Liberal Arts vs Knowledge Economy
Liberal Arts vs. Knowledge Economy
There are two parts to the following.
The first concerns the immediate background to the threat to the University of Glasgow’s ‘Liberal Arts’ courses at their Dumfries/ Crichton Campus.
The second concerns the wider implications of attempts to develop a ‘Knowledge Economy’ as a response to globalisation.
Part One
On the 15th February 2007, the threat (now realised) that the University of Glasgow might withdraw from the Crichton University Campus in Dumfries was debated in the Scottish Parliament. However, it was a remark allegedly made by a senior member of the Scottish Funding Council which attracted the strongest criticism. This remark was to the effect that “The Liberal Arts courses offered by the University of Glasgow at the Crichton make no contribution to the economy of Dumfries and Galloway”.
So what kind of economy does Dumfries and Galloway have? The following is a rough outline:
The region is one which has a low wage, low skill, economy based on self-employed and micro-business operating mainly within traditional / primary sectors of farming, forestry and fishing . These in turn support related processing industries - creameries, sawmills and sea-food packaging. Finally, the region supports a highly fragmented tourism sector, which is likewise based on self-employed and micro-businesses.
The region lacks its own metropolitan/ major urban centre and therefore lacks the modern economic/ industrial infrastructure associated with such centres. This is a critical factor, since in the absence of such infrastructure, the region creates little demand for a high skilled/ high waged workforce.
The region has a ‘conservative’ or ‘traditional’ social structure in which low aspirations combine with low expectations to perpetuate a passive, risk-avoiding business culture. Lacking dynamism, this business culture‘s horizons rarely extend beyond the immediate locality. Effectively, the region’s economy operates at little more than subsistence level. Dumfries and Galloway could be classified as having a ‘pre-industrial’ economy and society.
Given this background, it can be argued that what Dumfries and Galloway needs to do is ‘catch-up’ with the rest of Scotland. To do so the region first requires the development of essential levels of education , skills and training. The relocation of Dumfries and Galloway College onto a Crichton site shared with a merged Paisley University and Bell College ‘West of Scotland University’ presence will deliver this essential objective. The Crichton would then become what is best described as a ‘Polytechnic Campus’.
If this does reflect ( as I suspect it does, see 1. below) the Scottish Funding Council/ Lifelong Learning Group’s objective assessment of how best to create effective educational provision in Dumfries and Galloway , then some of the confusion surrounding the University of Glasgow situation can be removed. If it is considered that what Dumfries and Galloway needs is a ’polytechnic’ level of further/ higher education, then it follows that the level of educational provision provided by the University of Glasgow in Dumfries and Galloway is unnecessary and therefore not an efficient use of resources.
That the University of Glasgow courses, if continued, would pump ‘over-qualified’ and ‘over -educated’ graduates and post-graduates into a regional economy which lacks the structural capacity to make effective (or even any) use of their skills. The graduates and post-graduates would then either have to accept lower skilled and lower paid jobs (denying employment opportunities to others) or seek employment elsewhere.
In which case, it would seem entirely reasonable for the Scottish Executive to allow the University of Glasgow’s presence in Dumfries and Galloway to ‘wither on the vine’.
The above is based on a presentation given by Professor Ewart Keep to the Scottish Executive’s Lifelong Learning Group in 2004. It was Mark Batho, Head of the Scottish Executive’s Lifelong Learning Group who was briefing Deputy Minister Allan Wilson during the February Crichton Debate . Professor Ewart is a professorial fellow at Warwick Business School and Deputy Director of the Economic and
Social Research Council on Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance. I have highlighted key remarks made by Professor Keep in his Presentation.
1..From http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2005/07/14121258/13037
Mark Batho set the scene for Professor Ewart Keep's presentation on the challenges for lifelong learning policy as described by his thought-provoking paper ' The 'Bottom Half' and the Dangers of Labour Market Polarisation'. Mark emphasised this is an area in which the Executive's Lifelong Learning Group has a very keen interest. In his presentation Professor Keep:
argued that lifelong learning was not a substitute for a strong industrial policy and welfare state, and that the value of skills in terms of economic success and social justice were in his opinion over estimated. Professor Keep maintained there is a growing polarisation in the labour market with a rise in the number of jobs at the bottom deciles of job quality offering lower pay, career prospects and learning opportunities, with in-work benefits subsidising the least efficient employers.
He suggested members also consider the impact on the labour market of an increasing number of university graduates. For example, more employers explicitly want people with degrees thus pushing non-graduates down the job ladder. In his view the product market strategies and quality of available jobs pose challenges for government policy and skills development and suggested that one-size fits all interventions will produce sub optimal results.
An alternative proposition would be to take a long-term approach by tailoring and targeting need to create a high wage, high skill economy for the majority of the workforce. This would require policy makers and stakeholders asking 'hard questions' about where to target resources to achieve the greatest impact and would only be successful with buy in from a wide range of actors. In his view the scale of change envisaged to adjust product market strategies and job quality might take 10-15 years to achieve.
I speculate that, faced with Glasgow University’s threat to quit Dumfries and so having to ask ‘hard questions about where to target resources to achieve the greatest impact’, and , having looked at the regional economy of Dumfries and Galloway, the Lifelong Learning Group have advised the Scottish Executive and Scottish Funding Council that continued support for Glasgow University’s ‘Liberal Arts’ courses at the Crichton is not an efficient use of educational resources.
For more on Professor Keep’s business focused critique of ‘Lifelong Learning’, see Appendix 1.
Part two : the Bigger Picture http://www.ces.fas.harvard.edu/publications/docs/pdfs/Andersson.pdf
In his presentation to the Lifelong Learning Group, Professor Keep recommended the work of Professor Paul Thompson of Strathclyde University who is a critic of the ‘Knowledge Economy’ (of which Lifelong Learning is a subset.) This led me to a paper presented by Swedish academic Jenny Andersson to a conference held at Lancaster University in 2006. [See Appendix 2]
This is a more ‘politically engaged’ approach than Professor Keep’s as the following quotations show:
the Third Way is a political economy based on the assumption of the reality of globalization, and accordingly it redefines the role of social democratic politics to act for the creation of wealth within the parameters set by globalization. Since capital is uncontrollable, what government must do is to provide the stable framework and infrastructure so as to attract capital and inward investment. The other leg of
this strategy, however, is to increase the value of the capital within its borders, that is, the human capital or the potential of the people. Attracting foreign investment has a parallel here in those labor-market policies, education policies, or asylum policies which attempt to attract the “best brains.”
Practically all New Labour policies, whether they be aimed at social inclusion, the pre-schooling of young children, or the preservation of the historical heritage, are economic in the sense of being given a role for the strategic creation of the human and social capital of the knowledge economy. In the same way, virtually all social or cultural values, from trust to curiosity and aesthetics are in New Labour thinking also economic values and therefore legitimate objects for economic intervention.
This expansion of the field of the Economy has meant that areas such as education policies,
cultural policies and social policies have become new forms of industrial policies.
.
From this perspective, the institutional acceptance of Glasgow University’s decision to withdraw from Dumfries is equivalent to recognising that Dumfries and Galloway could not support a major cutting-edge industrial development. [As opposed to investment timber or other primary processing forms of industry].
From this same perspective, the ‘knowledge economy’ is also a ‘knowledge industry’. An industry which depends on the exploitation of intellectual rather than physical labour. However, since my own views on this process have been influenced by those advanced by Guy Debord in his ‘Society of the Spectacle’ [1967] but which are not considered by Jenny Andersson in her paper, I will refrain from further comment.
Alistair Livingston
22 May 2007
Appendix 1
http://www.open.ac.uk/lifelong-learning/papers/39295485-0007-585D-0000015700000157_EwartKeepOUCONF-Paper.doc.
Learning Organisations, Lifelong Learning and the Mystery of the Vanishing Employers
Dr Ewart Keep University of Warwick
ABSTRACT
This paper reviews UK employers' provision of lifelong learning. It opens with an overview of the concept of the learning organisation and the barriers that stand in the way of its adoption, arguing that relatively few UK organisations have or are about to become learning organisations. It then examines the
record on providing lifelong learning to its adult workforce, which suggests that certain groups of workers (part-timers, older workers, those in low status jobs, those working in SMEs, and the less well qualified) are at risk of receiving very little non-task specific training. The paper then highlights the dwindling role, which policy makers are according to employers in their strategies for lifelong learning. The structural factors that explain this picture are outlined, including firms' product market strategies, the impact of the structure of the domestic market, the persistence of routinised forms of work organisation and job design, and the pressure for the maximisation of short-term profits. The paper concludes with a plea for a different style and type of policy approach to lifelong learning, that engages with these issues and which addresses the often-limited demand for higher levels of skill in the workplace.
A Snapshot of Current Employer Demand for Skills
The cumulative effect of the issues sketched in above needs to be underlined. At aggregate level, employers' conceptions of the skills the majority of their workforces need ought to be a source of very serious concern to policy makers. Two examples are offered here.
First, data from the 1997 Skills Survey (Ashton et al, 1999) shows that the following percentage of workers believed that their employer required no qualifications whatsoever from applicants that might fill the job which they currently held:
Manufacturing - 35.5 per cent
Construction - 22.6 per cent
Wholesale - 57.0 per cent
Hotels - 43.0 per cent
Transport - 32.7 per cent
Overall, 31.4 per cent of workers believed that their employer required no qualification of any sort from applicants for posts similar to those they currently held. At the same time, about one third of respondents to the survey appeared to be over qualified for their current job and to hold qualifications that were at a level higher than those required by their employer.
The second vignette comes from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS). Despite the endless rhetoric about the need for dramatic upskilling across the entire workforce in order to cope with competitive pressures, data from WERS indicates that managers in many organisations believe that large sections of their workforce require limited skills. Companies were asked what percentage of their non-managerial employees could be regarded as 'skilled' (i.e. having professional, associate professional and technical, or craft and related status). The proportion of workplaces indicating that less than one quarter of their non-managerial workforce was skilled was as follows:
Manufacturing - 44 per cent
Electricity, Gas & Water - 10 per cent
Construction - 31 per cent
Wholesale and Retailing - 80 per cent
Hotels and Restaurants - 82 per cent
Transport - 75 per cent
Financial Services - 80 per cent
Other Business Services - 30 per cent
Public Administration - 58 per cent
Education - 2 per cent
Health - 55 per cent
Other Community Services - 53 per cent
SOURCE: Cully et al, 1999:31-32)
In Wholesale and Retailing, 40 per cent of workplaces believed that they employed no skilled non-managerial employees. In Financial Services this figure was as high as 57 per cent.
It is more or less irrelevant if these figures represent the real skills of the workforces in question. The fact that managers believe that the distribution depicted above is real will influence how training is planned and distributed.
Appendix 2
From http://www.ces.fas.harvard.edu/publications/docs/pdfs/Andersson.pdf
In his presentation to the Lifelong Learning Group, Professor Keep recommended a book by Paul Thompson of Strathclyde University entitled ' Skating on Thin Ice' which explores the myths of the knowledge economy. Following this suggestion, I found a recent (2006) critique of the ’Knowledge Economy’ .
Center for European Studies Working Paper Series #145 (2007)
Socializing Capital, Capitalizing the Social:
Contemporary Social Democracy and the
Knowledge Economy
by
Jenny Andersson
Institute for contemporary history
Södertörn University College
14189 Huddinge, Sweden
Jenny.Andersson@sh.se
Quotations :
the Third Way is a political economy based on the assumption of the reality of globalization, and accordingly it redefines the role of social democratic politics to act for the creation of wealth within the parameters set by globalization. Since capital is uncontrollable, what government must do is to provide the stable framework and infrastructure so as to attract capital and inward investment. The other leg of
this strategy, however, is to increase the value of the capital within its borders, that is, the human capital or the potential of the people. Attracting foreign investment has a parallel here in those labor-market policies, education policies, or asylum policies which attempt to attract the “best brains.”
Practically all New Labour policies, whether they be aimed at social inclusion, the pre-schooling of young children, or the preservation of the historical heritage, are economic in the sense of being given a role for the strategic creation of the human and social capital of the knowledge economy. In the same way, virtually all social or cultural values, from trust to curiosity and aesthetics are in New Labour thinking also economic
values and therefore legitimate objects for economic intervention.
This expansion of the field of the Economy has meant that areas such as education policies,
cultural policies and social policies have become new forms of industrial policies.
Conclusion
I set out a provocative question in the Introduction, does social democracy have a critique of knowledge capitalism or merely a theory of knowledge capital? In the previous pages I have argued against the interpretation that has tended to dominate much of the literature on the Third Way, and that has seen it as essentially a continuation of neoliberalism.
Rather, I have pointed to important continuities between the Third Way and the historic
discourses of social democracy. I have argued that the Third Way is informed by a logic of capitalization of the social, a logic through which elements of the Social become forms of capital. While this has elements that are specific to the Third Way, it also holds similarities with social democracy’s historic rationalization discourses, and particularly with a technocratic or productivist legacy of Fabianism. In the knowledge economy, however, Fabianism takes new forms, as the economic policies of the Third Way target the capital embedded in human beings, in the disposition and character of individuals. This is a highly radical form of social intervention, directed towards the “tapping of potential” and the exploitation of talent and creativity in order to extract the value of human capital.
In this process, I argue, the Third Way turns what in the social democratic project have been articulations in critique of capitalism into arguments for capitalism, thus incorporating strands of utopian critique in the social democratic tradition into an economistic discourse of improvement. On the one hand, then, in the Third Way this stands in a continuity with a technocratic strand in social democracy, from an Enlightenment value of “useful knowledge,” where knowledge and skill were always parts of discourses of capitalist amelioration, productivism and Taylorism.
On the other, it marks a break with radical notions of self-fulfilment or wholeness as critiques of capitalism. The idea of self-improvement, of fulfilling one’s potential, of bridging the gap between what we are and what we have it in us to become, a deeply emancipatory notion in the history of social democracy, is in Third Way discourse a question of adapting to the demands of the market. Its notions of emancipation and exploitation in the knowledge economy, are fundamentally blurred. Freeing the potential of all, and exploiting the value of human capital, are seen as processes virtually without friction. The possible tensions and conflict between them are silenced.
There are two parts to the following.
The first concerns the immediate background to the threat to the University of Glasgow’s ‘Liberal Arts’ courses at their Dumfries/ Crichton Campus.
The second concerns the wider implications of attempts to develop a ‘Knowledge Economy’ as a response to globalisation.
Part One
On the 15th February 2007, the threat (now realised) that the University of Glasgow might withdraw from the Crichton University Campus in Dumfries was debated in the Scottish Parliament. However, it was a remark allegedly made by a senior member of the Scottish Funding Council which attracted the strongest criticism. This remark was to the effect that “The Liberal Arts courses offered by the University of Glasgow at the Crichton make no contribution to the economy of Dumfries and Galloway”.
So what kind of economy does Dumfries and Galloway have? The following is a rough outline:
The region is one which has a low wage, low skill, economy based on self-employed and micro-business operating mainly within traditional / primary sectors of farming, forestry and fishing . These in turn support related processing industries - creameries, sawmills and sea-food packaging. Finally, the region supports a highly fragmented tourism sector, which is likewise based on self-employed and micro-businesses.
The region lacks its own metropolitan/ major urban centre and therefore lacks the modern economic/ industrial infrastructure associated with such centres. This is a critical factor, since in the absence of such infrastructure, the region creates little demand for a high skilled/ high waged workforce.
The region has a ‘conservative’ or ‘traditional’ social structure in which low aspirations combine with low expectations to perpetuate a passive, risk-avoiding business culture. Lacking dynamism, this business culture‘s horizons rarely extend beyond the immediate locality. Effectively, the region’s economy operates at little more than subsistence level. Dumfries and Galloway could be classified as having a ‘pre-industrial’ economy and society.
Given this background, it can be argued that what Dumfries and Galloway needs to do is ‘catch-up’ with the rest of Scotland. To do so the region first requires the development of essential levels of education , skills and training. The relocation of Dumfries and Galloway College onto a Crichton site shared with a merged Paisley University and Bell College ‘West of Scotland University’ presence will deliver this essential objective. The Crichton would then become what is best described as a ‘Polytechnic Campus’.
If this does reflect ( as I suspect it does, see 1. below) the Scottish Funding Council/ Lifelong Learning Group’s objective assessment of how best to create effective educational provision in Dumfries and Galloway , then some of the confusion surrounding the University of Glasgow situation can be removed. If it is considered that what Dumfries and Galloway needs is a ’polytechnic’ level of further/ higher education, then it follows that the level of educational provision provided by the University of Glasgow in Dumfries and Galloway is unnecessary and therefore not an efficient use of resources.
That the University of Glasgow courses, if continued, would pump ‘over-qualified’ and ‘over -educated’ graduates and post-graduates into a regional economy which lacks the structural capacity to make effective (or even any) use of their skills. The graduates and post-graduates would then either have to accept lower skilled and lower paid jobs (denying employment opportunities to others) or seek employment elsewhere.
In which case, it would seem entirely reasonable for the Scottish Executive to allow the University of Glasgow’s presence in Dumfries and Galloway to ‘wither on the vine’.
The above is based on a presentation given by Professor Ewart Keep to the Scottish Executive’s Lifelong Learning Group in 2004. It was Mark Batho, Head of the Scottish Executive’s Lifelong Learning Group who was briefing Deputy Minister Allan Wilson during the February Crichton Debate . Professor Ewart is a professorial fellow at Warwick Business School and Deputy Director of the Economic and
Social Research Council on Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance. I have highlighted key remarks made by Professor Keep in his Presentation.
1..From http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2005/07/14121258/13037
Mark Batho set the scene for Professor Ewart Keep's presentation on the challenges for lifelong learning policy as described by his thought-provoking paper ' The 'Bottom Half' and the Dangers of Labour Market Polarisation'. Mark emphasised this is an area in which the Executive's Lifelong Learning Group has a very keen interest. In his presentation Professor Keep:
argued that lifelong learning was not a substitute for a strong industrial policy and welfare state, and that the value of skills in terms of economic success and social justice were in his opinion over estimated. Professor Keep maintained there is a growing polarisation in the labour market with a rise in the number of jobs at the bottom deciles of job quality offering lower pay, career prospects and learning opportunities, with in-work benefits subsidising the least efficient employers.
He suggested members also consider the impact on the labour market of an increasing number of university graduates. For example, more employers explicitly want people with degrees thus pushing non-graduates down the job ladder. In his view the product market strategies and quality of available jobs pose challenges for government policy and skills development and suggested that one-size fits all interventions will produce sub optimal results.
An alternative proposition would be to take a long-term approach by tailoring and targeting need to create a high wage, high skill economy for the majority of the workforce. This would require policy makers and stakeholders asking 'hard questions' about where to target resources to achieve the greatest impact and would only be successful with buy in from a wide range of actors. In his view the scale of change envisaged to adjust product market strategies and job quality might take 10-15 years to achieve.
I speculate that, faced with Glasgow University’s threat to quit Dumfries and so having to ask ‘hard questions about where to target resources to achieve the greatest impact’, and , having looked at the regional economy of Dumfries and Galloway, the Lifelong Learning Group have advised the Scottish Executive and Scottish Funding Council that continued support for Glasgow University’s ‘Liberal Arts’ courses at the Crichton is not an efficient use of educational resources.
For more on Professor Keep’s business focused critique of ‘Lifelong Learning’, see Appendix 1.
Part two : the Bigger Picture http://www.ces.fas.harvard.edu/publications/docs/pdfs/Andersson.pdf
In his presentation to the Lifelong Learning Group, Professor Keep recommended the work of Professor Paul Thompson of Strathclyde University who is a critic of the ‘Knowledge Economy’ (of which Lifelong Learning is a subset.) This led me to a paper presented by Swedish academic Jenny Andersson to a conference held at Lancaster University in 2006. [See Appendix 2]
This is a more ‘politically engaged’ approach than Professor Keep’s as the following quotations show:
the Third Way is a political economy based on the assumption of the reality of globalization, and accordingly it redefines the role of social democratic politics to act for the creation of wealth within the parameters set by globalization. Since capital is uncontrollable, what government must do is to provide the stable framework and infrastructure so as to attract capital and inward investment. The other leg of
this strategy, however, is to increase the value of the capital within its borders, that is, the human capital or the potential of the people. Attracting foreign investment has a parallel here in those labor-market policies, education policies, or asylum policies which attempt to attract the “best brains.”
Practically all New Labour policies, whether they be aimed at social inclusion, the pre-schooling of young children, or the preservation of the historical heritage, are economic in the sense of being given a role for the strategic creation of the human and social capital of the knowledge economy. In the same way, virtually all social or cultural values, from trust to curiosity and aesthetics are in New Labour thinking also economic values and therefore legitimate objects for economic intervention.
This expansion of the field of the Economy has meant that areas such as education policies,
cultural policies and social policies have become new forms of industrial policies.
.
From this perspective, the institutional acceptance of Glasgow University’s decision to withdraw from Dumfries is equivalent to recognising that Dumfries and Galloway could not support a major cutting-edge industrial development. [As opposed to investment timber or other primary processing forms of industry].
From this same perspective, the ‘knowledge economy’ is also a ‘knowledge industry’. An industry which depends on the exploitation of intellectual rather than physical labour. However, since my own views on this process have been influenced by those advanced by Guy Debord in his ‘Society of the Spectacle’ [1967] but which are not considered by Jenny Andersson in her paper, I will refrain from further comment.
Alistair Livingston
22 May 2007
Appendix 1
http://www.open.ac.uk/lifelong-learning/papers/39295485-0007-585D-0000015700000157_EwartKeepOUCONF-Paper.doc.
Learning Organisations, Lifelong Learning and the Mystery of the Vanishing Employers
Dr Ewart Keep University of Warwick
ABSTRACT
This paper reviews UK employers' provision of lifelong learning. It opens with an overview of the concept of the learning organisation and the barriers that stand in the way of its adoption, arguing that relatively few UK organisations have or are about to become learning organisations. It then examines the
record on providing lifelong learning to its adult workforce, which suggests that certain groups of workers (part-timers, older workers, those in low status jobs, those working in SMEs, and the less well qualified) are at risk of receiving very little non-task specific training. The paper then highlights the dwindling role, which policy makers are according to employers in their strategies for lifelong learning. The structural factors that explain this picture are outlined, including firms' product market strategies, the impact of the structure of the domestic market, the persistence of routinised forms of work organisation and job design, and the pressure for the maximisation of short-term profits. The paper concludes with a plea for a different style and type of policy approach to lifelong learning, that engages with these issues and which addresses the often-limited demand for higher levels of skill in the workplace.
A Snapshot of Current Employer Demand for Skills
The cumulative effect of the issues sketched in above needs to be underlined. At aggregate level, employers' conceptions of the skills the majority of their workforces need ought to be a source of very serious concern to policy makers. Two examples are offered here.
First, data from the 1997 Skills Survey (Ashton et al, 1999) shows that the following percentage of workers believed that their employer required no qualifications whatsoever from applicants that might fill the job which they currently held:
Manufacturing - 35.5 per cent
Construction - 22.6 per cent
Wholesale - 57.0 per cent
Hotels - 43.0 per cent
Transport - 32.7 per cent
Overall, 31.4 per cent of workers believed that their employer required no qualification of any sort from applicants for posts similar to those they currently held. At the same time, about one third of respondents to the survey appeared to be over qualified for their current job and to hold qualifications that were at a level higher than those required by their employer.
The second vignette comes from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS). Despite the endless rhetoric about the need for dramatic upskilling across the entire workforce in order to cope with competitive pressures, data from WERS indicates that managers in many organisations believe that large sections of their workforce require limited skills. Companies were asked what percentage of their non-managerial employees could be regarded as 'skilled' (i.e. having professional, associate professional and technical, or craft and related status). The proportion of workplaces indicating that less than one quarter of their non-managerial workforce was skilled was as follows:
Manufacturing - 44 per cent
Electricity, Gas & Water - 10 per cent
Construction - 31 per cent
Wholesale and Retailing - 80 per cent
Hotels and Restaurants - 82 per cent
Transport - 75 per cent
Financial Services - 80 per cent
Other Business Services - 30 per cent
Public Administration - 58 per cent
Education - 2 per cent
Health - 55 per cent
Other Community Services - 53 per cent
SOURCE: Cully et al, 1999:31-32)
In Wholesale and Retailing, 40 per cent of workplaces believed that they employed no skilled non-managerial employees. In Financial Services this figure was as high as 57 per cent.
It is more or less irrelevant if these figures represent the real skills of the workforces in question. The fact that managers believe that the distribution depicted above is real will influence how training is planned and distributed.
Appendix 2
From http://www.ces.fas.harvard.edu/publications/docs/pdfs/Andersson.pdf
In his presentation to the Lifelong Learning Group, Professor Keep recommended a book by Paul Thompson of Strathclyde University entitled ' Skating on Thin Ice' which explores the myths of the knowledge economy. Following this suggestion, I found a recent (2006) critique of the ’Knowledge Economy’ .
Center for European Studies Working Paper Series #145 (2007)
Socializing Capital, Capitalizing the Social:
Contemporary Social Democracy and the
Knowledge Economy
by
Jenny Andersson
Institute for contemporary history
Södertörn University College
14189 Huddinge, Sweden
Jenny.Andersson@sh.se
Quotations :
the Third Way is a political economy based on the assumption of the reality of globalization, and accordingly it redefines the role of social democratic politics to act for the creation of wealth within the parameters set by globalization. Since capital is uncontrollable, what government must do is to provide the stable framework and infrastructure so as to attract capital and inward investment. The other leg of
this strategy, however, is to increase the value of the capital within its borders, that is, the human capital or the potential of the people. Attracting foreign investment has a parallel here in those labor-market policies, education policies, or asylum policies which attempt to attract the “best brains.”
Practically all New Labour policies, whether they be aimed at social inclusion, the pre-schooling of young children, or the preservation of the historical heritage, are economic in the sense of being given a role for the strategic creation of the human and social capital of the knowledge economy. In the same way, virtually all social or cultural values, from trust to curiosity and aesthetics are in New Labour thinking also economic
values and therefore legitimate objects for economic intervention.
This expansion of the field of the Economy has meant that areas such as education policies,
cultural policies and social policies have become new forms of industrial policies.
Conclusion
I set out a provocative question in the Introduction, does social democracy have a critique of knowledge capitalism or merely a theory of knowledge capital? In the previous pages I have argued against the interpretation that has tended to dominate much of the literature on the Third Way, and that has seen it as essentially a continuation of neoliberalism.
Rather, I have pointed to important continuities between the Third Way and the historic
discourses of social democracy. I have argued that the Third Way is informed by a logic of capitalization of the social, a logic through which elements of the Social become forms of capital. While this has elements that are specific to the Third Way, it also holds similarities with social democracy’s historic rationalization discourses, and particularly with a technocratic or productivist legacy of Fabianism. In the knowledge economy, however, Fabianism takes new forms, as the economic policies of the Third Way target the capital embedded in human beings, in the disposition and character of individuals. This is a highly radical form of social intervention, directed towards the “tapping of potential” and the exploitation of talent and creativity in order to extract the value of human capital.
In this process, I argue, the Third Way turns what in the social democratic project have been articulations in critique of capitalism into arguments for capitalism, thus incorporating strands of utopian critique in the social democratic tradition into an economistic discourse of improvement. On the one hand, then, in the Third Way this stands in a continuity with a technocratic strand in social democracy, from an Enlightenment value of “useful knowledge,” where knowledge and skill were always parts of discourses of capitalist amelioration, productivism and Taylorism.
On the other, it marks a break with radical notions of self-fulfilment or wholeness as critiques of capitalism. The idea of self-improvement, of fulfilling one’s potential, of bridging the gap between what we are and what we have it in us to become, a deeply emancipatory notion in the history of social democracy, is in Third Way discourse a question of adapting to the demands of the market. Its notions of emancipation and exploitation in the knowledge economy, are fundamentally blurred. Freeing the potential of all, and exploiting the value of human capital, are seen as processes virtually without friction. The possible tensions and conflict between them are silenced.
posted by Unknown | 6:22 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home