘knowledge economy’ (the Science and Technology minister later recalled that advocating this amongst his colleagues was akin to ‘spitting in church’). The particular intervention here involved development of the infrastructural core of the KBE – the Internet. This, 4
There is an irony here as KBE advice claims that the road to economic riches is not down a path of repetition e.g. industrial production, but down the path of innovation at the level of knowledge. The report does not take its own advice. It does not stop to look for innovation in the conceptual framework of KBE, but reproduces the same conceptual framework and adds local empirical ‘colour’ and notes on the local policy context (I return to this below in relation to Jessop). 5 Since the Knowledge Economy Report Fredericks has produce other similar reports that rank New Zealand on the basis of entrepreneurial activity.
9
in the New Zealand context, would require direct engagement with the foreign-owned monopoly telecommunications provider.
The most publicly controversial element of the report however was the demand that New Zealand steer economic activity away from agricultural commodity production, toward knowledge production. Farming interests rejected this saying that such distinctions where poorly drawn. Agricultural commodity production, they claimed, was highly knowledge-intensive, technologically advanced, and earned growing economic rents offshore from licensing locally produced and owned technological innovations. This form of economic activity was regarded as a core element of the vision of a Knowledge-based economy outlined in the report.
What can we learn from this ‘touch down’ and this first ‘elaboration’ period? Firstly ‘touch down’ is largely an effect of a coalition between: urban and newly assertive information technology groups, a recently migrated ‘evangelical’ US academic, and a marginalised Government minister with one eye on the up-coming election. While the core KBE conceptual framework remains intact, ‘elaboration’ is not smooth and unproblematic. There are struggles at the semiotic level with agricultural production, with Maori (as represented in the struggle between government advisors and Fredericks over the report’s initial lack of discussion with New Zealand’s bi-cultural partner, Maori), and with the non-interventionist economic policy stance of the then government (e.g. policy insiders report that direct criticism of the existing telecommunications monopoly were removed from the final report).
‘Elaboration’II
10
Labour’s win in the 1999 election had a dramatic impact on the Knowledge Based Economy discourse. Overnight the phrase was removed from Government discourse (speeches, documents and advice) and replaced with the phrase ‘knowledge society’. The new government argued that its more inclusive political agenda ruled out exclusive focus on a ‘knowledge-based economy’. At one level the phrase’s association with the previous government – and its economic policies – clearly made it unpalatable for the new Government. At the same time KBE could not be simply disposed of. It had been a feature of election discourse and clearly spoke to, and for, various interests attempting to address New Zealand’s flagging economic performance during the late 1990s.
The assertion of this more inclusive vision of the KBE (as the ‘knowledge society’) can, on the one hand, be read as the assertion of labour’s traditional agenda of balance between economic and social objectives. However on the other this also resonates with its approach to international events. Since the 1980s Labour has taken a stance that has challenged US domination (e.g. nuclear ships). This political party has a tradition of questioning, at least, the efforts by other nations and global interests to extend and consolidate their advantage. This re-inscription of the Knowledge Economy discourse signals the importance of nationalist and post-colonial discourse that marks the next phase of New Zealand ‘embrace’ of KBE, and particularly the involvement of the university sector.
New Zealand’s Labour Government has close links with the university sector. Three key Cabinet members, the Prime Minster, Minister of Finance and Minister of Social Development are all former university teachers previously educated and employed in
11
three of New Zealand seven universities. With the ‘Knowledge-based economy’ removed from public policy in favour of the ‘Knowledge Society’(KS), a gap seems to appear in the ‘knowledge’ agenda. In early 2001 the Prime Minister’s alma mater, and former employer, the University of Auckland, stepped into this gap. With the support of the Government and sponsorship from various business interests it organised two high profile policy ‘talk-fests’ known as the ‘Knowledge Wave’ Conferences. The first of these held in August 2001, and entitled ‘Catching the Knowledge Wave’, and the second in February 20036 . These invitation-only, televised events included hundreds of local notables, expatriate New Zealanders (e.g. David Teece) and a strategic mix of academic, political and economic commentators and gurus from around the global. The conferences were workshop orientated. They produced strings of recommendations for use in policy and practices across many fields but particularly education and innovation. A Knowledge Wave Trust was established to take this agenda forward between conferences and into other arenas.
By 2003 however economic growth had returned to the New Zealand economy in part through surging primary product commodity prices and immigration. Enthusiasm for the KS had waned. Recommendations produced by the two conferences seemed to have come to little and cynical voices claimed a victory over ‘hype’7. The recommendations of the conferences, together with advice from traditional sources (e.g. UK and Australia), and the Government’s own political agenda had begun to inform policy in a number of areas, particularly higher education.
6
see http://www.knowledgewave.org.nz/
7
http://www.knowledgewave.org.nz/index.php?fuseaction=template&content=recommendations&headi ng=overview
12
Among the many recommendations on social and economic themes, many called for action on and involving higher education. The 2001 Conference recommended for instance that:
‘every educational institution be benchmarked globally8 and that excellence ‘be demanded’. (Recommendation 5 from ‘Sustainable Ecomomic Strategies Group)
These recommendations provide the basis for a closer focus on the particular missions of tertiary education institutions and their competitive strengths. At the same time the State had been struggling with effects of the existing market orientated higher education funding regime (ultimately driven by abilities of the educational consumer to spot opportunities). There had been significant increases in public funding of private training institutions, concerns with quality issues of private training institutions and efforts by a number of former polytechnics to become universities and compete for more lucrative degree students. The ‘knowledge society’ imaginary potentially provided a means of responding to this. It potentially provided a means of confirming the distinctive missions of universities and polytechnics to pursue, develop and distribute different forms of knowledge. The market system that had operated through the 1990s meant that tertiary providers were treated similarly by the funding agency and would compete with each other for the most lucrative users of their services. The Knowledge Society imaginary provided a means of confirming a shift in tertiary policy away from a market focused distribution system, toward more managed/controlled market processes that confirmed the different forms of 8
Benchmarking involves the selection and comparison of firms, organizations or functions between non-competitive sites performing the same operation/practice. It requires institutions for example to identify where they are competing and against whom and which processes make them distinctive.
13
educational work and different missions for different institutions. This movement of course was likely to take some time. As the political analyst Colin James noted it is
an enormous task to re-orientate tertiary education so that universities produce an academic elite and polytechnics generate a pool of technical and skills talent. The quality of our universities is endangered by the mass education programmes - proving more is not necessarily better. And polytechnics are too much wannabe universities. (2002:2)
The KS imaginary then provides the discursive resources to attempt a shift in funding and audit frameworks. Of course this is not simply a response to the Knowledge Wave ‘talk fests’. In various speeches the now former Minister of Tertiary Education highlighted how this framework was instep with that being developed in the UK and by some smaller European nations. It also follows from the Labour Government’s election programme. This signalled an attempt to return to a more managed and coordinated higher education sector that would attempts to reduce competition and the duplication of teaching programmes across the sector through longer funding horizons and comparison of institutional teaching profiles. While the details of this were not in place in 1999, the change of emphasis included an attempt to relocate research resources to proven areas of international-comparative research capability. Both the teaching and research strands of this overhaul were laid out in the 2002 policy documents which featured ‘knowledge Society’ discourse (Tertiary Education Advisory Commission, 2002). This framework introduced a new funding and audit body – the Tertiary Education Commission – charged with introducing intensive methods to measure and compare performance on individual, departmental and
14
institutional levels in both teaching and research. While little new money has followed, what is underway is an attempt to take control of higher education production through new audit and funding frameworks. These mechanisms bring New Zealand universities into line with practices in other western democracies particularly with regard to the funding of research. New Zealand’s Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) is modelled largely on the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). A parallel teaching assessment exercise is scheduled to begin in 2005. The research funding processes will, over a three year period, redistribute research money to areas with internationally recognisable expertise. The teaching assessment exercise will attempt to reduce the duplication of teaching programmes across the sector which have been the hallmark of the market focused mechanisms of the 1990s.
What then has occurred? The claim here is that KBE was initially rebuffed by powerful agricultural interests and found to be out-of-step electorally with the incoming political alliance (and smothered by improving economic returns). The economic imaginary of KBE, that Jessop describes (2004), was re-written as an education policy agenda that has attempted to, at least, dampen down some features of marketized tertiary education. This re-writing softened the priority given to economic objectives and included social and cultural signifiers that resonate with post-colonial and nationalist agendas. With this empirical discussion complete, we now raise again the second issue: is Jessop’s Cultural Political Economy approach itself (implicitly) implicated in the same neo-colonialist ‘grove’ of the ‘KnowledgeBased Economy’ discourse?
15
Locating ourselves Jessop’s claim is that ‘the rise of KBE as a master narrative is not innocent’ (2004:176). He argues that while it can be ‘inflected to suit different national and regional traditions and different economic interests’ (ibid.:170) and there is some scope for ‘counter-hegemonic versions’ (largely supported in the New Zealand case) but that once the KBE imaginary is accepted it is easier for the neo-liberal variant to triumph through the ‘sheer weight of the US economy as well as through the exercise of economic, political and intellectual domination’ (ibid.).
There is no question that the US has dominated global political and economic affairs since WWII but the claim that once KBE is accepted US versions of neo-liberalism will easily triumph appears to overstep the case before us. In the New Zealand case a revised version of KBE (‘knowledge society’) has been used to challenge strongly neo-liberal market processes in tertiary education. I now turn to discuss whether this same challenge should be made to Jessop’s CPE?
Knowledge is always produced in some place and is thus marked by that location (often implicitly). The very language, the authoritative position of the author and its relation to others amount to a kind of geo-academic theoretical positioning. Jessop’s account, admirable and engaging on many levels, is written and articulated from the very ‘centre’ that is the subject of its critique. The major advance (if we can put it that way) of discourse analysis is found in its critical analysis of form that knowledge takes. The form that Jessop’s work takes itself is not discussed. Jessop’s theoretical resources replicate in form, but not in content, the colonial and imperialist trajectories that are its critical target. Surely if we are serious about the ‘semiotic
16
moment’ and the power that it provides for analysis of global shifts in economic formations, then we must also be serious about the semiotic moment of our own analysis, and how this might reveal patterns that might be similar to those that are our substantive critical target? Jessop writes:
The new (knowledge based economy) strategy was translated into a successful hegemonic campaign (armoured by law and juridical precedents, dissemination of US technical standards and social norms of production and consumption, bilateral trade leverage, diplomatic arm-twisting, and bloody minded unilaterism) to persuade other states to adopt the KBE agenda. Indeed, the KBE has been warmly embraced as a master narrative and strategy by other leading political forces – ranging from the international agencies (notably the OECD and WTO but also the IMF, World Bank and UNCTAD) through regional economic blocs and intergovernment arrangements (such as the EU, APEC, ASEAN, Mercosure, NAFTA) and individual national states with different roles in the global division of labour (such as New Zealand, South Korea, Germany, Colombia) down to a wide range of provinces, metropolitan regions and small cites. (2003:170).
The question one asks of this is ‘where is the authorial position’ located? Where is the author speaking from? And more importantly where is the theoretical centre the text implicitly assumes? It is in the Northern Hemisphere. It is inside the ‘global north’ and from a metropolitan centre. The challenge of discourse analysis is to bring out the positionality from which the intellectual speaks (or ‘that speaks the intellectual’) and identify how this position is encoded in the theoretical and intellectual resources.
17
It is this effort that marks out the very epistemological ‘ground’ from which much recent academic work in New Zealand is produced. The following comment, written for a lay audience by the New Zealand historican James Bellich, and presented to the first Knowledge Wave Conference, gives an indication of this agenda:
There is a risk that New Zealand’s cultural maturity is finally staggering to its feet, only to be washed away by globalising tides . . . If we can manage to use the benign legacies of recolonisation and eliminate the bad, while simultaneously rising to the challenges of decolonisation, then we may find ourselves with a very good compound board on which to surf the knowledge wave - and not be swamped by it. .(Bellich, 2001:5)
Bellich would agree that these same dynamics apply to academic work, and to the challenge to theoretical space (see Durring, 1998). The challenge of ‘decolonisation’ involves questioning the very material from which we shape our own ‘compound boards’ (a reference to surf board making) in theoretical space. The challenge applies not simply to business and governments but also to academics and educators. The same semiotic processes of discourse production used to challenge globally distributed economic advice,
must also apply to theoretical work and academic
debate.
This is not a call for theoretical separatism. It is simply not possible, nor desirable for those located ‘elsewhere’, and engaged battles for theoretical space, to reject North Atlantic theories, authorities and practice (Clegg et al., 2000). But neither is the alternative - to knuckle down and play the game of academic imperialism – possible
18
either. What is required is the development of a relationship with these forms of knowledge. This recognises the emigration of knowledge, and that such ‘emigration’ overlays colonial and imperialist economic and political process. It recognises that spatial, temporal, historical location has a prominence or salience that goes beyond a simple claim to a context. Location is a central theoretical signifier that turns attention on a world marked out by centres and margins, urban and rural, city and country, antipode and metro-pode. In what remains of this paper I briefly sketch some of the practices that might be used to negotiate relations with North Atlantic academic knowledge production. Here I draw on Clegg et al (2000).
Implications for academic work Building a relation with North Atlantic theory, and not simply growing empirical produce for European or North American theoretical larders and kitchens, involves challenging the stability of North Atlantic categories and divisions. One way to begin this is, as Clegg et al. (2000) notes, to drawing metaphorically from the social and physical environments in which one is located. The ocean, with its big horizon, might be a metaphor for consciously drawing on multiple and marginal conceptual frames. The beach barbecue or the campfire might be a metaphor for using local resources (literature), speaking in a ‘local voice’ ( with all its inflexions and infectiousness) and developing ‘local’ research methodologies from available resources. The barbecue or campfire might be a useful metaphor for theoretical and methodological improvisation. It is suggestive of an open invitation to newcomers and travellers and the stories they might bring. It is evocative of difference and the learning that can come from those uncomfortable moments that difference can produce. Such metaphors potentially ‘unlock’ the stable meanings and relations upon which
19
hegemonic positions in theoretical space are built or defended. Such metaphors seem to challenge the ‘suburban’ smoothness of US academic milieu and the ‘village’ warfare tactics of European intellectual fields. Such metaphors treat the intellectual field as open and welcoming. But perhaps a brief word of caution is needed here. If we are to develop a theoretical, empirical and political mode of inquiry that begins with the local, and attempts to develop non-colonialising practices, one cannot expect this epistemological stance to be welcomed or celebrated by others. The campfire or the barbecue might be the metaphor of choice for epistemological engagement, but we can’t expect it to be ‘warmly embraced’ by others.
Notes 1. An informal ministerial policy group chaired by bank chief executive and Air New Zealand director Ralph Norris (until recently CEO of Air New Zealand).
20
References Bellich, J (2001) ‘Presenting a Past’, Paper Presented to the Catching the Knowledge Wave Conference 1-3 August 2001, Auckland, New Zealand Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) (1998) Competitive futures: Building the Knowledge Driven Economy, London: DTI. Fairclough, N. (2005). ‘Discourse Analysis in Organization Studies: The Case for Critical Realism’, Organization Studies, 26(6): 915–939. Fairclough N (1989) Language and Power, London: Longman Fairclough N (1992), Discourse and Social Change, London: Polity Fairclough, N, Jessop, B and A Sayer, (2003). Critical Realism and Semiosis. In J.M. Roberts and J. Joseph (eds.), Realism, discourse and Deconsturction (pp. 32-34), London: Routledge Foucault M, (1975) The History of Sexuality.Volume One: An Introduction (Penguin, Hemel Hempstead, Herts) Foucault M, 1980 Power/Knowledge (HarvesterWheatsheaf,Harmondsworth, Middx) ITAG (1999) The Knowledge Economy, Submission to the New Zealand Government by the Minister for Information Technology’s IT Advisory Group, Wellington: Ernst and Young James, C (2992) ‘Re-directing the Tertiary System’, NZ Herald, Busienss Herald, p.2, June 3. Jessop B. (2004) ‘Critical Semiotic Analysis and the Cultural Political Economy’, Critical Discourse Analysis, 1(2):159-174.
21
Ministry of Education (2002) Tertiary Education Strategy, 2002-2007, Wellington: Ministry of Education. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (1996) Employment and Growth in the Knowlege-based Economy, Paris: OECD. Prichard, (1999) ‘The politicians have a new plan. ..’ Massey (magazine) Vol 1 Prichard, C. (2000). ‘Know, Learn and Share! The Knowledge Phenomena and the Construction of a Consumptive-Communicative Body’. In Craig Prichard, Richard Hull, Mike Chumer and Hugh Willmott (eds.), Managing Knowledge: Critical Investigations of Work and Learning. (pp.176-198). London: Sage. Prichard, C. (2003) ‘Creative Selves? Critically Reading Creativity in Management’. Creativity and Innovation Management, 11(4):265-276. Wells, A (1999) ‘Academic To Study New Zealand's Future In Knowledge Economy’, NZ Infotech Weekly, March 8, Edition 2, Page 4.
22
Figures
Year 96 97 98 99 00 01 02 03 All daily 0 1 13 170 247 271 178 60 newspapers (INL/Fairfax only) National Business Review and Independent (weekly business newspapers)
1
2
8
102 85
80
21
26
Management (monthly business magazine)
1
1
1
4
4
8
1
8
Figure 1. Articles that use the ‘Knowledge Economy’ phrase in New Zealand daily newspapers (INL/Fairfax only), weekly business newspapers (x2) and monthly business magazine ‘Management’ (x1).
23
