Globalization Higher Education

So I come to you tonight in part with an academic analysis of current discourse. But more than that I come to you with an invitation. An invitation to participate in a loosely coordinated set of efforts, a national coalition and a national campaign, a national caucus, if you will, of academic labor seeking to reframe and redirect public discourse and public policy about higher education. A national coalition and campaign that are underway. Central to that campaign is entering in a systematic, coordinated, collective way, the national conversation about higher education. That conversation is being advanced and defined outside of the academy by foundations such as Gates and Lumina, by governors and state legislators, and by the Department of Education and Congress. It is a conversation that is being defined within the academy by academic managers. It is a conversation that is framed by a neoliberal political economy that privileges the private over the public (which is remarkable given the collapse and bail-out of Wall Street), that features large corporate, for-profit employers, but that ignores small and medium-sized business, not-for-profit organizations, and not-for-profit employees. It is a conversation that calls for students (as customers) to pay more to get less, that overlooks the persistent gap between what we promise and what we deliver to various student populations, that are the growth populations of the future, lower income students, students of color, and immigrants. It is a conversation that is defined by absence, by an absence of professional voice, an absence of imagination, and an absence of a sense of the possible. It is a national conversation defined by a politics of scarcity, and by a narrow view of what we do in higher education, of the functions we serve.

This article uses four academics' gendered and cultural responses to life in a university in Aotearoa New Zealand under the new managerialist regime. Performance Based Research Funding (PBRF) requires academics to submit evidence-based portfolios every six years to categorise and rank them, with government funding assigned accordingly. When the authors met as members of a writing group, the talk often turned to negative aspects of PBRF. Using co-operative enquiry, the four co-researchers began writing observations of their individual experiences, differences and identities to help them reflect and understand the impact of the changed environment. The four phases of writing as enquiry were: deciding on a focus, writing observations, engaging with the written accounts and interpreting the outcome through metaphor. The article process facilitated a positive outcome by helping the authors regain a sense of collegiality and mutual support, along with a sense of preserving their academic identity by writing and publishing as a group.

Concomitant with the rise of rationalizing accountability in higher education has been an increase in theoretical reflection about the forms accountability has taken and the ones it should take. The literature is now peppered by a wide array of distinctions (e.g. internal/external, inward/ outward, vertical/horizontal, upward/downward, professional/public, political/economic, soft/ hard, positive/negative), to the point that when people speak of 'accountability' they risk speaking past one another, having some of these distinctions in mind and not others. Furthermore, often these distinctions are vague and cross-cut each other in ways that are as yet unclear. The field could benefit from having a comprehensive framework in which to place these distinctions and to view their relations. My aim in this article is to provide an analytical tool by which to classify important debate about what accountability in higher education has been and ought to be. Beyond organizing such debate, this schema will serve the purposes of revealing ambiguities in terms, conflations of ideas, assumptions that warrant questioning, and gaps in present research agendas.

In this paper, we introduce a new framework that generates a list of strategic actions to support successful management of the innovation process as new technologies are taken to market. The framework links different stakeholders inside and outside the organisation to obtain an holistic view of the requirements necessary to develop the new technology. It integrates and synthesises existing frameworks into an inclusive set of guidelines. The framework is then tested in a case study located in a mid-size semiconductor organisation currently seeking new business opportunities in the emerging photovoltaic market. We conclude by reflecting on the usefulness of the model. Theoretically, the paper contributes to the literature on the management of the introduction of new technologies; practically, the framework provides a normative tool for practising managers.

Although R&D has been highlighted as the main source of firm-level innovations, a significant group of firms develop innovations without performing R&D activities. The primary goal of this study is to understand the sources of innovation in such firms. To accomplish this goal, we explore the role played by other, non-R&D activities that can lead to innovation - activities such as technology forecasting, design, use of advanced manufacturing technologies and training. Our empirical analysis is based on a representative panel of Spanish manufacturing firms. The results strongly support the view that non-R&D activities are critical factors in explaining both product and process innovations attained by any firm, especially in the case of firms not performing R&D. Academic, managerial, and policy implications are derived from these results.

Globalizing Education Policy. Fazal Rizvi and Bob Lingard. New York: Routledge, 2010. 228 pp. $45.95 (paper); and Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. David Harvey. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. 352 pp. $27.50 (cloth). The authors of the texts reviewed here situate current education and social policies within the rise of the neoliberal state and describe how Friedman's free market capitalism became the dominant view of society not only in the United States, but also throughout much of the globe. Rizvi and Lingard explain how neoliberalism became the dominant "social imaginary which is, as Taylor (2007) defines, the way in which large groups of people "imagine their social existence-how they fit together with others and how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations" (19). The concept of social imaginary is useful in placing how people think about the world within the context of culture, economic, and political events. Social imaginary differs from social theory in that it is held by large groups of people, and often communicated in stories and anecdotes. However, although it may be less theoretical, it is no less powerful because it shapes how people think of the role of government and the "nature and scope of political authority" (Rizvi and Lingard 2010, 13). It reminds us that how people view the world is largely contested not theoretically, but at the level of lived experience. Consequently, scholars and members of the educational community must explicitly engage in problematizing our social imaginaries.

There is a growing body of literature discussing evidence-based education, practice, policy, and decision-making from a critical perspective. In this article, drawing on the literature and policy documents related to evidence-based education in the USA, Britain, and Canada, I join this critique and offer an anticolonial perspective. I argue that proponents of evidence-based education unknowingly promote a colonial discourse and material relations of power that continue from the American-European colonial era. I posit that this colonial discourse is evident in at least three ways: (1) the discourse of civilizing the profession of education, (2) the promotion of colonial hierarchies of knowledge and monocultures of the mind, and (3) the interconnection between neoliberal educational policies and global exploitation of colonized labor. I conclude with the decolonizing implications of revealing some of the colonial vestiges in educational policy, research, and neoliberal reform

Recent years have seen a number of studies on the determinants of educational spending. Almost all of the existing work emphasizes the importance of left-wing governments as a motor of expansion because such expansion allegedly ensures both redistribution and the facilitation of a supply-side economy. The existing literature thereby corroborates the power resource theory. Against this common wisdom the article presents an argument building on the varieties of capitalism approach. It is argued that education is a poor instrument for redistribution because access is universal and high-income groups have a tendency to use education even more than low-income groups. Instead, we argue that deindustrialization is the main driver of educational spending because deindustrialization constitutes one of the most salient threats to workers in modern societies. As deindustrialization rises workers risk ending up with redundant skills, especially in countries where the average skills specificity is high, that is, coordinated market economies. The expectations find empirical support in a time-series cross-section regression analysis of 18 Western countries in the years 1980-2000

This contribution explores the transformation of higher education policy from the mere co-ordination of educational curricula by national governments to the embodiment of the Lisbon Agenda's 'governance architecture', together with its impact on national policies, institutions and actors. It does so by charting change in both policy outputs and policy outcomes in four different European countries - England, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy - and by relating these changes to the ideational and organizational aspects of the Lisbon Strategy. We suggest that Lisbon acted as a 'script' to be followed by national governments and other policy actors, enabling them to gradually adapt to Lisbon-induced ideational and organizational pressures, and to shape national organizational and communicative discourses that can overcome entrenched interests and transform the prevailing perception of higher education so deeply rooted in national cultural and policy traditions.