Education and Ideologies of the Knowledge Economy: Europe and the Politics of Emulation

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously proposed a style of philosophy that was directed against certain pictures [bild] that tacitly direct our language and forms of life. His aim was to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle and to fight against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein 1953, 115). In this context Wittgenstein is talking of philosophical pictures, deep metaphors that have structured our language but he does also use the term picture in other contexts (see Owen 2003, 83). I want to appeal to Wittgenstein in my use of the term ideology to refer to the way in which powerful underlying metaphors in neoclassical economics have a strong rhetorical and constitutive force at the level of public policy. Indeed, I am specifically speaking of the notion of ‘the performative’ in Wittgenstein and Austin. The notion of the knowledge economy has a prehistory in Hayek (1937; 1945) who founded the economics of knowledge in the 1930s, in Machlup (1962; 1970), who mapped the emerging employment shift to the US service economy in the early 1960s, and to sociologists Bell (1973) and Touraine (1974) who began to tease out the consequences of these changes for social structure in the post-industrial society in the early 1970s. The term has been taken up since by economists, sociologists, futurists and policy experts recently to explain the transition to the so-called ‘new economy’. It is not just a matter of noting these discursive strands in the genealogy of the ‘knowledge economy’ and related or cognate terms. We can also make a number of observations on the basis of this brief analysis. First, there has been a succession of terms like ‘postindustrial economy’, ‘information economy’, ‘knowledge economy’, ‘learning economy’, each with a set of related concepts emphasising its social, political, management or educational aspects. Often these literatures are not cross-threading and tend to focus on only one aspect of phenomena leading to classic dichotomies such as that between economy and society, knowledge and information. Second, these terms and their family concepts are discursive, historical and ideological products in the sense that they create their own meanings and often lead to constitutive effects at the level of policy. Third, while there is some empirical evidence to support claims concerning these terms, at the level of public policy these claims are empirically underdetermined and contain an integrating, visionary or futures component, which necessarily remains untested and is, perhaps, in principle untestable.

Beyond Kantianism - Response to Critiques

I am flattered and privileged to have received four such astute critiques of my work from an international cast. I will reflect at length about many of their points in future work but to respond fully would require a very long article and so I will highlight some of the more salient issues. The authors share misgivings about my commitment to a realist version of governmentality theory so I will try to articulate a bit more clearly how it is different from two major alternative perspectives highlighted by the authors: what I term a `discursive` governmentality perspective (Stenson 2005), and the neo-Marxist regulationist school of political economy. However, deeper normative questions are raised, for example by Wendy Larner, about what it means to be progressive or critical within the broad terrain of liberalism (which can include neo-liberals and neo-conservatives) in the wake of the collapse of communism and much of the power of western labour movements, the rise of the new emancipatory and environmental social movements and varieties of religious fundamentalism. As social scientists and university intellectuals we usually argue that our work differs from journalistic reportage or ideological polemics that gather supportive evidence through selective fact gathering. This is because we dig beneath the flux of events and surface appearances and debates to uncover the deeper structures of thought and social relations that shape our experiences and the flow of events. And we also engage with contrary evidence that troubles our truth claims. This is the work of theory. I accept that theory plays a vital role but argue for a more grounded approach rooted in empirical research using a variety of methods and data sources. Hence I adopt a more cautious approach to conceptions of the `deeper structures` we uncover. At best we can only know them through provisional heuristic modelling and it is best not to reify them.

What’s the Problem? Precarious Youth: Marginalisation, Criminalisation and Racialisation.

Since the nineteenth century invention of adolescence, young people have been consistently identified as social problems in western societies. Their contemporary status as a focus of fear and anxiety is, in that sense, nothing new. In this paper, I try to combine this sense of historical recurrence about the youth problem with some questions about what is different about the present – asking what is distinctive about the shape of the youth problem now? This is a difficult balance to strike, and what I have to say will probably lean more towards an emphasis on the historical conditions and routes of the youth problem. That balance reflects my own orientations and knowledge (I am not expert on the contemporary conditions of being young). But it also arises from my belief that much contemporary social science is profoundly forgetful. An enthusiasm for stressing the newness, or novelty, of the present connects many varieties of contemporary scholarship. One result is the construction of what Janet Fink and I have referred to as ‘sociological time’ in which

Opera seria nördlich der Alpen – venezianische Einflüsse auf das Musikleben am Dresdner Hof um die Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts

La cultura musicale delle corti dell'Europa centrale nel '700 viene contrassegnata dal successo dell' "Opera seria", un genere musicale e drammatico che nonostante le sue origini italiane si espande e si diffonde rapidamente ovunque in Europa adattandosi da caso a caso ad esigenze e condizioni locali. La relazione prende in esame l'attività della principessa elettrice della Sassonia Maria Antonia Walpurgis di Baviera (1724 – 1780) che a partire dal suo arrivo a Dresda nel 1747 prende una parte assai attiva nella vita musicale della corte che occupava uno dei primi posti in Europa. Grazie alla sua dotazione musicale Maria Antonia stringe rapporti di lavoro con alcuni dei più importanti musicisti d'epoca che erano i suoi maestri e insegnanti, soprattutto con Johann Adolf Hasse formatosi a Venezia che dal 1730 era capo musicista della corte sassone. Hasse che soltanto ora viene riscoperto come compositore assistette la principessa nell'elaborazione delle sue "Opere serie". Essenziali anche i rapporti con Pietro Metastasio che oltre ad essere il più famoso librettista dell'Opera seria di allora era anche legato all'ambiente degli Arcadi che acclamarono socia onoraria la principessa a causa delle sue opere serie "Talestri e Il Trionfo della fedeltà" che segnano l'apice della sua attività da compositrice musicale. Viene sottolineato il ruolo importante della ricerca per il "vero buon gusto“e la preferenza per la semplicità della musica antica intesa come musica italiana in contrasto con la musica di gusto francese. Dopo il 1766 le opere della principessa segnate dall'influenza che ebbe la tradizione veneziana sulla vita musicale alla corte di Dresda venne criticata in Germania per il suo gusto italiano.