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Chapter 3 Globalisation: Conceptual Possibilities

3.1 Introduction This chapter discusses the conceptual relevance of globalisation for understanding contemporary expressions of international education. It starts with an archaeological reading of globalisation discourses to reveal the context surrounding their emergence (‘surfaces of emergence’); the institutional sites from which they are produced, circulated and disseminated; the ‘objects’ that they privilege; how these discursive constructions are inserted into the domain of ‘commonsense’ and public policy; and how they produce and reinforce particular subject positions. Understood in discursive terms, what is visible and sayable about globalisation is an example of power/knowledge in operation. As I elaborate later in this chapter, a collective limitation of many of the theoretical discourses on globalisation, is their failure to engage with a ‘vocabulary of space’, and with the contingencies of history. In other words, contemporary conceptualisations of globalisation, have not recognised the relational links between power and knowledge, something that a Foucauldian reading of globalisation discourses addresses. An engagement with theoretical discourses of globalisation, which is the aim of this chapter, reveals firstly, what is visible and sayable about the ‘proper’ role of the nation-state in providing, financing, regulating and managing education. Secondly, these discourses reveal how relations of power produce, sustain and reinforce particular interpretations of transcultural exchanges and subject positions. Following Appadurai (1996, p. 31) and Kayatekin and Ruccio (1998, pp.74-76), the interest of this study is in understanding globalisation’s links with subjectivity. Thus, the terms of the debate about globalisation’s risks and opportunities, are shaped by the forms of subjectivity presumed and/or produced by theoretical discourses of globalisation. To put it differently, the sort of ‘habitus’ which allows us to consume and appropriate particular ideas about globalisation is illustrative of our subjectivities (see Friedman, 2000, p. 140).

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‘Globalisation’ has become something of a catch-all phrase over the past decade. In many respects a ‘slippery’ and vacillating concept, it is associated with things great and good which are anticipated to elevate humanity into a new civilizational phase. In this regard, it is trumpeted as removing barriers between societies and cultures, for galvanizing new social movements and new sites of political activism, and for creating a global market economy which is anticipated to bring peace, prosperity and freedom (Martin, 2000, pp.12-13; Wolf, 2000; pp. 9-11). At the same time, its detractors have accused globalisation of fragmenting communities and of exacerbating class and gender stratifications through the reinforcement of older hierarchies of advantage and power (Scholte, 2000, pp. 234-237; Halliday, 1999, 2000). It is common for political and institutional commentary to cite ‘global forces’ or ‘global competition’ in their justifications for ‘rationalization’ and ‘corporatisation’ (Kenway and Langmead, 1998). These arguments take the form of exhorting the contemporary university to face up to the realities of a consumer driven, deregulated marketplace for knowledge and competition from corporate universities and ‘e-providers’ (see Heath, 2002, p. 37). Indeed, as I will discuss in Chapter Four, this discursive logic has influenced the ‘will to internationalise’. Thus, in both the British and Australian contexts, internationalisation is being translated to mean the recruitment of large numbers of fee paying international students. In the context of American higher education, considerations of earning export income are less important, although international education continues to occupy a role commensurate with American national interests and the ethos of exceptionalism (Leslie and Slaughter, 1997; Mestenhauser, 1998; Paige and Mestenhauser, 1999). However, the tendency for governments and institutional leaders to evoke ‘globalisation’, and its ‘inevitability’ for higher education ‘reform’, is itself problematic. Globalisation’s meanings and implications are contested, evident in recent calls for new ‘regimes of thinkability’ by theorists. For example, Appadurai (2000, pp. 3-5) has criticised the thematic priorities of globalisation theorists and urged them to extend their “academic imagination”. By this he means, an epistemological engagement with the emancipatory politics of globalisation (globalisation-from-below). A key dimension of this grassroots globalisation is a “strong internationalisation of knowledge”, which Appadurai defines as “moving beyond [merely] improving how others practice our precepts” and “deparochialis[ing] the research ethic, by closing the gap between the researchers of the United States and scholars from other parts of the world” (p.12). Both Tikly (2001, p. 159) and Pieterse (2000, pp. 130-131) have called for a ‘renarrativization’ of the globalisation story by using postcolonial theory to engage with ‘other’ spaces. For Scholte (2000, pp. 56-58), a new regime of thinkability of globalisation means an end to “methodological territorialism”, that is, research of the social world through the lens of territorialist geography1. He argues that globalisation’s radical re-ordering of time and space requires researchers to look beyond the ‘scale’ of the nation-state towards a non-territorialist cartography which engages with issues of power, influence and subject formation. Scholte’s 1. Using a a territorial spatial framework means formulating concepts, hypothesis, and questions (‘objects

of research’), gathering empirical data and interpreting empirical evidence using the nation-state as the referent (pp. 56-57).

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injunction against methodological territorialism is reinforced by Sassen (2001, p. 261) and Beck (2000, p. 21, 64) who argues that traditional sociological research has treated the nation-state as ‘a container’ which represents ‘a fixed spatiotemporality’. Kayatekin and Ruccio (1998) sound a similar warning. They observe that globalisation discourses have a political character, and to this end, interpretations of the global are being put to work in the government of others and of the self (p.76). ‘Re-narrativizing’ the globalisation story also requires an understanding of how power relations inform and influence transcultural and transnational flows. Much of the commentary on globalisation has discursively constructed globalisation as cultural hybridisation. Globalisation is thus associated with the end of modernity’s logic of uniformity and the end of Eurocentrism. It is mooted to produce a greater appreciation of difference, heterogeneity and reflexivity. In this chapter, I use the work of poststructuralist thinkers to argue against the ‘naturalness’ of global flows of information, knowledge, ideas and people. While these flows can produce new ways of understanding space and time (ontology), knowledge (epistemology), and aesthetics, the relations of power which underpin flows has meant that so far, many new ontological and cultural formations have been relegated to the position of ‘subjugated knowledges’ (Gough, 2000, pp.81-83; Massey, 1999, pp. 28-30; Scholte, 2000, Chapter 8; see also Pieterse, 1995). My aim in this chapter is to undertake an archaeological analysis of key theoretical discourses of globalisation, and thereafter, to examine how expressions of international education are influenced and sustained by contemporary processes of globalisation. I will focus on two key areas within the discursive domain of globalisation theory: how the nation-state engineers and is engineered, by global processes and the politics of transcultural exchanges. As part of my analysis, I will examine how the relations of power inherent in dominant discourses about the nation-state and cultural globalisation shape subjectivities, and what these expressions of subjectivity mean for social action. Here, Appadurai’s (1996) defining phrase ‘the social practice of imagination’ and its utility as a platform for social agency strikes resonance. This chapter begins with an exploration of definitions of globalisation. This is followed by a discussion of writings on globalisation, emphasising the role of the nation-state, and the cultural dimensions of globalisation. I conclude with a discussion of the regimes of truth which have acquired dominance in globalisation debates and their implications for international education. Before proceeding with my analysis I will clarify the terms globalisation and internationalisation. Although both terms are often used interchangeably, they have different meanings. Internationalisation describes interactions between nation-states (‘inter-national’) while the processes underlying globalisation go beyond national boundaries (Taylor, Rizvi, Lingard and Henry, 1997, p.56). The use of international treaties to protect the environment, to obtain access to human rights and to safeguard the rights of indigenous peoples to their lands, represent processes of internationalisation, as do such processes such as financial deregulation and investment liberalisation as prescribed by the trade treaties. Globalisation on the other hand, involves supraterritorial influences and consequences, which transcend national

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boundaries. Processes like the organisation of transcultural social movements and social action, and international student flows can be said to mirror globalisation.

3.2 Reading Discourses of Globalisation Despite its hold on the imaginations of academics, policy makers, politicians and the popular press, there is no agreed upon definition of globalisation. It is broadly acknowledged by researchers that globalisation’s diffuse and chaotic use, has significantly reduced its analytical utility (Robertson and Khondaker,1998, p. 6). This ‘globalisation of the term globalisation’, is held responsible for conceptual imprecision, ‘historical illiteracy’ and empirical shallowness (see Scholte, 2000; Therborn, 2000; Urry, 1998). I will argue in this thesis using international education as an example, and following Bartelson that “practices of definition and usage are never innocent” (Bartelson, 2000, p. 182). Ultimately, globalization’s diverse meanings are linked with the functions and agencies that it inspires (see also Massey, 1999, pp. 27-28; Kayatekin and Ruccio, 1998, pp. 74-76). Recently, theorists have started conceptualising globalisation as a series of discourses, with different material implications (Robertson and Khondaker, 1998; Therborn, 2000; Urry, 1998). This is also the position that I will take in this study. For Therborn (2000, p. 151), there are at least five topical discourses on globalisation: competition economics, social criticism, state (im)potence, culture and planetary ecology. Notably, there is a tendency for these discourses not to acknowledge each other (ibid). Robertson and Khondaker (1998) offer a slightly different understanding of globalisation discourses by identifying the following four major discourses: regional, disciplinary, ideological and gender. Taking globalisation as a series of discursive practices, immediately unsettles the notion that globalisation is inevitable and evolutionary. As such, it opens the discursive space for social agency whereby, individuals and institutions are able to intervene to shape contemporary social and economic events, rather than assuming the role of ‘objects’ who are acted on by global forces (Kayatekin and Ruccio, 1998, p. 80). Theorists who treat globalisation in these terms are increasingly aware that different theoretical discourses will accord differential emphases to the material, cognitive and sociotemporal aspects of globalisation. Accordingly, theoretical persuasions such as post-structuralism, materialism, feminism, postcolonialism or neoliberalism, offer radically different insights into the interactions of the global with the local, as well as according different levels of attention to how these interactions vary across spatial and temporal scales. Moreover, within each of these theoretical orientations, theorists are likely to have different standpoints, to speak from different political and/or ideological positions, and in doing so to offer different interpretations about globalisation’s consequences (see Held et al., 2000; Kayatekin and Ruccio, 1998; and Shaw, 1999). As I discussed in Chapter Two, Foucault’s archaeology identified a series of internal rules which work to shape disciplines and their treatment of particular topics. Given this, there are certain limitations in studying globalisation through a single intellectual discipline and a single body of social theory. This stated, one of the most common ways of studying globalisation is through the categories of economic globalisation, political globalisation and cultural globalisation.

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The commentary on cultural globalisation, has drawn contributions from sociologists, cultural geographers and those speaking from the disciplines of anthropology and cultural studies. The objects of their investigation include the deterritorialization of cultural practices arising from the transnational flows of people, ideas and ideologies. Economic globalisation, on the other hand, is broadly concerned with such issues as the global economy’s interrelations with national economies, and the risks and opportunities associated with global capitalism. Its commentary is drawn from both left- and right- leaning economic geographers, sociologists, political scientists and economists. Finally, those commenting on political globalisation, speak and write from the disciplines of political science and international relations. Their preoccupations encompass issues of national sovereignty, regional integration and reconfigurations of political power in the global arena. This group of theorists is noted for unsettling older centre-periphery theories of political power. By ordering the terms of the debate within these three categories – economic, political and cultural – there is a danger that the complex, contradictory, uneven and far-reaching implications of globalisation will continue to be studied through the use of a single theory or a single intellectual discipline. A more serious consequence is the increased possibility of beginning with referents which have a poor fit with the spatial and historical dimensions of the research problem at hand (see Marginson 1999a; Taylor and Henry, 2000; Tikly, 2001). Held and McGrew’s (2000) taxonomy of globalisation discourses is another example of how theorists can occlude particular objects of research while according dominance towards others. Briefly, according to Held and McGrew, globalisation discourses fall into one of the following categories of hyperglobalist, sceptical or transformationalist. As an ‘ordering’ device, their tripartite taxonomy is itself problematic given the significant variations within each of these categories. Nonetheless, it is useful in identifying the broad and often crudely simplistic ways in which theoretical links are made between globalisation and international education. The hyperglobalist position tends to vest considerable power and authority to the various machinations of globalisation, particular the economic ones. Accordingly, the global market economy is viewed as supplanting the nation-state as the primary organising unit of political, economic and social life. This global market is said to facilitate borderless consumption and theorists who use this approach, tend to see the cultural practices of consumption, whether of consumer goods or information from the Internet, as having a far greater impact on individuals and communities than nation-state processes. The sceptical position, on the other hand, argues that control of economies, cultural and political processes, remains strongly in the hands of national governments. The notion of globalisation as greater global interdependence is largely viewed as fictional and ‘internationalisation’ is seen to be the more accurate descriptor term than globalisation (Cox 1997; Hirst and Thompson 1995, 1999; Weiss, 1997). The sceptics’ position has been criticised for understating globalisation’s implications, including the growth in the influence of transnational corporations and for advocating a ‘business as usual approach’2 (see Amin, 1997, for a detailed critique of the sceptical position). Finally, the transformationalist position conceptualises globalisation as a series of dynamic and interconnected cultural,

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environmental, political, social and economic changes. These changes yield divergent effects which are uneven and shaped by situational factors, including the specific histories of nation-states, their political institutions, cultural traditions and the economic constraints they face (see Beck, 2000; Appadurai, 1996; Held et al., 2000). This stated, Held and his colleagues, like many of the globalisation theorists they criticise have paid relatively little attention to such issues as subjectivities, social relations and social agency. Neither have they engaged adequately with the enunciative modalities of globalisation. Whether or not we accept Waters’ (1995) summation of globalisation as the conceptual construct that captures the transition of human society to the third millennium, it is clear that there is a need for an analytic with explanatory powers to analyse globalization’s historical and longer-term impacts, and its spatial implications. Of particular importance here is theoretical engagements with issues of context and power. There are increasing calls for theorists to go beyond merely accepting that globalisation yields a multiplicity of different discourses and subjectivities (Appadurai, 2000, pp. 3-6; Sassen, 2000, p. 163; Slater, 1998, pp. 647-649; Tikly, 2001, p. 152). Questions need to be asked about the agents of theoretical knowledge within the globalisation field, what are the objects of their investigations, which spatialities they theorize from, in what ways, and the types of subjectivities they presume and produce. In Foucault’s words, globalisation theory like other branches of social theory must engage with ‘a vocabulary of space’ (Foucault, 1980a, p. 68). While the commentary on globalisation remains largely located within, and inscribed by, particular disciplinary paradigms, there are positive moves by many scholars to transcend the disciplinary boundaries, for example by combining insights from both structuralism and poststructuralism (see Slaughter, 2001b; Scholte, 2000, Chapter Eight). One of the more promising recent efforts in this direction has been by geographers who have used a spatial register (see Crang, 1999; Law and Hetherington, 2000; Massey, 1994, 1999). A spatial register treats space, time and the social as mutually constitutive, and in doing so, reconciles both structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives. Consequently, spatialised readings of globalisation are able to engage with the power geometries which produce differential mobilities for people, while also acknowledging the different material consequences for places, countries, groups and individuals. For example, the transnational flight path of an Australian, British or American academic jetting off to undertake teaching or consultancies in off shore sites will yield a vastly different set of experiences than that of an Afghan or Iraqi refugee fleeing war, poverty and oppression. A spatial register thus reveals the politics of power 2. The

Sceptical position argues that; 1) the highly internationalised economy that we are witnessing is not new and extends back to the 19th century. 2) most corporations are multinational (MNCs) rather than transnational (TNC). They are based nationally, receive support from national governments and trade on the strength of their national assets and affiliations. Activities such as research and development remain geographically concentrated. 3) capital mobility is not shifting investment and employment from the advanced, developed world to developing countries with the exceptions of the high performing East Asian economies (HPE) such as Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore. Foreign direct investment (FDI) remains concentrated in the developing world. 4) the world economy is not genuinely global but remains concentrated in the hands of the Group of Three (G3), the United States, Europe and Japan. 5) the G 3 have the capacity to exert powerful pressures over financial markets and other economic tendencies particular if they coordinate their policies. Global markets, in short, are not beyond regulation and control.

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underpinning cultural flows and exchanges including the dynamics which influence human mobilities. Few theorists have attempted to pin-point the causes of globalisation, hardly surprising given the difficulties in resolving the tensions surrounding the relative weight to be accorded to local and global forces. The few theorists who have delved into this discursive domain, have done so under the aegis of examining the links between globalisation and modernity, or globalisation and capitalism (see Welch, 2001, pp. 476-478 for a synopsis of the key theoretical debates). This definition of globalisation from Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and Perraton (2000, p. 55) addresses some of the deficiencies of earlier theorisations by including notions of process, space-time and power: a process (or set of processes) which embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions – assessed in terms of their extensivity, intensity, velocity and impact-generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction and the exercise of power At the core of their definition is a concern with the power dimensions which underwrite transcultural and transnational flows of people, capital, ideas and ideologies, technologies and information. They distinguish ‘flows’ with their implications of ‘natural-ness’, from the turbulence of power-inflected ‘networks’. As stated earlier, Held and his colleagues do not explore how discourses of globalisation, produce or assume particular subjectivities although unlike many theorists, they do make some references to social relations in their definition. More recently, theorists such as Massey, (1999), Scholte, (2000), Therborn, (2000) and Tikly (2001) have joined Held et al. (2000) in stressing the importance of analysing the histories of global exchanges. From this perspective, globalisation emerges as a historically contingent set of processes with premodern, modern and contemporary assertions (see also, Waters, 2001, p.22)3. One of the key advantages of taking a spatial and temporal perspective is that it problematises the conceptualisation of globalisation as a teleological progression to an improved future. In the same way that the use of a postcolonial lens, or a feminist analytic has the effect of unsettling the story of modernity, so too, the use of a spatio-temporal analytic offers the opportunity to re-narrativise globalisation’s risks and opportunities. By contrast, an aspatial, atemporal optic of globalisation effectively means a discursive victory of the ‘narratives of the inevitable’ over social agency, evident in pronouncements like this one from Robertson (1992, p. 9) who is credited as a ‘seminal’ globalisation theorist: “...there is an autonomy and logic to the process of globalisation which operates in relative independence of strictly societal processes” (Robertson, 1992, p. 19). 3. Waters

and several other sociologists like Held et al. (2000) have identified the early modern period as extending from the 16th to 19th centuries. Early modern globalisation is thought to have taken place against a backdrop of colonisation, regional wars and trade. In the modern period, which is located in the 19th and most of the 20th centuries, globalising forces are noted to be cotemporal with modernisation and the development of industrial capitalism. Finally, the contemporary period refers to the last three decades of the 20th and the start of the 21st century. Contemporary globalisation is associated with disorganised capitalism, postmodernism, post-industrialisation (pp. 6, 21-25)

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In the next section, I examine how various globalisation theorists analyse the processes of transcultural and transnational exchanges. I also discuss the subject positions implied by their conceptualisations. Since this thesis is concerned with subjectivities that are textually constructed through the experience of international education, the theme of global flows has implications for understanding the subjectification processes produced and sustained by the international university. I follow this with an examination of how globalisation discourses construct meanings and knowledges about the nation-state. As an object and instrument of globalisation, the nation-state’s role in the financing and governing of education has implications for how the international university is discursively constructed.

3.3 Politics of Transcultural and Transnational Exchanges As noted earlier in this chapter, the commentary on transcultural and transnational exchanges is dominated by sociologists, cultural and social geographers, anthropologists and cultural studies practitioners and studied under the category of ‘cultural globalisation’. Their work spans myriad political and theoretical positions. A key issue that has preoccupied these ‘culturalists’ has been the issue of whether transnational and transcultural exchanges are producing homogenizing or differentiating trends. I examine this debate by analysing what is visible and sayable about three primary concepts which have arisen in discussions about cultural globalisation: deterritorialization4, hybridisation5, and cosmopolitanism and their impact on social relations6. Here, my interest is exploring how theorists have viewed globalisation’s role in transforming relations of closeness and remoteness, from place-bound into supraterritorial forms (see Krause and Renwick, 1996; Scholte, 1996). Given the long-standing formula for social relations to be informed by notions of territoriality, this is a significant issue in any study into a global and globalising phenomena such as international education. Most theorists writing about transcultural exchanges have cautioned against positing binaries along the lines of the Westernisation versus Indigenisation thesis. Their injunctions against a universalising grand narrative, whether globalisation as westernisation, as capitalism, or religious fundamentalism, are eminently sensible. However, as discussed in Section 1.2, ways of imagining globalisation and ways of theorising about globalisation, are inflected by power relations and cannot be divorced from issues of location, voice, disciplinary perspective and standpoint. Also, as highlighted previously, the optics of globalisation continue to be influenced by an entrenched tradition within the social sciences which have privileged time to the exclusion of space. Because many theorists have taken their Euro-American world as the 4. Deterritorialisation

refers to the transformation of the natural relation of culture to geographical and social territories. It is a concept that is resonant with other sociological terms used to capture the unsettling of the place-culture relationship e.g., delocalization (Tomlinson) and displacement (Giddens) (see Tomlinson, 1999, pp. 106-107).

5. Hybridisation

is broadly used to refer to inter-cultural exchanges which produces new, hybrid and more complex cultural products. There is an ongoing debate about the ‘new-ness’ of contemporary hybridisation processes compared to earlier forms. That is, if globalisation is changing processes of hybridisation (Tomlinson, 1999, pp. 141-147).

6. Cosmopolitanism

is difficult to define, however, I use it to refer to self-other relations, a mind-set which is able to foster supra-territorial, transcultural and cross-ethnic social relations. Tomlinson writes of an ability to embrace distant others as significant others (ibid, p.207).

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spatial reference point from which to theorize, other geographical spaces are subordinated within the academic imagination. In those instances when space is brought into the analytic equation, it usually takes the form of discussions either about the compression or obliteration of space; the unboundedness of free space which appear to be resonant with free trade impulses; discussions of cyberspace or by convening different spatialities under the aegis of progress (Massey, 1999, pp. 33-35). In this last instance, spaces like Mali and Chad are appreciated as being different but as Massey notes wryly, “don’t worry, they soon will be like us” (p. 34). The potential of these spaces to compose a different narrative of globalisation and to follow different paths is effectively occluded. As a result, academic discourse has largely ignored the power relations underpinning transcultural exchanges. One consequence is a failure to include the historical legacies of colonialism in studies of transcultural and transnational flows. Postcolonial theorists and feminists point to the impositions of uniform and universalising formulae by transnational institutions, national governments, donor agencies and educational institutions as examples of compressing different ‘spaces’ with different needs into the ‘global community’. They point out that prolific globalisation theorists like Robertson (1992) and Giddens (1990) have been able to declare that globalisation cannot lead to an outcome of imperialism or westernisation, because their analytics for studying globalisation are aspatialised and ahistorical. Furthermore, by evaluating the thesis of ‘globalisation as westernisation’ as an outcome or end point, these theorists have effectively ignored the imperialising and ‘othering’ narratives which are extant and which continue to have huge consequences for particular people in particular localities and occupations (see Massey, 1999; Hesse, 1999; Sum, 1999; Tikly, 2001). In short, before exploring the ideas of transcultural exchanges, cultural hybridities, and cosmopolitan subject positions, there is a need to proceed with caution so as to avoid the possibility of producing another metanarrative in the process of deconstructing one set of grand narratives, whether westernisation, modernisation or capitalism. I now analyse Appadurai’s work to reveal how, through the selective practices of citation, key dimensions of a discourse can be altered with an accompanying shift in meaning and knowledge. Appadurai’s framework of ‘scapes’ has been particularly well cited, and although he acknowledges the ambivalent, contradictory, uneven and disjunctive qualities of transcultural and transnational exchanges, this unevenness is not sufficiently acknowledged by many who cite his work. Appadurai’s ‘scapes’ framework analyses global cultural flows on the basis of five dimensions, ‘ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes and ideoscapes’ (Appadurai, 1996, p.33). The suffix ‘scapes’ is Appadurai’s attempt to portray the inconsistent and shifting quality of these exchanges. Flows, he argues, are best conceptualised in terms of loops and feedbacks. Appadurai argues that there is something qualitatively different, new and critical in the types of exchanges and flows that are currently taking place. Thus, globalisation, has to be understood as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order which cannot be understood in terms of centre-periphery models,... balance of trade models [nor in] terms of consumers and producers (p. 32).

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Accordingly, “simplistic models” such as those proposed by Marxist scholars espousing centre-periphery standpoints, and economistic ones which are framed in the language of producers, consumers, markets, and commodities, are deemed insufficient to conceptualise globalisation (ibid). It is this perspective of Appadurai’s which has been particularly well cited, along with statements proclaiming that globalisation does not lead to westernisation, nor to homogenisation, but instead produces differentiating trends. Rejecting essentialised thinking, along with notions of an unsullied, pure culture being ravaged by ‘western’ commodity capitalism, Appadurai acknowledges that exchanges and flows are more likely to give rise to a series of ambivalent outcomes. Thus, how transnational and transcultural ‘products’ are consumed or received is a function of a highly differentiated set of factors including local, national, cultural, political and individual factors. In other words, “one person’s imagined community is another’s political prison“(p.32). Accordingly, concepts such as tradition and indigenization, westernisation or liberalisation will hold different meanings for different nations, societies, communities and individuals. Relating this to my study, the experience of consuming international education will necessarily vary across the spectrum of ‘international students’ depending on their situatedness, their national, geographic, linguistic, ethnocultural, class and gender positionings. What interests Appadurai is how transnational flows of people, images, ideologies and capital shape the ‘social practice of imagination’, that is, the discursive possibilities for change. He observes that the imagination is more than “a platform for escape, it also is a staging ground for action” (1996, p.31). A close reading of his work suggests that he is aware that global cultural exchanges are underpinned by the politics of power, although following a poststructuralist position, Appadurai does not locate this power in a particular ideological or regional centre. Significantly, he does not provide answers to questions about the relative dominance of any of the scapes, noting instead that “the relationship between these various flows to one another as they constellate into particular events and social forms will be radically context-dependent” (p. 47). I have quoted him at length to capture the complexity he confers onto context: the suffix scape also indicates that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from each angle of vision but rather that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities as well as subnational grouping and movements (whether religious, political or economic) and even intimate face-toface groups such as villages, neighbourhoods and families. Indeed, the individual actor is the last locus of this perspectival landscape, for these landscapes are eventually navigated by agents who both experience and constitute larger formations, in part from their own sense of what these landscapes offer (p.33).7 Appadurai’s interpretation of context is detailed enough to embrace the micro physics of power at ‘capillary’ levels, whether in specific national contexts, in local sites and in various 7. my

emphasis.

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collectives whether families, trade unions or religious organisations. His analysis normalises the tensions between heterogeneity and homogeneity. Thus, he observes that globalisation cannot be perceived as “a one-way street leading to homogenization...[rather] it involves the use of a variety of instruments of homogenization which following their absorption into the local give rise to heterogeneous dialogues“(1996, p. 42). To this end, he cautions against attributing too much to surface signifiers such as “Filipinos singing perfect renditions of American songs “…[as] the rest of their lives is not in complete synchrony with the referential world that first gave birth to these songs” (1996, p. 29). Appadurai’s work has been discursively associated with postmodernist concepts such as melange, bricolage and pastiche by the citational networks of the academy. His observation that if a world culture is emerging it is “full of idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies...ironies and resistances” has been hastily translated to mean that flows are unavoidably contingent and random (1996, p. 47). This is not what Appadurai implies and to this end, he raises a series of profoundly important questions which have not been taken up by many proponents of his framework: Is there some pre-given order to the relative determining force of these global flows ? Because I have postulated the dynamics of global cultural systems as driven by the relationships among flows of people, technologies, finance, information and ideology, can we speak of some structural-causal order linking these flows by analogy to the role of the economic order in one version of the Marxist paradigm? Can we speak of some of these flows as being for apriori structural or historical reasons, always prior to and formative of other flows? My own hypothesis which can only be tentative at this point is that the relationship of these various flows to one another will be radically context-dependent (ibid, p. 47).8 In other words, the cultural contingencies which inhere in the local context and how these interact with the ‘imports’ to yield reconfigured entities, are key to any analysis of transcultural exchanges. However, this is not to suggest that flows are randomly and ‘meaninglessly contingent’: This does not mean that the causal-historical relationships among these various flows is random or meaninglessly contingent but that our current theories of cultural chaos are insufficiently developed to be even parsimonious models at this point, much less to be predictive theories, the golden fleeces of one kind of social science (ibid, p. 47). Importantly, Appadurai’s work acknowledges the intricate interplay of change and continuity in producing the social order. Above all, his work highlights the manifest influence of space-time, of power and politics; and of histories and geographies, in studies of globalisation: Globalization is inextricably linked to the current workings of capital on a global basis; in this regard it extends the earlier logics of empire, trade and political dominion in many parts of the world (Appadurai, 2000, p. 3). 8. my

emphasis

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While his work has been cited to indicate an unequivocal endorsement of cultural hybridisations and the imminent ‘death’ of the ‘globalisation is westernisation’ thesis, little nuggets of doubt appear and reappear in Appadurai’s work about the power relations which underpin transcultural flows and the relative importance of macro-contextual forces in shaping each of the scapes. Writing about the fetishism of production, and the fetishism of consumption, he alludes to ‘illusions’ of consumer agency along with the idioms and spectacles of local control which ‘mask’ transnational power: ...[the fetishism of production is] an illusion created by contemporary transnational production loci that masks translocal capital, transnational earning flows, global management and often faraway workers ...in the idiom and spectacle of of local control and national productivity and territorial sovereignity... ...As for the fetishism of the consumer, I mean to indicate here that the consumer has been trasnformed through commodity flows...into a sign...that only asymptotically approaches the form of a real social agent, in the sense of a mask for the real seat of agency, which is not the consumer but the producer and the many forces that constitute production (pp.41-42)9. There are suggestions here that Appadurai sees the construction of production and consumption processes as governing the social imagination and the ‘real seat of agency’. He raises the issue, albeit obliquely, of how the ‘consuming subject’ is deployed in contemporary governance. Appadurai’s insights then, can be said to support the work of governmentality theorists who have written at length about governance through the construction and mobilization of the consuming subject. This was discussed in some detail in Chapter Two of this thesis (see also Miller and Rose, 1990, 1997; Rose, 1993, 1999a; and Rose and Miller, 1992). Transcultural exchanges have always taken place and the ‘indigenization of imports’ is a historical and contemporary reality. It is arguably a highly desirable reality and one that has probably been pivotal to the survival of human societies over time. What is problematic is the limited scope and possibilities for reciprocal exchanges between cultures and nations. A key challenge associated with ‘becoming global’ is how to arrest the relations of disjuncture between flows, particularly those disjunctures which produce the “fundamental problems of livelihood, equity, justice, suffering and governance” (Appadurai, 2000, p. 5). It is not sufficient then, to merely talk of the mobilities or flows whether of people, objects, images or ideologies. A more useful set of inquiries to pursue could be, when globalisation theorists write about ‘action at a distance’, what this mean for transcultural engagements, including those produced by international education networks? What expressions of ‘action at a distance’ matter and which forms are deemed unimportant? How do ‘flows’ of people and information influence what is visible and sayable about ‘difference’ and ‘the other’. What types of subject-positions are being created by these flows and exchanges? Are they sufficiently complex or are they premised entirely on commodity capitalisms? How do these

9. my

emphasis

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subjectivities contribute to arresting the disjunctures which produce inequity and injustice? What do the answers to these questions tells us about the power/knowledge constellations underpinning globalisation discourses? These questions intersect with the interest of this thesis which seeks to inquire into what becoming global means for the international university. Appadurai is one of the few theorists to have discussed the influence of globalisation on gender and family relations. He poses a vitally important question: “How do small groups, especially families, the classical loci of socialisation, deal with these new global realities...?” (1996, p.43). However, this dimension of his work has received little attention by way of citation. Appadurai observes the spatial and cultural displacements associated with global flows as potentially destabilizing on family relations, including marriages, on meeting transgenerational responsibilities and on the work of cultural reproduction. He suggests that the reconstruction of family life in radically different social spaces places greater burdens on women. Thus, “...women [can] become pawns in the heritage politics of the household”(p.44). Some of these conclusions about ‘heritage and gender politics’ as they manifest in intra-familial relations across spatialities are useful in exploring and understanding how international students experience the overseas study sojourn. The subjugated status of issues like gender and family relations in globalisation discourses is easily explained by attending to enunciative modalities: the institutional sites where globalisation theorists are located, along with their predominantly male and first world status leads them to privilege first world issues and those issues that relate to the public sphere. Having discussed at some length Appadurai’s hypothesis on transcultural and transnational flows and exchanges, I conclude my analysis of his work with two points: First, the role of power relations in underwriting global flows and exchanges has been undertheorised, in part through the practices of citation. Thus, Appadurai has been acclaimed for his framework of ‘scapes’, his views on cultural hybridisation, his rejection of the ‘globalization as westernisation’ thesis and his gloomy prognosis on the nation-state. However, his commentary on gender and family relations, along with his concern for other vitally important dimensions of social relations and social agency that are associated with globalising flows of people, capital and ideas have received little citational attention. Second, Appadurai’s work is often interpreted as meaning that global flows are random and ‘meaninglessly contingent’. Appadurai makes no such claim and instead, poses some difficult questions about the power of structural-causal and historical forces. Although he describes his framework of scapes as ‘rudimentary’, his ‘hypothesis’ for understanding flows and exchanges has been accorded metanarrative status. Many theorists have analysed transcultural exchanges by studying how commodity capitalism and consumption practices shape subjectivities. Theorists like Featherstone (1995, pp. 17-28, 80-84) and Waters (2001, pp. 196-201) have written about the ‘third cultures’ arising from these exchanges. These third cultures are defined as “sets of practices, bodies of knowledge, conventions and lifestyles which have developed in ways which have become increasingly independent of nation-states” (Featherstone, 1996, p. 60). They argue that third cultures, are made up of complex and diverse circuits of cultural flows which cannot be read

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using the simplistic logic of binary opposites such as local vs global, eastern vs western. The third culture argument has helped to elevate the ‘globalisation as hybridisation’ thesis to its current metanarrative status. By contrast, neo-Marxists argue that the manifest material and promotional power of western capitalism produces and sustains an unequal balance of resources which generates and sustains skewed and uneven transcultural exchanges. The use of ‘guerilla marketing’, where sophisticated technology is combined with knowledges of local idioms, religious affiliations and cultural traditions to create desires for particular goods and services among the inhabitants of the local is offered as an example to support this view (see Ahmad, 1995; Dirlik, 1996; Fitzsimmons, 2000). While the neo-Marxist perspective could be criticised for its notion of passive and uncritical consuming subjects, and for minimising the unadulterated pleasure enjoyed through consumption, its strength lies in its recognition of the role of power geometries in shaping transcultural flows and processes. Waters (2001) and Featherstone (1995) have rejected the neo-Marxist position which they regard as attributing too much power to the production technologies of western capitalism in shaping desire and subjectivities. Nonetheless, their accounts of third cultures have failed to acknowledge capitalism’s ability to operate and theorise on contradictory terrains. Miller and Rose’s (1997) work on the use of the psy disciplines which was discussed in Chapter Two, demonstrates the extent to which academic disciplines have been co-opted in constructing the consuming subject. Capitalism’s reconfiguration from an older, enclosed corporate form premised on a national identity, to a global postmodern form which incorporates local tastes, sensibilities, idioms, and sensitivities has involved a seemingly innocuous and unproblematic fusion between local and global, as this example, describing an advertisement to “Singaporeanise McDonald’s” (see also Hall, 1997a, pp. 33-34). Here, a tactical use of culturally sensitive marketing sees the engagement of nostalgia and local imagination, for the end goal of profit-maximisation. A hybrid product is thus created, to fit with consumer desires and a state ideology which is selective in its borrowings of American cultural and ideological products (Chua, 2000, pp. 198-199): One of the repeatedly used TV advertisments especially during the run-up to National Day begins with a morning assembly of primary school boys in a flag-raising ceremony...this is followed by a frame of two eggs frying and piping hot coffee suggesting that it is breakfast time, it then cuts to a Chinese old lady in a shophouse, symbol of old Singapore architecture opening a window to let in the sunshine... the next frame is of a young man driving a red convertible sports-car...singing to himself the McDonald’s song in Mandarin... the final shot is of an old Chinese gentleman in traditional clothes... sitting stiffly in a rosewood chair, playing the McDonald’s refrain on a Chinese string musical instrument, the erhu (ibid, p.p. 195-196) Examples like this, are frequently used in support of the view that globalisation is not leading to homogenisation, but rather, indicates its profoundly differentiating qualities. Along with this argument, are numerous others which point to the emergence of aesthetic cosmopolitanisms, featuring hybrid music, fashion and dance, all of which are reputed to pay

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little heed to national and cultural boundaries (Urry, 1995). There is no end to the number of examples that can be called upon to support this view. I offer two more examples here: the spectacle of Lebanese Australian youth rapping in Arabic while wearing back-to-front Chicago Bulls caps. Or the equally compelling scenario of the 16th century Chinese opera, The Peony Pavillion, playing to full houses at local Australian arts festivals. However, some caution is required in extrapolating about the agency associated with the purchase of a simple commodity such as a hamburger, or watching an opera from a different musical tradition; to the agency required to obtain access to, and participate in, more complex cultural discursive practices. The litmus test concerns the agency to obtain access to knowledges which sit outside of the ‘reigning epistemes’ of rationalism and commodity capitalism. For example, indigenous ecology or transcultural epistemologies, access to social democratic government and so on. This is not to suggest that global flows are simply leading to reproductions of older hegemonies. It is possible, that some hegemonies are being reconfigured through processes of hybridisation. Many globalisation theorists cite the ‘Tiger economies’ of Singapore, Korea and Hong Kong as examples to support their hypothesis that globalisation processes are unsettling older centres of power. However, such examples reflect a theoretical failure to give due attention to the contingencies of history and geopolitics. The end result has been a universalisation of findings about ‘spaces’ and peoples which collectively, represent less than 1 per cent of the population of the Asian continent (Bauman, 1998, p. 73). Despite access to significant information and communication technologies which claim to reduce the phenomenological distance between nations, culture, communities and individuals, there are indicators that fears and fantasies of ‘the other’ have continued to proliferate, contrary to claims of greater desire for, and acceptance of hybridisation and hybridities. A pervasive ethnocultural and national anxiety about the eclipse of cultural particularities (e.g., losing the Australian or English identity), has contributed towards a rising tide of fascism, racism and religious fundamentalisms. All of these developments pose significant challenges for the human rights agenda and the future of civil societies (Bauman, 1998, p.3; Hall, 1997c, pp. 21-26; Waters, 2001, pp. 187-196). In other words, deterritorialization does not only mean the emergence of diasporic public spheres and diasporic public intellectuals, but also a reterritorialization or ‘othering’ evident in the global goose-step towards resentment politics and towards ethnocultural and nationalist reifications. Reterritorialisation is increasingly being used as a governmentality to steer populations towards particular understandings of the nation-state and ‘the other’ (see McCarthy and Dimitriadis, 2000). What I have attempted to do in the discussion this far, is to highlight the point that the scope and possibilities for bi-directional transcultural exchanges remains profoundly uneven. It is this unevenness which enables multiculturalism in Australia to be consumed unproblematically when packaged in the exotic spectacle of ‘food fiestas’10. A metonymic frame freezes ethnic dancers to a pre-modern and unthreatening past. As a consequence, the 10. In

the American context, this is colloquially referred to as the ‘chomp and stomp’ specatacle.

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performative inspiration for cultural diversity extends only as far as buying ‘ethnic’ food and enjoy the spectacle of dressed-up ‘others’ singing and dancing to strangely exotic rhythms. At the same time as power politics relegates multiculturalism to the gestural, the national imagination remains hostile to substantive engagements with difference and otherness, witnessed by the criminalization and detention of whole families of desperate asylum-seekers. Against this backdrop, there are very significant challenges for the development of cosmopolitan subjectivities. Yet, the construct of cosmopolitanism remains indeterminate, conceptually difficult and still ‘awaiting realization’. Where does the agency lie for driving the cosmopolitan agenda? There is no agreement among theorists. Some associate cosmopolitanism with postnationalism, while for others the answer lies in popular mass-based cosmopolitanism. Cheah (1998) advances a provocative thesis, namely that, the conditions of possibility for a critical cosmopolitanism are best realised within the auspices of the nation-state. Hannerz’s understanding of cosmopolitanism goes beyond notions of intellectual and aesthetic openness towards cultural difference. He posits the cosmopolitan as a polar opposite to the local and so effectively creates a dualism – one is either cosmopolitan or local (1990, pp. 238-239). Not surprisingly, Hannerz’s ideal of the cosmopolitan has been criticised for denigrating local experiences while upholding broadly elite assumptions. Globalisation offers possibilities of viewing cosmopolitanism in supra-territorial terms. However, this area has received relatively little attention from contemporary globalisation theorists. In the aftermath of a millennial madness featuring slavery, ethnic genocides, colonialisms, authoritarianisms, fascisms, nationalisms, tribalisms and technological determinisms, there is an urgency to work towards developing cosmopolitan subjectivities through engagements with both place-bound and supra-territorial forms of identification. It also requires thinking outside the box of European intellectual history (Scholte, 2000, pp. 190-199). This section revealed how theoretical discourses of globalisation have obscured the role of power relations in transcultural exchanges. I began by introducing Appadurai’s work to show how discursive logics can be strategically reconstructed to form profoundly different propositions about social relations, the nation-state or the state of the world from that intended by the original author. As Friedman affirms (2000), the politics of the academy has seen researchers and theorists appropriate and integrate particular categories or referents with one another to produce radically different interpretations of the ‘object’ at hand. Furthermore, as I elaborated in Chapter Two, following Foucault (1971, 1991b), knowledge and power are two sides of the same coin, that is, they mutually implicate each other. In analysing a discourse, we are required to attend to who speaks and from which sites (‘authorities of delimitation’) and the ‘grids’ against which particular discourses are evaluated. The concept of hybridity has been significant in unsettling notions of civilizational chauvinism, racism and romantic nationalism. However, it is not able to evaluate how power relations influence flows and exchanges and as such has limited analytic utility (Pieterse, 2000). Equally, constructs like glocalisation, or third culture, confirm that the local and global are mutually implicated categories but they are less useful in identifying and teasing out the unequal power relations that inspire particular exchanges between the local and the global.

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It is against this background that recent studies on globalisation have acknowledged the need to move beyond merely accepting multiplicities and hybridities and to ask, whose claims, imaginations and identities are more legitimate, whose less legitimate, in processes of cultural hybridisation; which hybrid forms are acceptable and which are unpalatable and in which situations? (see Sassen, 2000; Appadurai, 2000). To understand the unequal articulations arising from local/global exchanges requires attention to the situated interactions of social, economic, political, linguistic, historical and regional factors (Appadurai, 1996, p. 33, 47; Therborn, 2000, p. 166). Critically, as I noted at the start of the chapter, studying globalisation’s implications demands the use of interdisciplinary approaches. Above all, it requires a radical re-thinking of key ontological concerns such as time, space and the human subject (Scholte, 2000, pp. 192-197). Globalisation cannot be regarded in linear and teleological terms as the next phase of civilizational progress with minimal attention being paid to its spatial dimensions. Scholte is not alone in questioning the linearity of globalisation. Appadurai also affirms the utility of employing a spatio-temporal analytic to analyse globalisation’s myriad flows and exchanges: For Americans the past is usually another country...If your [American] present is their future, and their future is your past, then your own past can be made to appear as simply a normalised modality of your present” (1996, p. 31). A few general conclusions can now be made about this rubric of processes termed globalisation. As noted in the preface to this chapter, globalisation lacks definitional precision. However, the proliferation of theoretical orientations – neoliberal, Marxist, post-structuralist, feminist and post-colonial – bring to the studies of globalisation a ‘fruitful ambiguity’ which is mediating an ontological shift in the social sciences. Where social sciences previously attempted to emulate the sciences and to purge discourses of ambiguity, globalisation discourses have prompted an unsettling of existing categories and delineations, to facilitate, what Bartelson terms, “an opening up of the horizons of expectations and imagination” (see Bartelson, 2000, p. 182; also Robertson and Khondaker, 1999). Having discussed how theoretical discourses on globalisation understand transcultural and transnational exchanges, I now discuss the nation-state. As a way of locating the contemporary debates about what should be the appropriate role of the nation-state in an ‘era’ of globalisation, I begin with a spatio-temporal snapshot of the nation-state. My aim is to ‘unsettle the tranquillity’ surrounding the nation-state’s present and anticipated future role. It is from this basis, that its continuing relevance and its responsibilities to higher education, including international education can be theorised.

3.4 Politics of the Nation-State A spatial and historical analysis quickly unsettles assumptions of the primordial status of the nation-state. The nation-state emerged as a political entity at the time of the Enlightenment. Where rulers had drawn their right to govern from divine power by claiming to be God’s representatives in the world, the nationalisation of the masses during the Enlightenment saw the nation replace God as the centre of political authority. Many religious ceremonies were subsequently adapted to become ceremonies of the nation. For example, the singing of 80

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national anthems resembled and approximated the singing of hymns. Where saints’ images were once displayed with fervour, the images of heads of states were accorded prominence. The national flag replaced the saints’ banner as a mystical and revered icon (Mosse,1988, pp. 65-68). The modern nation-state’s history in the non-West is even more recent, nationhood having arrived at political independence from colonial authorities11. In the midst of predictions and pronouncements by social theorists and political and business leaders about the impending redundancy of the nation state, the historical fiction of total state laissez faire is revealing. Writing about the rise of British modern nation-state, Hobsbawn (1984) argues that British economic triumphs in the 18th and 19th centuries were the result of the readiness of numerous British governments to “back their businessmen by ruthless and aggressive economic discrimination and open war against all possible rivals” (p. 232). Much of this ‘economic war’ was conducted in Britain’s colonies. Thus, for Hobsbawn debate and analysis about the nation-state needs to start not with the fact of government intervention, but its character. Taking the context of Western Europe as a focal point, it took two World Wars, and the rise of Communism to galvanise the shift from minimalist state provision of services to its citizens, towards the welfare state. The state steered and ‘pump-primed’ the economy to maintain investment, a steady demand for goods and services and high levels of employment. Although the scope and style of this economic regulation varied according to the histories, political systems and cultures of respective countries, there was a broad based acceptance in an interventionist role by government (Mittleman, 1997; Teeple, 1995). So what challenges does the nation-state face in light of globalisation? Before exploring this question, it must be acknowledged that nation-states exist in myriad forms and operate in radically different contexts. The notion of ‘the nation-state’ then should not be interpreted as implying one spatiality and by extension, an association with one teleology. I will concentrate my discussions on the first world nation-state as both the producers of international education in this study, (United Kingdom, United States and Australia) and the consumer (Singapore), fall into this category. However, where relevant, contrasts will be drawn with the non-first world nation-state. Discussions on how globalization is affecting the form and function of the nation state are predictably varied and contested. Some theorists have argued that globalisation has mediated ‘disorderly’ flows of people, information, ideas and commodities between spaces and places. These disjunctive flows have significantly reduced the western democratic state’s regulatory capacity, in particular, its ability to regulate capital and raise taxes. By extension, a reduced ability (and will) to provide its citizens with a requisite welfare safety net has engendered scepticism and diminished hope in the nation-state.

11. There has been little research by political scientists into the ethnocultural, religious and linguistic affil-

iations of the anti-colonial elites which led the push for political independence from colonial authorities, although historical works abound. The impact of their collective memberships on subsequent nation-building strategies may cast light on the multiple forms of states that have arisen in the South/East.

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One such view is offered by Appadurai (1996) who considers the contemporary nation-state as a symbol stitched together with disparate threads and rag-tag coalitions and riven by disjunction and dysfunction. His unstinting, unsentimental appraisal of the nation-state’s predatory and genocidal inclinations throughout history makes grim reading as does his pessimism about the democratic prospects of the nation-state (pp. 39; 42-43). Neoliberalist pronouncements of the ‘free’, arbitrating market and New Economy as a teleological doctrine have been muted with the recent spate of financial crises (see Jessop, 2000). However, there remains a groundswell of opinion in favour of a minimalist nation-state and as Thrift’s (2001) study of the New Economy reveals, there is every possibility New Economy discourses will be resurrected given the significant investments that have been made in information and communication technologies. Accordingly, state subsidies of business and industry are likely to continue while state spending on educational provision and other public goods is likely to remain stagnant. The rise of ethno-nationalisms and religious fundamentalisms, and their impacts on the nation-state, have been the source of much discussion and analysis by academic researchers. These movements are said to be present, to a lesser or greater extent in virtually every spatiality, however, in some contexts they represent particularly serious threats to the survival of the nation-state. Thus, Kurds in Iraq and Turkey, Basques in Spain, Tamils in Sri Lanka, Muslim separatists in the Philippines, West Papuans and Achenese in Indonesia and Albanians in Macedonia, agitate for nationhood, using sophisticated composites of mediascapes and technoscapes and the funds and lobbying power of their diasporic communities to press their case (see Appadurai, 1996, pp.37-38). Understanding the networks of long-distance nationalism of these separatist movements, requires examining the nodal points that constitute ethnocultural diasporas, as well as the production centres of the global arms markets – the predominantly ‘Northern/Western’ democracies of the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy12. The global arms trade is estimated to be worth some US$30 billion and, not surprisingly, the weapons export industry enjoys considerable in-country political support in these democracies (see Bauman, 1998, p 61; Levine, Sen and Smith, 1999)13. Yet, few first world globalisation theorists have commented on the relations between the political economy of arms production and ethnocultural separatisms. Strong ethnocultural and nationalist persuasions may also present themselves within international student communities where they work to discipline and ‘reterritorialize’ individual students. So, what is the fate of the nation-state? Its supporters argue that it remains the only credible site of political mobilisation. The nation-state is not necessarily weakened by globalization, rather it is reconfigured as it asserts an identity which is functional to economic globalisation. Because each nation-state must relativize its position vis-a-vis the global capitalist economy, it 12. A growing number of industrializing countries like Brazil, China and India are increasing their profile

as arms suppliers. 13. This

was the estimated worth of the arms trade in 1998 as reported by P. Levine, S. Sen and R. Smith (1999) ‘The Political Economy of the International Arms Trade: A Framework for Policy Analysis. See http://bobbins.mdx.ac.uk/~john6/Armsproduction/fullrepfinal.pdf (Accessed 11 March 2002).

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is more accurate to see economic globalisation and the nation-state as ‘mutually self-constituting’ (see Brown 2000; Holton, 1998). It is national ‘variables’ which promote and sustain shifts in global capital, information, people and technology. Global business, for example, remains highly reliant on national systems to provide a range of services, from facilities for transportation to banking and legal services. Government support is also used to support ‘local’ companies which are engaged in global competition (Amin and Thrift, 1997, pp. 150-151; see also Holton, 1998), and in producing the ‘right’ industrial relations climate, which can be variously translated as meaning a cheap, ‘flexible’ labour force. Globalisation thus, presupposes the state as this succinct observation by Brown (1999, p.11) affirms: Today transnational capital is more effective in penetrating every corner of the world because of the assistance offered by local capital and national states. While the state has lost some of its functions, it has gained new ones. Significantly then, globalisation should not be viewed as an external force, deploying an all-powerful agent, exercising a top-down modus operandi to govern nation-states. Rather it constitutes a set of process with variable effects, which national policies can promote and guide. The strategies employed by individual states will vary depending on local/national factors such as the ideology of their governing elites, national histories, and their situatedness vis-à-vis the global capitalist system. Nation-states retain the ability to attract, threaten, ally with, and co-opt international capital (Brown, 2000, p.91). They are often highly creative in how they achieve their aims. For example, the ability to attract international investment can involve the appropriation of ethnocultural ‘myths’ by governing elites to present a favourable face to investors. The 1980s, saw a plethora of writings that attributed Japan’s economic success to a unique form of Japanese business governance – management by consensus – which is reputed to have steered capital-labour relations towards high productivity levels. In the 1990s, the success of the ‘Asian Tigers’ (Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong) was widely attributed to Confucian Values, officially translated to mean collective ‘sacrifice’ by a diligent workforce which was prepared to defer wage demands for long-term economic and social benefits. However, as I discuss in Chapter Six, these myths are part of a broader discursive ensemble, a governmentality premised on an ‘East versus West’ discourse which has effectively positioned a homogeneous, decadent and individualistic ‘West’ against a hard working, thrifty and community-minded East. Similar in function, although very different in substance, are discourses like the Clever Country discourse in Australia in the 1990s and the present Cool Britannia discourse in the United Kingdom, which I detail in Chapter Five. Although the prominence of these myths has declined somewhat in recent times, their residual traces remain and are recycled periodically by various governments. Singapore, is an illustrative site where ethnocultural and civic nationalisms are combined with state corporatism to provide the conditions that support economic globalisation. Discourses of ethnocultural and civic nationalism are deployed in educational sites where they work as inscribing devices to construct particular subjectivities. I discuss this in some detail in Chapter Six.

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There is a strong case for an enduring role for national economic governance. Taking the first world nation-state as their referent, Amin and Thrift (1997) point to three areas where the nation-state’s input continues to be important. First, the national financial system remains relevant and is required to support ‘local’ corporations engaged in global competition via various schemes ranging from tax concessions to access to finance. Second, government support is necessary for research and innovation. Although research and development is recognised to have a key function in the development of the post-industrial knowledge-based economy, consistent and cohesive support by the neoliberal state has been less forthcoming. Third, the national system is required to regulate the labour market and industrial relations system (pp. 150-151). Markets cannot be relied upon to deliver these outcomes. Furthermore, the globalisation of risk, whether in the form of financial crises, or the need to regulate the flow of finances which may find their way to global terrorism will require greater cooperation between national governments and transnational institutions (see also Beck, 2000, pp. 129-132; Jessop, 1999, pp. 33-37; Mittelman, 1997, pp. 1-19; Sassen, 2000, pp. 164-168). Thus far, I have limited my discussions to the first world nation-state. What of the non-first world state? Bauman’s (1998) caustic dismissal of ‘the lie of free trade’ leads him to argue that such states can, and do effectively abandon all thought of autonomous economic policy and labour rights. Capital in the New World Order requires weak, quasi-states which, Bauman argues, “can be reduced to the useful role of police precincts securing a modicum of order required for the conduct of business but need not be feared as effective brakes on the global companies’ freedom”(p.68). Having established that the nation-state authors globalisation, to a lesser or greater extent, while also being at the receiving end of global processes and forces, what should be the role of the nation-state? Ultimately, the answer must lie in the social imagination of the various social actors within the nation-state. The issue is not whether the nation-state is redundant but the kind of nation-state that best serves the citizenry (Beck, 2000, p. 147; Scholte, 2000, pp. 227-229). The reduced potential of individual nation-states to uphold the rights of democratic citizenship for communities, nationally and globally, is a major issue confronting the international university. I will re-visit this issue when I examine the public discourses surrounding international education in the sites of production – the United States, Britain and Australia. To summarise, some globalisation theorists have declared the imminent redundancy of the nation-state in the face of disorganised capitalism and a growing cultural and ethnic fragmentation. However, a historical snapshot of the nation-state in west Europe, suggests that over the past 200 years, nation-states have played greater or lesser roles in governance and administration. A spate of economic crises in the ‘developed world’ in recent times is beginning to unsettle the neoliberal sensibility that accords primacy to the market and sees it as a teleological doctrine to replace the regulating nation-state. Extending this historical analogy to the present, it is not the first time that the nation-state has exercised a minimalist role. Ultimately, it is a matter of political will whether the nation-state should adopt a mediating role rather than a regulating and facilitating role. The merits of pronouncements

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declaring that ‘There is no alternative’ to globalisation must be examined with an eye to history (see Welch, 2001, p. 477).

3.5 Globalisation, Education and the Nation-State The literature on globalisation has largely focused on national education systems and domestic educational markets rather than international education. However, the findings of these analyses which extend to globalisation’s implications, is a useful starting point to understand the challenges and opportunities facing international education. Fitzsimmons (2000), following theorists like Foucault and Bourdieu observes that as a key social institution education is charged with the responsibility of “shaping subjectivities [and of] winning hearts and minds” (Fitzsimmons, 2000, unpaged; see also Marginson and Mollis, 2001, p. 330). I argue in the course of this thesis that this role remains largely unchanged in the face of globalising processes and forces. A review of the literature on education and globalisation, reveals five broad themes. With a few exceptions where the focus is on the cultural dimensions of globalisation, the literature has largely focused on revealing the interplays between the political and economic strands of globalisation. First, there is the body of research which identifies globalisation with the emergence of the neoliberal state and analyses its educational implications. The central argument concerns the rise of neoliberal state which, it is argued, has attempted to steer education towards fiscal independence and greater entrepreneurialism (‘academic capitalism’). Some researchers have pointedly referred to the use of education as a technology to reproduce the capitalist state and the global economy (Morrow and Torres, 2000; Spring, 1998; Welch, 2001). Other theorists, notably, Ball, (1998, 2000); Currie and Newson, (1998), Kenway and Langmead, (1998), Marginson, (1997a, 1997b), Marginson and Considine, (2000), Porter and Vidovich, (2000), Slaughter and Leslie, (1997), Slaughter, (1998, 2001) and Stromquist and Monkman (2000), have focused on the consequences of neoliberal globalisation on institutional governance (managerialism and performativity), knowledge production (instrumentalism, vocationalism and commodification) and social relations (competitiveness and other market-like subjectivities). This group of researchers has argued that under the auspices of a neoliberal globalisation, education is being steered towards the following ends: the subordination of notions of public good to private good, declining conditions for academic labour; the loss of collegiality and rising internal competition, declining academic standards, and greater instrumentalism which is evident in the construction of an increasingly vocationalised ‘service university’ (see also Brett, 1997; Buchbinder and Rajagopal, 1996; Keast, 1995; Pusser, 2000; Tractenberg, 1994; and Welch, 2001). Mirroring the globalisation debates, various education researchers have debated whether globalisation produces an increased convergence in education systems. Presently, the conclusion reached is that there is little evidence of convergence in systems despite similarities at the levels of policy rhetoric and policy objectives (Dale, 1999; Green, 1999, Selwyn and Brown, 2000). International education has been at the cusp of some of the criticism directed at the entrepreneurialism within university contexts. The university’s desire to function as a competitive business is noted for the recruitment of significant numbers of international 85

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students, a development which is associated in some quarters with declining academic standards (Pratt and Poole, 2000, pp. 19-21; Patience, 2000, pp. 64-65; Spring, 1998, pp. 177-179). I discuss some of these concerns in Chapter Four. Second, and allied with human capital theory, is the discourse of the knowledge-based economy. Touted as the only means of creating jobs and growth in the New Economy, official pronouncements of the knowledge-based economy have focused on four main areas: learning, work, public services and enterprises (Peters, 2002, p. 91). Learning is thus linked to the economic competitiveness of the nation and its adoption of technology (see also Selwyn and Brown, 2000, pp. 661-663). The authorities who contribute to this discourse include education bureaucrats, the World Bank, education consultants and think-tanks, technology companies, global media corporations and increasingly, public universities. Notable in this body of writings is an assumption of the natural-ness and inevitability of a ‘new’ stage of capitalism where knowledge is perceived to be a force of production (ibid, p. 93). Issues of ideology, power, social relations and subjectivities are absent from the discourse of the knowledge-based economy. Considerations of space are addressed only so far as discussions of how technology can be used to annihilate distance and diminish the effect of location, for example, by the provision of ‘anytime, anyplace’ education (p. 94). In academic circles there has been scepticism that the information age will lead to an expansion of ‘high skilled’ employment opportunities and cohorts of empowered knowledge workers. Researchers like Selwyn and Brown (2000, p. 678) have argued that the more likely outcome is the production of “information slaves rather than knowledge workers”. A third body of work has taken as its object of discussion, the plural challenges and possibilities created by cultural globalisation. Here, the discursive logic has been to normalise the interconnected and interdependent world, so as to put the case forward for new educational forms which can respond to these ‘new times’ and ‘new configurations’ of student identity (see Gough, 2000; Lingard, 2000b; Henry et al., 1999, Marginson, 1999; Rizvi, 1998; see also Rizvi and Lingard, 2000). A discursive space is thus produced which emphasises the urgent need to ‘steer towards a different destination’ where building social capital is paramount, along with respect for difference, hybrid identities and intercultural competencies (‘transnational imaginaries’)14. Using key concepts from postmodernist theory, this body of work presumes and reinforces the notion of the subject as multiple and shifting and argues for pedagogical reforms to enable education to engage with this learner. A fourth constellation of research argues that globalisation is shifting the ontological dominance of time to space-time, which demands corresponding changes in educational theories and practices. Thus, where education has largely been organised along developmental lines (eg age), there is now an urgent need for engagement with space (see also Edwards and Usher, 2000; Usher, 2002). Notably, much of the engagement with space has focused on cyber-education and cyberliteracies. Taking a different perspective but arriving at the same conclusion that globalisation demands a change in how knowledge is regarded and 14. Social

capital can be defined as “processes between people which establish networks, norms, social trust and facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit” (Cox 1996 in Henry et al. 1999, p. 95).

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produced, are theorists like Appadurai (2000), Gough (2000), Scholte (2000) and Stromquist and Monkman (2000) to name a few. Their criticisms span a broad field: from the modernist fixity on the ‘cult of technology’, to concerns for alternative knowledges that are produced in spaces which are peripheral to first world academia. A fifth and related body of research has focused on the role of technologies in education. Its proponents stress that technologies enable education to be transformed from teacher centred to student centred, from rigid and bureaucratic, to flexible in time and location access, from passive to interactive (see Mason, 1998, p. 52). The student-cyborg, who surpasses the educator’s technological literacy, has been the source of hope and optimism (see Henry et at al 1999, pp. 93-94; Scholte, 2000, pp. 199-200). This subject is said to be at odds with the modernist, low-tech schools and classrooms which have dominated the educational imaginary. It is left to be seen whether this new global student subject will materialise, or whether this hope in cyber-education simply reflects a continuation of rationalism’s romance with technology. Within this group of researchers are sceptics who charge that by themselves, the use of technologies in education, will do little to improve educational standards, or to improve educational opportunities for all but a small majority (Mason, 1998, pp. 7-10; Selwyn and Brown, 2000, pp. 679-680). Also writing on the topics of education, technology and globalisation, is a group of theorists who have taken as their objects of analysis, the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on the provision, organisation, financing and governance of higher education. The use of technologies in education is being associated with the rise of new education providers modelled on ‘corporate universities’. It is anticipated that these corporate universities will target the life-long learning cohort, those over the age of 25 years, with the emphasis largely concentrated on business-related disciplines (Cunningham et al., 2000). Importantly, the rationale for the greater use of technology in education is portrayed as arising from demand from consumers, rather than through the manufacturing of desire from providers, a point raised by Thrift (2001) in his incisive critique of the New Economy. The subject presumed by this body of discourse is the learner who is also an earner and whose educational aspirations are essentially vocationalist. I will discuss the rising profile of the for-profit institution in Chapter Five. As noted earlier, technology in education has assumed centre stage in the education policies of many governments, particularly first world governments. The declared aim of many of their policy initiatives is to improve their nations’ competitive advantage in the ‘new’ knowledge-based economy (Selwyn and Brown, 2000). Much of the theorizing on education and globalization has hardly been global in focus and analysis. A great deal of this work has been authored by, and has focused, on the western, industrialised countries or the more ‘significant’ Asian ‘Tiger ‘or ‘Dragon’ economies (see Tikly, 2001). This stated, how are the relations between globalisation and international education theorised? What are the subject positions assumed, constructed and enabled by these theorisations? Which of the discursive strands that emerged from the above review on globalisation and education, is privileged in discursive constructions of international education?

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I argue in the next section that the complexity of the relationship between globalisation and international education is undertheorised, resulting in an overemphasis on the power of the global economic market and an implied lack of agency on the part of the nation-state. There is also a tendency to accept categories such as ‘hybrid’ and ‘transformationalist’ without interrogating their influence on subject formations and self-other relations.

3.5.1

Globalisation & International Education

Policies and political pronouncements have conceptualised the links between international education and globalization in terms of an open, global market where consumers can choose which educational product best suits their needs. Accordingly, universities construct themselves to become global providers of education credentials. They are driven to be globally competitive, self- reliant and financially independent of the nation-state. The development of a successful entrepreneurial university is paramount, and the various programmes of internationalisation are seen as nesting within this vision. Recruiting international students from a range of markets and developing partnerships with other private and public higher education institutions as well as for-profit corporations, assumes centrality. This vision of the international university implies some level of standardisation of pedagogy and of credit transfer arrangements to ensure the ‘immutable mobility’ of educational credentials across time and space. Finally, there are the ‘exciting’ possibilities to compress space and time by using new technologies to deliver education ‘any place, any time’ in an ever expanding network of markets and customers. This position is resonant with what Held and McGrew (2000) have described as hyperglobalist. According to this vision, the international university must develop ‘products’ which have market-appeal. Given that contemporary relevance is the determinant of what will sell in a market, this approach removes from the international university its responsibility to produce and transmit knowledges which do not have utilitarian market value. The limitations of a market-based approach is made evident by Halliday’s salutary observation that a predominantly market-based approach would never have enabled human rights, environmental science and gender studies to feature in the university’s curricula and research agendas (1999, p. 102). Furthermore, if education is constructed as a commodity, what of those who lack the purchasing power to be consumers? This is a key question posed by Bagnall (2002) in his discussion of the ethics of the ‘contingent university’. Are accountability provisions adequate to ensure the welfare and interests of the international university’s constituents? Or is the technology of accountability simply a form of accounting as Peters (1992) charges? Mason’s (1998, pp. 45-46) study of the uses of information and communication technologies (ICT) in education suggests that global education providers have not been particularly successful or vigilant in accommodating cultural differences in their pedagogical approaches: Although there is a case for arguing that there is considerable diversity and diversification concomitant with globalisation, there is little likelihood of a myriad of small, local, traditional cultures being nurtured within globalisation (Evans 1995 in Mason, 1998, p. 45).

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Mason’s study analysed student feedback and found that on-line programmes such as Executive MBA programmes with an international student body, produced and enabled greater sharing of cultural information amongst students. In some ways then, international education programmes that utilize ICT’s and include an international student body are facilitating greater awareness of issues of cultural diversity, although this understanding is instrumental in its focus. However, critics like Bagnall (2002, pp. 85-87), and Stromquist and Monkman (2000, pp.11-12, 14) warn against reading too much into examples like this, arguing that they contribute little to a genuinely pluralistic and transformative discourse. Instead, what is being produced, circulated and disseminated is in Bagnall’s words, a “very skewed set of cultural values”, which he argues, are “western,... privatised, ego-centric” and corporate in their focus (p. 86). None of these authors have used a power/knowledge analytic, however, their findings and conclusions lend weight to arguments about the differential dissemination powers of some discourses over others. A discourse of cultural diversity in education is acceptable insofar as it is ‘productive’ and able to contribute to a market economy. Even a hyperglobalist vision of international education cannot operate conceptually on the notion of a redundant nation-state. Education is a ‘disciplining technology’, which has long been used by nation-states to inculcate particular notions of subjectivities, particular desires and aspirations, including the responsibilities and loyalties required of its citizens. Furthermore, the issue of credentialization and regulation remains in the realm of state control, at least in countries like Australia and the U.K. where higher education is a quasi-market. Even in a more marketised higher education system like the United States, state instrumentalities are pivotal in the regulation and quality assurance of educational services and products. Equally problematic are those approaches which ignore the influence of globalising forces and processes on the international university, while regarding it as being nation-centred in its functions. International universities today depict similarities and differences from their nation-centred predecessors. On the one hand, they are similar in that their primary focus remains training professionals for the national economy and citizens for a society that is territorially based. Yet on the other hand, international universities are different from their counterparts a few decades ago in that their global engagements are manifestly greater today than in the past. A broad sweep of activities from staff and student mobility, to exchanges and collaborations, recruitment and marketing practices and institutional policy borrowings all depict an extension of the nation-centred university. The preferable model of international education would be one which is informed by a view of globalization which drives and incorporates the reciprocity and complexity of flows and exchanges (Marginson and Rhoades, 2002, pp. 290-292). This ‘brand’ of international education would mediate the complexities, and contradictions of local, national and global-level forces in order to retain ‘horizontal diversity’ without resorting to the ‘imitate or perish syndrome’ (Marginson, 2002, p. 422; Marginson and Considine, 2000, pp. 178-185). Such a brand would have local, national and international utility and would seek to balance issues of international and national (local) relevance. Accordingly, it would create an awareness of, and desire for hybrid knowledges. Finally, such a transformationalist brand

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would contribute towards the development of an educated subject who is sufficiently cosmopolitan to balance the ethical responsibilities associated with being a member of both a democratic nation-centred and global civil society. Critically, this type of transformationalism would require the international university to engage with other global referents, and not just notions of economic space which conceptualise the university in largely business terms. Where does the present model of international education fit? It has a hyperglobalist orientation which is evidenced by the search for new markets, and the desire to provide ‘borderless education’. As I will discuss in Chapter Four, borderless education is being discursively constructed to mean ‘for-profit, electronically delivered education’ (e-education). International education has been pulled into the discursive melange which features the knowledge-based economy, life long learning and informational capitalism. In both the U.K. and Australia, the international university operates in a discursive space where selling education to international students works together with a neoliberal text, aimed at making universities financially independent of governments, and transferring the burden of education expenditure from the state to the individual. In a neoliberal education discourse, the main organising concepts within the discursive domain of international education are consumer choice, personal investment (private good) and rising consumer demand that governments cannot keep pace with: “there will be growth in demand...the least likely [response] is increased allocation of public resources” (Blight, Davis and Olsen, 2000, pp. 95-96). These statements work to locate power and social agency in the demanding consumer. Thus, international education is discursively constructed to be a provider of opportunity, access and equity to international students because “Demand for university places will continue to outstrip supply in Malaysia” and, “structurally, Hong Kong needs half its workforce to be training overseas” (ibid, pp. 98-99). Other statements within the neoliberal and hyperglobalist discursive domain work to neutralise the power differentials between first- and non-first world spaces. It is simply the lack of education and training that prevents this world from joining the first world club of nations. Private higher education provision is necessary as the nation-state lacks the resources to educate its citizens. Thus, “Foreign providers build the capacity of the local higher education system... and reduce the net currency outflows” (see McBurnie and Ziguras, 2001, p. 86). The same discursive logic argues that students receive an education that is often geared more to international rather than local forms of knowledge and practice, meaning that they may be able to work in different countries more easily and have better developed cross-cultural skills (ibid, p.86). Some of these pronouncements which seek to pinpoint the productive engagements arising from the marketisation drives of the international university ring ‘true’. However, what is left unexplored is the long-term effects of these developments for the ‘public good’ function of higher education (Cohen, 2000, p. 13). Power relations that are inspired by profits are less likely to produce counter-hegemonic knowledges such as those which reflect feminist, indigenous and ecological perspectives (Marginson, 2000b; Marginson and Mollis, 2001;

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Halliday, 1999). Rather the preferred knowledges will be those which have immediate market-relevance. A hyperglobalist orientation is also evident in the rationales offered for university alliances. Today, most publicly funded educational institutions in the western world have interactions and alliances with a host of private suppliers, financial and management consultants, commercial businesses, educational traders and ‘knowledge companies’ (McLaren and Farahmandpur, 2001, pp. 140-141; Cunningham et al., 2000). They also have alliances with selective private and public higher education institutions in the non-western world. The actors, which make up producer networks, include corporations such as the media multinational, News Ltd., ‘knowledge companies’ such as Arthur Anderson and Peat Marwick, the publishing house Thompson Corporation and the ‘virtual’ American ‘university’, Cardean University. Mega-varsity projects such as Universitas 21 epitomise such a hyperglobalist approach to international education. Universitas 21 uses language that is resonant with a Fordist discourse, to discursively construct a giant ‘knowledge factory’: Universitas 21 is an international network of leading research-intensive universities. Incorporated in Guernsey, it has 18 member universities in 10 countries. Collectively, its members enrol about 500,000 students, employ some 44,000 academics and researchers, provide over 700,000 Internet addresses, have over 2 million alumni, and have a combined operating budget of about $US9.5 billion. The Company's core business is provision of a pre-eminent brand for educational services supported by a strong quality assurance framework. It offers experience and expertise across a range of vital educational functions, a proven quality assurance capability and high brand value (Universitas 21, 2002). In Universitas 21 we have the ‘e-university’ – a virtual education space that requires sophisticated and costly information and communication technologies which are beyond the means of state funded universities. Collaborations are touted as the only option, which means that serious players tend to be the larger universities and larger multinational corporations. The desire to emulate corporate techniques has seen universities building ‘brand’ identities, which must subsequently be protected. Branding thus assumes the function of assuring the quality of the credential, a move which is profoundly problematic and which I will discuss in detail in Chapter Eight when I examine British branding initiatives in international education. A hyperglobalist orientation is also evident in accounts like the following, by an authoritative source in the Australian higher education sector, on the potential of ‘any time, any place’ education: Thus, the Berliner who enrols for a degree through a truly globalised provider will not know that the multilingual person who takes the initial inquiry is at a call centre in the Philippines and that the academic moderators for the on-line chat groups in Accounting 101 are in Pakistan, and that the high quality printed text materials that arrive at the doorstep have been authored in regional Australia, modified to German accounting standards through a world-wide contract with KPMG to localise the 91

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material for all markets, printed in Indonesia and dispatched to Berlin via a Chinese air-carrier: each element in this process determined by a quality and cost-efficiency matrix. At every point the student is making contact with the seamless surface of a single-provider (Chipman, 1998). Some might argue that Chipman’s vision of education depicts hybridisation-in-action. After all, we have a ‘hybrid’ product, ‘Accounting 101’, which has been modified to include the localised content by a private organisation with some disciplinary expertise. We have a Berliner acquainting herself with English spoken by Filipinos on the assumption that all are sufficiently ‘cosmopolitan’ to speak a common language and that this language is English. Presumably, there is a flow of benefits via the creation of jobs in the third world. Thus, all parties are happily linked by mutual need and mutual interest. This can be read as an example of glocalisation with quality and cost-efficiency being the primary scales of relativization. The subject is the rational consumer who is driven by considerations of ‘value for money’, who is able to use digitised instruction to learn. However, at the same time, a homogenising imperative presents itself through the performative principles of uniform quality and cost-efficiency. Moreover, as Marginson and Mollis (2001, p. 582) point out, the ‘global template’ which informs many a hybrid educational product, is embedded in predominantly American educational norms. There are strong indications from the research within the international education field that educational visions and pedagogical practices continue to be strongly influenced by hyperglobalist and marketised orientations. Clyne, Marginson and Woock’s (2001) study of Australian universities found little in the way of ‘discursive noise’ within universities to critically examine the links between globalization and international education. They concluded that international education continues to be narrowly perceived and operationalised, as the recruitment of full fee paying international students. While some university staff were enthusiastic about the entrepreneurial track records of their institutions, others viewed these developments less enthusiastically, seeing them as part of a general shift towards reducing education to the status of a traded commodity good and the university to a service industry. Additionally, most of the staff interviewed for their study expressed disquiet at the term globalization, equating it with a neoliberal globalization which is wholly premised on commercial values. They concluded that the dominance of the neoliberal discourse of globalisation was such that broader, deeper and more sensitive definitions, for example, like those provided by Appadurai (1996) had little impact in the Australian university sector, “the one place where a detailed critique [of globalisation] is available” (p.126). The commercial assertions of international education are also evident in the proliferation of “Diploma mill universities” in the United States. Morrow and Torres (2000, p. 42) offer the observation that the typical ‘diploma mill’ is a small American university with a poor domestic reputation which expands overseas to a developing country by way of distance education programmes, which then become solid earner of income revenue. The discursive links between globalisation and internationalisation in the European context, are also vulnerable to hyperglobalist visions which privilege standardisation, a service

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approach to education and greater inter-institutional competition for students. It is in this light that Wachter (2000) argues for the need to “...abolish]... the present jungle of Europe’s degrees and diplomas in order for European higher education to survive and succeed in international competition....” (p. 11). The introduction of Bachelor/Master degrees is declared imminent, as “a baccalaureate reminds one of an academic bug rather than an academic degree and will keep customers at bay rather than inspire confidence” (ibid). Wachter observes that several European universities have also started to offer programmes in English in order to attract foreign students (p. 9). In recent times, the desire to reduce their reliance on state funding has prompted many Australian universities to re-invent themselves, although as Marginson and Considine (2000, pp. 222-231) point out, these reinvention strategies have been excessively reliant on entrepreneurial rather than academic considerations. Cosy associations between university management and organisations such as the Global Alliance for Transnational Education (GATE) which is driven by a hyperglobalist and neoliberal agenda, have done little for academic quality and diversity (see Allport, 2001, p.27)15.

3.6 Concluding Comments In this chapter, I undertook an archaeological reading of key globalisation discourses. I started with the position that what is visible and sayable about globalisation ultimately, tells us something about power/knowledge constellations.These constellations work to establish a repertoire of defining issues and concepts (‘objects’), and to privilege particular subjectivities. Using a power/knowledge analytic, I examined the discursive constructions of transnational and transcultural exchanges, and the role of the nation-state. I argued that a fine-grained, multi-level analysis which acknowledges space, power relations and historical contingencies can best capture the nuances and complexities of globalisation. The discussion then turned to the conceptual possibilities offered by globalisation discourses to understand how international education is being discursively constructed. A preoccupation with global markets has translated into a hyperglobalist interpretation of international education. At the same time, the dominant profile accorded by academic discourse to the neoliberal state and its impact on education has seen the marginalisation of issues related to the non-economic dimensions of globalisation. Thus, there is relatively little academic commentary about how discursive relations between globalisation and international education influence self-other relations, subjectivities and social agency. 15. Founded

by Jones International Ltd., a for-profit education provider and founder of Jones International University, GATE received a warm welcome by some key players in the Australian university sector. Monash University ‘s Deputy Vice-Chancellor described GATE’s certification as giving it ‘the competitive edge overseas’. GATE was described as an external eye to complement universities own quality assurance processes. The Vice-Chancellor of Central Queensland University was equally enthusiastic, arguing that state-based accreditation systems were too conservative: ‘What I like about GATE is that there is room for competition – someone else could set up an accreditation agency’ (Australian, 1999d). Jones International University had been awarded a GATE accreditation for quality despite the following criticisms from the American Association of University Professors: 1) it had only two full time academic staff despite offering some thirty-six courses, 2) its courses were very brief-eg one hour per week for eight weeks), 3) only 4% of its staff were full-time. These concerns appear to have had little impact on deterring the management of these Australian universities from involvement with GATE.

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I conclude with a summary of the key points arising from my selective review of the literature on globalisation. First, definitions of globalization are never neutral. Theorists privilege different objects for their analysis of globalization and use different scales to relativize. Some emerge from, and are better suited to the ‘West/North’, some reflect the biases and reductionisms of their disciplines. Second, globalisation has to be studied as something more than the flows of people, ideas, capital and technologies. Flows are informed and inspired by power geometries which are embedded in social, political and economic relations. The exchanges brought about by these flows afford possibilities for both cultural synergies and cultural conflicts or a series of interstitial possibilities that span both polarities. Our awareness of the power relations underwriting transnational exchanges are discursively determined, as are our views of the role of the nation-state in globalised times and spaces. Third, ‘globalization as hybridisation’ is fast assuming the status of universality in terms of its theoretical treatment. It is premised on a notion of subjectivity which is shifting, non-essentialised, multiple, choice-driven and reflexive. Theoretical discourses on hybridisation construct and represent globalisation as the opportunity to shop for commodity brands in ‘global supermarkets’ and to craft multiple identities. I have argued in this chapter that much of the work on hybridization has emerged from studies focusing on aspects of commodity capitalism. These studies have not problematised why some flows and exchanges are peripheral and subordinate, while others are dominant. Neither have they assessed the reciprocity and strength of flows (Marginson and Rhoades, 2002). To remedy this theoretical chasm will require at the very least, engagement with the ‘historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors’: nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities as well as subnational grouping and movements including religious, political or economic ones (see Appadurai, 1996, p. 33). This will require theoretical and methodological tools which are able to capture the nuances of relativization which engage with power, history and different geographical spaces. To this end, it is vital that the theoretical insights of both structuralism and poststructuralism are employed together with a space-time (spatio-temporal) analytic. In the next chapter, I analyse the macro-contextual terrain of international education in Australia. I identify the ‘public truths’ that are produced and circulated about international education, by policy, academic and media discourses. Chapter Five does the same but analyses the macro-context of international education production in Britain and the United States. Together, Chapter Four and Chapter Five provide the discursive background against which to situate and analyse the micropractices used to promote international education, the basis of the rest of the thesis.

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