Education and the Knowledge-Based Economy in Europe
01 Jan 2008-
About: The article was published on 2008-01-01 and is currently open access. It has received 122 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Planned economy & Post-industrial economy.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors introduce cultural political economy as a distinctive approach in the social sciences, including policy studies, and explore both semiosis and structuration in terms of the evolutionary mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention and highlight the role of specific forms of agency and specific technologies.
Abstract: This article introduces cultural political economy as a distinctive approach in the social sciences, including policy studies. The version presented here combines critical semiotic analysis and critical political economy. It grounds its approach to both in the practical necessities of complexity reduction and the role of meaning-making and structuration in turning unstructured into structured complexity as a basis for ‘going on’ in the world. It explores both semiosis and structuration in terms of the evolutionary mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention and, in this context, also highlights the role of specific forms of agency and specific technologies. These general propositions are illustrated from ‘economic imaginaries’ (other types of imaginary could have been examined) and their relevance to economic policy. Brief comments on crisis-interpretation and crisis-management give this example some substance. The conclusion notes some implications for research in critical policy studies.
337 citations
TL;DR: Using the Cultural Political Economy approach, the authors explores the complex relationships that exist between competitiveness and resilience and argues that de-contextualised, placeless competitiveness strategies lead to problems of resilience that can be at least partly overcome with respect to more contextualised approaches.
Abstract: Resilience is attracting increasing interest in the thinking and policy discourses around regional development. However, regional development policy remains dominated by a narrow discourse of competitiveness that appears to have negative implications for resilience and is subject to increasing and widespread challenge and critique. Using the Cultural Political Economy approach, this paper explores the complex relationships that exist between competitiveness and resilience and argues that de-contextualised, placeless competitiveness strategies lead to problems of resilience that can be at least partly overcome with respect to more contextualised approaches.
312 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the scope, character and some of the consequences of internal and external marketization of Swedish education in the early 2000s are summarized, and the impact of competition on the internal workings of upper secondary schools is highlighted in particular.
Abstract: Sweden has commonly been regarded as a striking example of a social democratic welfare-state regime (Esping-Andersen 1996), characterized by strong state governance and active involvement in welfare matters. In the last two decades, however, the Swedish public sector and education system have been radically and extensively transformed in a neo-liberal direction, a move that was preceded by extensive decentralization of decision-making from the state to municipalities and schools. In this article the scope, character and some of the consequences of internal and external marketization of Swedish education in the early 2000s are summarized, and the impact of competition on the internal workings of upper secondary schools is highlighted in particular. We conclude that the external marketization of education has proceeded a long way and Sweden also fully embraces new public management, i.e. ‘inner marketization’, of education in most respects. However, aspects of the older social democratic policy paradigm are still visible with regard to the assigned functions, values and governance of education.
215 citations
Cites background from "Education and the Knowledge-Based E..."
...…states aiming to maintain full employment and raise living standards for all citizens, to Schumpeterian welfare states, actively seeking to raise competitiveness by promoting innovation, enterprise and flexibility (Jessop 2006, Jessop et al. 2008, Lauder et al. 2012, Rizvi and Lingard 2010)....
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the processes and relationships of recontextualization between higher education and other EU policy fields, including for instance the recontextuality of "competitiveness rhetoric" and "globalization rhetoric" in HE policy documents.
Abstract: This paper explores, in some detail at the European Union scale, processes and relationships of recontextualization between higher education and other EU policy fields, including for instance the recontextualization of ‘competitiveness rhetoric’ and ‘globalization rhetoric’ in HE policy documents. We trace the implementation of the Bologna Process in two EU member states, Austria and Romania, illustrating the effects of these very different socio-political and historical contexts on EU standardization processes through a detailed discourse analytic study of recontextualization processes of policy documents. This paper integrates two approaches in critical discourse analysis, Fairclough's dialectic-relational approach and Wodak's discourse-historical approach, by introducing recontextualization as a salient critical discourse analysis category and explaining its relationship to other categories within a discourse-analytical approach to (or ‘point of entry’ into) trans-disciplinary research on social change.
186 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, an alternative, relational-dialectic conception of discourse that defends an integrationist orientation to research methodology, privileging trans-disciplinarity over rigour, is proposed.
Abstract: We engage with Leitch and Palmer's (2010) analysis of Critical Discourse Analytical (CDA) scholarship in organizational and management studies, in order to argue that, whereas they rightly point to the need for further reflexivity in the field, their recommendation for a strict methodological protocol in CDA studies may be reproducing some of the problems they identify in their analysis. We put forward an alternative, relational-dialectic conception of discourse that defends an integrationist orientation to research methodology, privileging trans-disciplinarity over rigour.
164 citations
References
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors introduce cultural political economy as a distinctive approach in the social sciences, including policy studies, and explore both semiosis and structuration in terms of the evolutionary mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention and highlight the role of specific forms of agency and specific technologies.
Abstract: This article introduces cultural political economy as a distinctive approach in the social sciences, including policy studies. The version presented here combines critical semiotic analysis and critical political economy. It grounds its approach to both in the practical necessities of complexity reduction and the role of meaning-making and structuration in turning unstructured into structured complexity as a basis for ‘going on’ in the world. It explores both semiosis and structuration in terms of the evolutionary mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention and, in this context, also highlights the role of specific forms of agency and specific technologies. These general propositions are illustrated from ‘economic imaginaries’ (other types of imaginary could have been examined) and their relevance to economic policy. Brief comments on crisis-interpretation and crisis-management give this example some substance. The conclusion notes some implications for research in critical policy studies.
337 citations
TL;DR: Using the Cultural Political Economy approach, the authors explores the complex relationships that exist between competitiveness and resilience and argues that de-contextualised, placeless competitiveness strategies lead to problems of resilience that can be at least partly overcome with respect to more contextualised approaches.
Abstract: Resilience is attracting increasing interest in the thinking and policy discourses around regional development. However, regional development policy remains dominated by a narrow discourse of competitiveness that appears to have negative implications for resilience and is subject to increasing and widespread challenge and critique. Using the Cultural Political Economy approach, this paper explores the complex relationships that exist between competitiveness and resilience and argues that de-contextualised, placeless competitiveness strategies lead to problems of resilience that can be at least partly overcome with respect to more contextualised approaches.
312 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the scope, character and some of the consequences of internal and external marketization of Swedish education in the early 2000s are summarized, and the impact of competition on the internal workings of upper secondary schools is highlighted in particular.
Abstract: Sweden has commonly been regarded as a striking example of a social democratic welfare-state regime (Esping-Andersen 1996), characterized by strong state governance and active involvement in welfare matters. In the last two decades, however, the Swedish public sector and education system have been radically and extensively transformed in a neo-liberal direction, a move that was preceded by extensive decentralization of decision-making from the state to municipalities and schools. In this article the scope, character and some of the consequences of internal and external marketization of Swedish education in the early 2000s are summarized, and the impact of competition on the internal workings of upper secondary schools is highlighted in particular. We conclude that the external marketization of education has proceeded a long way and Sweden also fully embraces new public management, i.e. ‘inner marketization’, of education in most respects. However, aspects of the older social democratic policy paradigm are still visible with regard to the assigned functions, values and governance of education.
215 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the processes and relationships of recontextualization between higher education and other EU policy fields, including for instance the recontextuality of "competitiveness rhetoric" and "globalization rhetoric" in HE policy documents.
Abstract: This paper explores, in some detail at the European Union scale, processes and relationships of recontextualization between higher education and other EU policy fields, including for instance the recontextualization of ‘competitiveness rhetoric’ and ‘globalization rhetoric’ in HE policy documents. We trace the implementation of the Bologna Process in two EU member states, Austria and Romania, illustrating the effects of these very different socio-political and historical contexts on EU standardization processes through a detailed discourse analytic study of recontextualization processes of policy documents. This paper integrates two approaches in critical discourse analysis, Fairclough's dialectic-relational approach and Wodak's discourse-historical approach, by introducing recontextualization as a salient critical discourse analysis category and explaining its relationship to other categories within a discourse-analytical approach to (or ‘point of entry’ into) trans-disciplinary research on social change.
186 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, an alternative, relational-dialectic conception of discourse that defends an integrationist orientation to research methodology, privileging trans-disciplinarity over rigour, is proposed.
Abstract: We engage with Leitch and Palmer's (2010) analysis of Critical Discourse Analytical (CDA) scholarship in organizational and management studies, in order to argue that, whereas they rightly point to the need for further reflexivity in the field, their recommendation for a strict methodological protocol in CDA studies may be reproducing some of the problems they identify in their analysis. We put forward an alternative, relational-dialectic conception of discourse that defends an integrationist orientation to research methodology, privileging trans-disciplinarity over rigour.
164 citations