Abstract
This article considers higher education in the context of global knowledge economy policies as a site for the production of economic subjectivities. Drawing insights from poststructuralist theory and feminist economics, it explores how the incorporation of economic discourse and market metaphors into education policy and practice functions as a disciplinary technique of governmentality. The article argues that while economic discourse displaces, disciplines and disrupts educational discourse, there is a need for greater acknowledgement of the productive potential of the intersection of education and economy as a means through which agency is in part accomplished. Implications for university learning and labour are considered, with a view to contributing to dialogues about new ways of undisciplining economic subjectivities, through which new ways of doing and being might enact alternative educational economies.
Highlights
In the macro‐narratives of educational and economic discourse, higher education is ‘big business’—a key sector in the global knowledge economy, and a major export industry in the national economies of Anglophone countries.[1]
Educators are service providers, and ‘quality’ teaching, learning objectives and student attributes and outcomes are the new language of pedagogy
As Gert Biesta points out, ‘the role of the University is not exhausted by its economic function’ and that ‘ neo‐liberal policies increasingly present a University education as an investment in one’s future employability, we should not forget those who engage in Higher Education first and foremost for personal fulfilment and for the intrinsic rather than the exchange value of a University
Summary
In the macro‐narratives of educational and economic discourse, higher education is ‘big business’—a key sector in the global knowledge economy, and a major export industry in the national economies of Anglophone countries.[1].
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