Researching the

Future: Towards an

Inclusive Global

Knowledge Economy

Professor Louise Morley

Centre for Higher Education and Equity

Research (CHEER)

University of Sussex, UK

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer

Provocations/ Being Untoward

• What is the field of social science

research and who is defining it?

• Who are the standard makers?

• How have neoliberal and austerity policy

cultures influenced social science

research?

• Does social science research detect some

forms of knowing and exclude others?

• What does research do to academic

identities?

• Who/ what is excluded from the global

research economy?

• What is the future for critical scholarship?

Shifting Research Rationalities

• The Knowledge Economy

• Neo-liberal Corporate

Logic - Competition/

Convergence/Compliance

• Audit Culture - measuring

products/outputs

From Industrial Capitalism to Information/Knowledge Capitalism

• Emphasises knowledge in creating:

economic growth global competitiveness

• Recognises that information/ knowledge are:

highly mobilecan be globally marketed

• Driven by the Network Society (Castells, 1996)

• Promotes dominance of economic theories in education (Robertson, 2010)

(See Drucker, 1993, Peters, 2010; Porter, 1990)

Innocent Knowledge?

Knowledge production/

custody/ dissemination:

•Not neutral

•Infused with power

•Situated and contingent

•Largely an invested process

•Embodied.

(Wickramasinghe, 2009).

20 April 2023

Economics Imperialism

•Research colonised by the ‘cultural circuits’

of capitalism (Mills and Ratcliffe, 2012)?

•Instrumentalisation of knowledge/

Quantifiable use value.

•Research funded for government priorities

e.g. security?

•Non-economics scholarship becoming

unfundable or unknowable?

•Counter-hegemonic/ critical scholarship in

danger of becoming ‘socially illegitimate’ (Butler, 2006).

20 April 2023

Value, Not Values

Research productivity =

•Income-generation

•Indictor for performance management

•Exchange in the global prestige

economy

•Innovation for the market

Where is?

•Creativity

•Discovery

•Pleasure

•Intellectual contribution

•Social justice(Blackmore & Kandiko, 2011; Leathwood & Read,

2013).

Globalisation of Scientised Knowledge/ Power of Number

Natural sciences

•assigned matters of fact

Humanities and Social Sciences

• matters of concern.

•‘Gold-standard’ of research methods is the

randomised controlled trial… (Colley, 2013)

•Results are prioritised over processes,

numbers over experiences, procedures

over ideas, productivity over creativity (Ball and Olmedo, 2012:91) .

•Can scientific understanding alone provide

the resources for understanding the social

world?

Management by Number

• RAE, ERA, REF Accounting

Systems

• Quantification to grade research.

• Reducing activity to a common

managerial metric.

• Research = performance indicator

for individuals, organisations, and

nation states.

• Global League Tables =

Comparison, bench-marking and

ranking

• Aspirational framework

• Prestige Economy(Collini, 2013; Lucas, 2006)

Paradigm Wars/ Cultural Clashes

• Binaries = every concept haunted by its

mutually constituted excluded other.

Big Science v Anthropological models.

Scientific Realism v Social

Constructivism.

Positivist/ neo-realist v Interpretative/

relativist epistemologies.

Quantitative v Qualitative methods.

Problem-solving v Critical.

Peer Reviewers: Assemblage of Regulation?

• Guardians of ‘standards’

• Democratising intervention disguising the

steering at a distance power base.

• Part of the measuring apparatus constituted

through norms, practices and epistemologies.

• Scarce resources capriciously allocated by

non-accountable and non-transparent

processes.

• Externality problematic in resource-

constrained economies?

• Reluctance to sign over competitive

advantage to other researchers?

• Determine what remains outside of the

domain of intelligibility.

• Captured by hegemony?

Optics and Apparatus

• What is it that people

don’t see?

• Why don’t they see it?

• What do current optics/

practices/ specifications

reveal and obscure?

(Barad, 2007)

Impact/ Knowledge Mobilization

• Demand for ‘value- for-money’ accountability for publicly-

funded research.

• Demonstrable, auditable benefits: Economic Environmental Social

Implications

• Burden of meeting social, economic and environmental

needs placed on grant recipients?

• Research critical of government/ stakeholders?

• Metric to redirect research in politically approved

directions?

• Forcing research to conform to market ideology/ use

value?

• Demonstrating impact – resource intensive and possibly

impracticable?

• Can impact be known/ predicted/ quantified in a causal

way?

• Imposed performativity (Brown, 2013; Colley, 2013; Fielding, 2003)

Academic Identities• Research/ knowledge capital = KPI, reputation,

power, status and rewards.

• Identities formed and evaluated in relation to

mutable and constructed differences and

boundaries.

• Researchers positioned as supplicants for

diminishing/ highly targeted public resources.

• Logic of relationality = for every winner there are

many losers.

• Psychic economy- shame, pride, humiliation,

anxiety.

• ‘Cruel optimism’? (Berlant, 2011).

Exclusions/Misrecognitions

Who is deemed capable of reason?

71% of researchers globally are men

29% women (UNESCO, 2012).

Women less likely to be: Journal editors/cited in top-rated

journals (Tight, 2008).

Principal investigators (EC, 2011).

On research boardsAwarded large grantsAwarded research prizes (Nikiforova,

2011).

Keynote conference speakers (Schroeder et al., 2013).

Are gender differences factored into

research itself? (EU, 2013)

Summary: Knowledge…

• Important form of global capital.

• Reduced to its economic/ exchange value in neo-liberal economies.

• Scholarship shaped by market demands.

• Linked to performance management.

• Purports to be neutral/objective, but is invested, situated and exclusionary.

• Production/ custody processes overlap with social hierarchies.

• Productivity connected to predictability of research utility.

• Value indicators can be unstable, transitory, contingent and contextualised.

Making Alternativity Imaginable: Social Science Researchers To…

• Resist being co-opted by narrow

research policy agendas.

• Inform policy with evidence, not vice

versa.

• Challenge and expose increasing socio-

economic inequalities/ exclusions.

• Re-invigorate knowledge production as a

site of transformation and possibility.

• Act as Socratic ‘gadflies’ (Colley, 2013).

• Trouble neo-liberal realism.

• Transgress and re-signify.

• Re-work tired, stale categories/

vocabularies.

• Identify new optics for viewing social

world.

• Imagine and research the future that you

want to see.

20 April 2023

Follow Up?

Morley, L. (2014) Lost Leaders:

Women in the Global Academy. In

press, Higher Education Research

and Development.

Morley, L. (2014) Researching the

Future: Closures and Culture

Wars in the Knowledge Economy.

In press, Critical Studies in

Education

CHEER http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer/