Researching the Future: Towards an Inclusive Global Knowledge Economy Professor Louise Morley

1. 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

2. 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?

3. Shifting Research Rationalities • The Knowledge Economy • Neo-liberal Corporate Logic - Competition/ Convergence/Compliance • Audit Culture - measuring products/outputs

4. From Industrial Capitalism to Information/Knowledge Capitalism • Emphasises knowledge in creating: • economic growth • global competitiveness • Recognises that information/ knowledge are: • highly mobile • can 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)

5. Innocent Knowledge? Knowledge production/ custody/ dissemination: • Not neutral • Infused with power • Situated and contingent • Largely an invested process • Embodied. (Wickramasinghe, 2009).

6. 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).

7. 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).

8. 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?

9. 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)

10. 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.

11. 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?

12. 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)

13. 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)

14. 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).

15. 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 boards • Awarded large grants • Awarded research prizes(Nikiforova, 2011). • Keynote conference speakers (Schroeder et al., 2013). Are gender differences factored into research itself? (EU, 2013)

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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/ Follow Up?