Research Project: Market Society on a World Scale

This post outlines the research project I am working on, together with Dr Nour Dados, at the University of Sydney.

Recent social theory has been greatly concerned with the world-wide transition in economy, society and culture that Boltanski and Chiapello in France summed up in their much-quoted phrase "the new spirit of capitalism".  Neoliberalism, globalization, market society, Empire, economic rationalism, are other terms in play.

Most well-known theories assume that this new era can be understood by generalizing concepts that have originated from Europe and the United States.  This is not adequate for 21st century social theory. Market society is worldwide, and has been produced by a restructuring of global economic and social relationships.  The periphery, as well as the metropole, is a very rich source of social thought.  We follow the logic that Chandra Talpade Mohanty calls “decolonizing theory”, bringing knowledge production from the global periphery to work on a global problem.

Southern analyses of market society.  In this part of the project, we are collecting and studying books and articles about market transitions, neoliberalism and market society that come from four world regions: South Asia, Latin America, Middle East & North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa.  We are making extensive Web-based searches to go beyond the more familiar sources.  But we are conscious of the biases of Web-based information (towards Northern and English-language publications), so we also rely on word of mouth and pay attention to non-English sources.

Transitions to market society.  In this part of the project, we are collecting and studying the social research that describes historical moments of transition to market society.  This transition has occurred at different times in different regions, and along different paths, so the story is extremely complex.  To focus our searching and analysis, we have chosen certain institutions to focus on: large-scale corporate organizations; policing institutions, including the private security industry; school systems, including vocational training colleges; marriage and alternative forms of household and intimate relationship.

Theorists of transition.  In this part of the project, we will meet and interview intellectual workers who have contributed to contemporary research and theory about market society, in the four regions mentioned earlier.  We will ask about the biographical and social context of their work, the networks they have created, the way they do intellectual work, the development of their ideas, and the futures they see.

Large questions!  We welcome advice and help.  (Seriously: if you would like to share thoughts about this project or these issues, please send them to raewyn.connell@sydney.edu.au.)

Gender, health and theory

Raewyn Connell, Gender, health and theory: conceptualizing the issue, in local and world perspective. Social Science & Medicine, vol. 74, 2012, 1675-1683.

Gender is a significant issue in health, but most health research and policy has a very simplified, increasingly obsolete, idea of what gender is.  In 2010, colleagues in the United States organized an international mini-conference on contemporary gender issues in health, and they considered a re-think of theory was a necessary part of this: I contributed a discussion of this question.  A special issue of the leading journal Social Science & Medicine resulted, my paper can be found here, and the link to the whole issue is here.

This is the abstract of my paper:

Public policy documents on gender and health mostly rely on categorical understandings of gender that are now inadequate.  Post-structuralist thought is an advance, but relational theories of gender, treating gender as a multidimensional structure operating in a complex network of institutions, provide the most promising approach to gendered embodiment and its connection with health issues.  Examples are discussed.  A crucial problem is how to move the analysis beyond local arenas, especially to understand gender on a world scale.  A relational approach to this question is proposed, seeing gendered embodiment as interwoven with the violent history of colonialism, the structural violence of contemporary globalization, and the making of gendered institutions on a world scale, including the corporations, professions and state agencies of the health sector.  Gender is seen as the active social process that brings reproductive bodies into history, generating health consequences not as a side-effect but in the making of gender itself.

A Fringe of Leaves

A new publication:  Raewyn Connell: (2012) A Fringe of Leaves: Australian modernity and Southern perspectives.  Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol. 26 no. 2, 207-214.

Here is the abstract: 

Patrick White’s novel A Fringe of Leaves, written in the 1970s, resonated with a renewed questioning of the European presence on Australian land and its significance for cultural issues. A debate about coloniality in the social sciences is now happening globally, especially questioning the global North’s apparent monopoly of theory. Multiple structures of knowledge are found in the colonized world: indigenous knowledges, the analysis of colonialism by the colonized, and analysis of the societies  and global structures produced by imperialism. Key authors on these topics are introduced. Australian modernity needs to be considered in the light of the lively debates about these issues now occurring across the global South.

New publication: globalization & masculinity

"Neoliberal Globalization, Masculinity and Gender Justice" in World Financial Review, March 2012, pp. 36-38, is an introduction to worldwide change and the politics of masculinity; find it here.

Article in The Drum: Ideology of the marketplace underpins school "reforms"

Originally published by the ABC 16th March 2012 here.

Last weekend the NSW government announced the most far reaching reforms to school education "in a century".

The main proposal was to give more power to school principals. Hidden in the announcement were proposals for more temporary staff, and confirmation that the Government is intending to introduce performance pay.

Actually there is little new here. For the past 25 years, Australian education has been steadily re-shaped on market lines. We have had a drum-beat of "reforms": university fees, corporatisation of TAFE, overseas students as cash cows, more subsidies to private schools, national achievement testing, MySchool website, de-zoning of public schools, more selective schools - and more.

Beneath this visible story are hidden changes in the way schools, colleges and universities work. The idea is to make them more like little corporations competing with each other, and less like cooperative public institutions. The power of managers has grown, and workforces have become more casualised.

Both Labor and Coalition governments have supported this agenda, at state and federal levels. It has become the common sense of policy-making. If something is a problem, apply market logic to it. If something is still wrong, apply more market logic.

Urged on by the Business Council of Australia, our Federal Labor Government is on the point of re-introducing that fine 19th century innovation, Payment By Results for teachers. Ideally, business expertise will take over the whole sector. We have a splendid model in the pre-school department, where ABC Learning led the way.

Many people have been uneasy about these changes – teacher and parent organisations especially. But with the major parties in agreement, and the mass media in support, and business pointing the way, where do critics turn? The unions, for instance, are easily dismissed as a "special interest" resisting reforms that benefit the whole community.

Does the market agenda benefit the whole community? Actually, I doubt that it benefits anyone but a privileged minority. It is time to put the whole agenda under scrutiny.

Are we comfortable about testing systems with systematic social biases? Do feel-good stories about happy winners each year outweigh the fact that competitive testing requires losers, lots and lots of them – and that defining students as losers destroys their education? Do we really want to subsidise gated communities in education, where parents pay to keep the rubbish people out?

Markets commodify things, that is basic: markets are based on buying and selling. Actually you can't commodify education as a human process. But you can commodify access to education. If you ration education, you can sell a privilege to those with enough advantage, and you can reduce the need for public investment in education for all. That's what the market agenda in education basically does.

You can commodify privileges such as entry to universities, smaller class sizes, better facilities, better-trained or less-stressed teaching workforces, curriculum materials such as textbooks, or (with the help of PR firms) the prestige of schools or universities. You can even commodify certificates and degrees and the labour market privilege they deliver, though that's usually defined as corruption rather than market logic. The more you commodify, the more you hand advantages to groups who already have privilege. Twenty-five years of market "reform" has done nothing to close the social gaps in Australian education.

Crucial to the market logic of competition and the rationing of access is a means for defining and then measuring "success" vs "failure" - and making it look objective. That's why a competitive testing regime has become central to Australian education policy. It's also why our policy-makers have turned away from negotiated curricula, community participation, multicultural education, and the other democratic initiatives in education that don't go with competitive testing and managerialism.

For teachers, the market agenda has meant growing insecurity in employment (sharply increased, in TAFE), growing inequalities and new forms of surveillance (in the name of "accountability"). Above all, where the testing regime is in force, it means pressure to teach to the test – and that means narrowing the curriculum, reducing the richness of education.

Teachers resist this pressure, of course. Overwhelmingly, teachers want education to be good for all their students, not just a high-scoring few. But there are limits to how far they can resist the self-affirming logic of the whole system, not to mention parents' and students' anxiety.

Market fundamentalism in business places power in the hands of top management. That's why we have those huge salaries and bonuses for CEOs. In education too, management prerogative has grown at all levels, the recent NSW announcement being another example. An important consequence is a top-down policy process, driven not by educational expertise nor democratic decision-making, but by market logic and the agendas of ministers and their minders.

We can do better. There are other possibilities in education. Before they can emerge, we need clarity about where the problem actually is. At the next panic about test results, ask whether we need these tests at all. At the next website launch, whether it's MyUni or MyKinder, show a little tough love and ask the awkward question: what interests are really being served by this?

Educating boys

A good video of my talk "Educating boys: realities and principles" at the 2011 Austrian conference on Boys Work is available here.

New publication

The latest issue of Australian Universities Review is a special issue about doctoral education.  I have an article in it, which is a discussion of changes since the piece "How to supervise a PhD" which I published (gulp!) in 1985.