Putting culture in its place in the political economy of Arab higher education: civilisation analysis as a means of accessing the cultural questions

Abstract

Globally, interest has increased in the relationship and role of civil society, as a process of educational change, in national and subnational educational spaces (Mundy and Murphy, 2001). This conceptual paper lends itself - using Robertson and Dale's (2015) critical cultural political economy of education framework (CCPEE) - to the overall aim of identifying if Arab civil societies have a role in the process of change within Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) higher education, with what power, and with what impact. The paper specifically considers how civilisation analysis (Arnason, 2003) can be used as a theoretical framework to investigate the 'culture' in the CCPEE in general and civil society in particular. Analysing Arab modernity, culture and societies, using civilisation analysis (CA) as a theoretical framework, offers a means of accessing deeply entrenched sets of meanings and practices allowing for comparative interpretations of societal differences in education and a new way to understand similarity and differences, convergence and diversity in the modern world (Dale and Robertson, 2016).