Flexibility and Lifelong Learning

Policy, Discourse, Politics

Katherine Nicoll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415372831
• eBook ISBN: 9781134192397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

What can the politics of discourse tell us about the discourse of politics?

How are flexibility and lifelong learning positioned within policy?

Flexibility and lifelong learning have become key aspects of education policy in nation states and bodies such as the European Union and Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development in recent years. They are positioned as necessary for the knowledge economy and social inclusion. The failure to adapt through becoming more flexible and participating in lifelong learning is held up as a failure at individual, organisational and national levels.

But how has that narrative come to be constructed? In what ways is it persuasive? And what forms of political action are possible and necessary? These are the questions addressed in this text. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and on the notion of rhetoric, this book forensically explores examples of the work of policy texts in the discourses of education, lifelong learning and flexibility that they construct. In so doing, it argues for the need to take policy discourse seriously and not simply dismiss it as 'spin'.

Through a detailed examination of policy texts from primarily Australia, the UK and European Union, this text provides insights into the strategies through which flexibility and lifelong learning become realized and realizable as part of the common sense of educational discourse. Rather than simply rejecting these ideas, or suggesting they are merely the window dressing for the more malign interests of the knowledge economy or globalization, it suggests a politics of the wedge and possibilities for the insertion of different meanings. Central to the claims of this text are that we need to engage closely with the discursive and rhetorical strategies of policy, in order that we understand both how it is constructed and thus how it can be deconstructed.

1 Departures and beginnings

Political analysis and criticism have in a large measure still to be invented-so too have the strategies that will make it possible to modify the relations of force, to co-ordinate them in such a way that such a modification is possible and can be inscribed in reality. That is to say the problem is not so much that of defining a political ‘position’ (which is to choose from a pre-existing set of possibilities) but to imagine and to bring into being new schemas of politicization. If ‘politicization\means falling back on ready-made choices and institutions, then the effort of analysis involved in uncovering the relations of force and mechanisms of power is not worthwhile. To the vast new techniques of power correlated with multinational economies and bureaucratic States, one must oppose a politicization, which will take new forms.

(Foucault 1980: 190)

Post-compulsory education policies and politicians tell us that we must become more flexible as individuals, whether we are learners or workers. Our institutions must be more responsive to demand. As our future environment is no longer certain, all must become flexible. As learners, we must take on new skills in contexts of change. As individuals, we must ensure that we equip ourselves to be employed or to maintain our employment. As educators, we must be flexible at work, be prepared to take on new ways of doing our jobs and new ways of thinking if the needs of our students and societies are to be met. Educational institutions must be flexible if they are to equip populations with the attributes that our corporations and economies will need for the future. We are incited by politicians to become lifelong learners, to learn continuously so that we might better contribute to work and societies. Organizations, we are told, need to become learning organizations and societies learning societies.

These themes of flexibility and lifelong learning have been around for some time now. They emerge and are repeated over and over within policy discourses, within education institutions in conversations over what should best be done within teaching programmes, within the media and elsewhere. They are, for many, signs of the new times in education-whether this is considered good or bad.

There is no doubt that it is in part through the themes of flexibility and lifelong learning that governments and intra-national policy organizations have argued for quite radical change within education systems and societies over the last years. They are embedded within wider arguments for the marketization of systems of education, and for economic and social reform. They are not just talk, even though they are often represented as such within the media and by policy analysts. They do things; they take effect. Their effects are of course quite difficult to pin down. They are not uniform but fragmented and what appears as an effect within one context may emerge quite differently elsewhere. To some extent what can be identified as effect depends upon the analytic resources that one brings to bear. However, they do appear to be bound up in complex ways with moves away from welfare state forms of governance towards those that are identified as post-welfare within some nations. In some national contexts they are argued to work in support of a reconfiguration of previous relations between state and civil society. They seem to help reconfigure education and training systems; as they enter into our schools, colleges and universities as themes for change, they support reconfigurations of curricula, alter the relationship between the teacher and learner, revise assessment practices, and inscribe an ethic and value of learning where education and training was previously considered a social rather than economic good. They are argued by some to be themes that support the reconfiguration of the political field and moves towards postmodern forms of economies and societies. They are thus powerful and political in the work that they do. In part, this is through policy strategies that are deployed in their name-for example, the policy theme of flexibility is often accompanied by financial strategies to increase intra-institutional competition. The themes of flexibility and lifelong learning become embedded within institutional and other discourses and are taken up in sites of education and elsewhere as local themes for the reconfiguration of practices of teaching and learning.

They are then themes and arguments of policy that appear to have the capacity to rework relations that have previously been relatively stable-between governments, education and training institutions, students and teachers, and workplaces-and shape them into new forms. Such relations have always been in some sense relations of force or power, which attempt to be productive and mold our societies in ways that we take to be useful. Education and training systems are productive of particular kinds of people and societies; they help produce us and the worlds that we live in. Themes of flexibility and lifelong learning thus act in the reconfiguration and co-ordination of those relations of force that have previously been stabilized in a particular way, the workings and detail of which are thus important to understand further.

Some within the fields of education and policy studies appear relatively content with these themes and arguments. They have adopted them as truths and visions guiding their work of teaching or policy analysis. They have conducted research to see how they might be best realized. Others, however, have been much more troubled by and concerned about them and have sought ways to oppose them or at least to expose the work they do. This book joins this latter group, as it takes flexibility and lifelong learning as discourses of policy that are to some degree problematic. Flexibility and lifelong learning take on different signification, different meanings, within different locations and discourses. They are slippery, and, in themselves, hard to pin down. Within institutions of education and training and by people more widely they are quite commonly taken to signify what is ‘good’ and perhaps progressive about courses, institutions and learning. For example, increasing the flexibility of courses is thought to be useful to people, because it can signify an improvement of access to learning and may afford a widening of choice in the kinds of courses and topics available. Lifelong learning is often taken to denote a beneficial opening of learning to individuals across their lifespan. And there are few who would refuse the possibility of learning being open to them whatever their age. However, there is more to flexibility and lifelong learning than such local discourses imply. They are not just these things. When one raises one’s head out of the immediate context one begins to see their correlation with the vast new techniques of power of which Michael Foucault speaks. Although meanings of flexibility and lifelong learning are not usually linked up directly with those of an increasing power of multinational economies or bureaucratic States, the increasing economization of education, training and learning and its enmeshment with policy arguments for flexibility and lifelong learning certainly points strongly in this direction. The question is how could this be considered and theorized? This book thus looks to invent strategies that may help find ways to articulate such a correlation. But it is a contribution that goes further than this. It considers possibilities from its articulation, for the modification of the relations that have been forged so powerfully through these themes. To this extent it is concerned with the politics of flexibility and lifelong learning as policy themes and with their politicization.

Distrust of policy making and policy makers has become more common as politics has become positioned as more concerned with the spin of media presentation than with substance. Of course, this is a powerful rhetorical achievement. To position a political party or interest group as engaged in spin is to attempt to undermine and delegitimize their position, and to position audiences as needing to distrust what is written/said. In some ways, this might appear to be fair. To suggest that an increase in funding is sufficient to achieve the policy goals set, when, in real terms, it signifies a decrease in funding, is rightly challenged. Or, as Fairclough (2000) does in his analysis of the language of the 1997 New Labour government in the United Kingdom, to suggest that new and old labour reflect different ideological positions is to manipulate language in the attempt to control public perception.

A contemporary concern over ‘spin’ and the more general undecidability associated with the proliferation of media and messages is nowhere more pronounced than in the world of policy. Thus, as Fairclough (2000: 3) suggests,

language has…always been a relevant consideration in political analysis. But language has become significantly more important over the past few decades because of social changes which have transformed politics and government. An important part of these changes is a new relationship between politics, government and mass media - a new synthesis which means that many significant political events are now in fact media events.

Indeed, the mediatization of those events point to the rhetorical strategies engaged in not only by politicians but also by the media, as they attempt to engage in political struggle and mobilize their own audiences in the name of reporting (Macmillan 2002). Listen to the radio news and the struggles that take place between reporters and politicians over whether or not the chosen topic, for example, funding or student debt, does or does not represent a ‘crisis’. Crisis narratives provide an imperative for policy action and, therefore, invest situations with political importance, almost regardless of the relative weight of evidence and analysis by all concerned. They engender a certain policy hysteria (Stronach and MacLure 1997). Within policy arguments, increasing flexibility and lifelong learning are represented as the solutions to the crises that we face.

While studies that point to a lack of substance in flexibility and lifelong learning policy are important, they may devalue or misunderstand the role and purpose of discourse in general and rhetoric in particular. This is, despite the importance of discourse and rhetorical analysis to be found in areas such as deconstruction (Parker 1997), genre studies (Freedman and Medway 1994), and the representation of research (Nelson et al. 1987; Atkinson 1996). Implicit within many studies that deploy the argument of rhetoric - like the term ‘spin- to criticize and denigrate certain communicative practices are forms of ideology critique. This is to construe certain representations in texts as mystifications of the material world by those who exercise power. Here, the notion of rhetoric is collapsed into ideology, and a transparent view of reality, clear of rhetorical traces, is implicitly posited as possible. By contrast, the argument of this book is that the study of policy in general and lifelong learning policy and themes of lifelong learning and flexibility within policy in particular precisely as rhetoric can illuminate our understanding in slightly different ways. These point to the very real and powerful rhetorical practices that are in play both in policy representations and within our own. The significance of this work is in that ‘part of the job of the rhetorical analyst is to determine how constructions of “the real” are made persuasive’ (Simons 1990: 11). The question is not so much about whether reality matches rhetoric or not but which rhetorical performance is more persuasive, how, why and with what effects. Here presentation and representation are taken to be substantial actions in their own right.

Flexibility and lifelong learning are important contemporary themes of post-compulsory education policies within many post-industrial countries. They are presented within policies as solutions to the particular challenges of the contemporary world that must be overcome. They are crisis narratives. Over the years, there has been quite a significant analysis of them within the policy studies and post-compulsory education literature (e.g. Field 2000b; Coffield 2002; Edwards et al. 2002). Certain theoretical approaches have dominated this work with resulting productivity but also specific forms of constraint. These latter produce particular discursive relations -relations of power - within and between the domains of study and policy and thereby limit the meanings of flexibility and lifelong learning that emerge. In the process, specific questions of the discursive and rhetorical construction of flexibility and lifelong learning and the power and politics involved in this have been marginalized. This book takes these constraints as its point of departure in three trails of exploration and theorization. It identifies a different beginning for the politicization of flexibility and lifelong learning within policy studies and alternative resources for their analysis.

This book then explores the potential for different forms of discourse analysis as a means to examine flexibility and lifelong learning, to theorize them and furnish new avenues for politicization. It brings together a range of theoretical resources, beginning with aspects of the poststructuralist work of Michel Foucault (1972, 1996) and the rhetorical analysis of Jonathan Potter (1996). It takes specific formal and national policy documents as the site for the analysis of discourses and themes. At first glance, these forms of analysis might be considered by some to be more akin to literary criticism than to any kind of critical policy analysis. However, to take this view would be to overlook their productivity and misunderstand the kind of work that they do. They are selected, as they make it possible to identify and expose the politics involved in constituting, maintaining and dispersing flexibility and lifelong learning as themes within policy discourses. To make these analyses possible it is necessary to put aside previous notions of policy documents as simply realist or static descriptions or ideological mystifications. Policy documents are not taken as reflections of reality, nor as representations of ‘settlements’ between competing discourses. To view policy texts in this way would be to treat language as a neutral technology and ignore aspects of the political and active work that it does. Policy discourse acts rhetorically to work up the truth of what is described - it works to persuade us that we know the world and how we should act within it. It helps exclude and undermine alternative possible descriptions and actions. Policy language acts to reinforce and reinscribe prior regularities within discourses that make its truths possible and to which we are or become habituated even though we may also contest them. Policy masks its activity to condense, control and regularize discourses through the deployment of texts. These are active mechanisms of governance within policy processes. Policy discourses are thus imbricated with desire and power and work to exclude alternative discourses of other truths of the world that might emerge to challenge them.

Initial explorations

A poststructuralist and discursive approach drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault is productive for such a venture as it makes possible questions of the power and politics of discourses of flexibility and lifelong learning. It offers theoretical resources through which one can explore their constitution and operation. Policy studies have begun to take up such approaches in particular drawing upon Foucault’s later genealogical work. This has resulted in explorations of discourses as expressions of power-knowledge that are actively constitutive of subjects, social forms and ways of thinking. However, this book draws upon Foucault’s earlier work for specific explorations of flexibility and lifelong learning and on his later work for its positioning within relations of power. Crudely, some of Foucault’s earlier archaeological work tends towards a more ‘textual’ and his later work towards a more ‘critical’ poststructuralism. The former is more akin to say, literary criticism, whilst the latter locates textual practices and their criticism within a broader framework of the production of knowledge and the exercise of power.

It is the more literary poststructuralism that links my interest and the relevance of this book to rhetoric. Rhetoric is part of the work of all policy discourse, just as it is of all language and communications. Policy analysts such as Stephen Ball (1990a) and Sandra Taylor et al. (1997) have highlighted the rhetorical work of policy and its power in public persuasion. However, even though acknowledged to be a significant aspect of policy activity, the work of rhetoric has not yet been examined in detail or to any great extent within the policy studies literature. In part, this is perhaps a consequence of rhetoric being quite generally understood to be a persuasive embellishment of language, often used to hide the truth and deceive. Analysts of policy have tended to search for the truth beneath or behind and hence adopt a realist stance. Here they either focus on the ways in which policy descriptions of the world match up with empirical evidence or ideologically mystify the ‘real world’. This kind of focus has been ‘natural’ in the sense that it draws upon particular common sense views of the world and language, based on certain epistemological and ontological assumptions. However, in the process attention has been taken away from considerations of how policy language acts to build up representations of reality through rhetorical strategy.

The growth of modern science with its emphasis on the search for truth through a process of induction from empirical observation and experiment has resulted in little emphasis being given to the art of rhetoric. Rhetoric and truth have been held to be mutually exclusive and science has been concerned with the truth devoid of rhetoric. The persuasiveness of science has been held to rest in its truth claims not in its rhetorical practices, despite various incursions pointing to the significance of rhetoric to knowledge production in the sciences (Latour and Wolgar 1979; Nelson et al. 1987). Rhetorical analysis has been considered as part of the arts and humanities, while science is concerned with truth untainted by rhetoric. This can be seen within policy science but has continued to be the case within much policy sociology - its [rhetoric’s] historical attitude towards knowledge production is much more at home with literary criticism than with sociology’ (Leach 2000: 211). It is not therefore surprising that, in continuing traditions from both the empirical and social sciences, policy studies and the analysis of policy has not focused significantly on rhetoric. In this, policy studies have been bound within a certain politics of truth when questioning the truth of politics.

It is the particular discursive and rhetorical strategies that support, surround and help produce flexibility and lifelong learning as truths within policy discourses that are explored here. Policy communications are produced rhetorically and do rhetorical work (Axford and Huggins 2001; Chilton 2004). This depends in part upon prior regularities within and between discourses, which permit what can be said ‘truthfully’ at any one time and location. The approach in this text therefore undermines any certainty in a distinction between truth and rhetoric by examining the work of the latter in the production of the former. The position taken is that, by so doing, a dominant politics of truth can be elaborated.

The specific focus on flexibility and lifelong learning within this text is undoubtedly timely and important. They are promulgated as truths, as required responses to an increasing pace of change, the economic and social pressures of globalization and uncertainty over the future. If economies are to remain competitive within global markets and societies continue to cohere, it is argued that flexibility and lifelong learning, as the capacities and practices of individuals, institutions and educational systems, must be brought forth in the construction of learning societies. Flexibility and lifelong learning emerge within the policies of many post-industrial nations and intergovernmental agencies. For example, lifelong learning and the learning society are promoted within the United Kingdom (Kennedy 1997; NAGCELL 1997, 1999; NCIHE 1997; DfEE 1998, 1999; DfES 2003b), in Australia (DEETYA 1998), in Germany and from the Dutch, Norwegian, Finnish and Irish governments (Field 2000a). Lifelong learning and flexibility have been taken up strongly within the United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (1996) and by the European Commission (1996, 2000a,b). Explorations of the means by which flexibility and lifelong learning are brought forth within policy discourses, of how they migrate across and within discourses much more widely, and their rhetorical strategies, will help the development of a notion of politics and policy as a form of communication rather than simply a struggle over truth. It will bring out how certain policy discourses come to be persuasive and powerful.

The regularity of the emergence of flexibility and lifelong learning over a period of time, across policy discourses and within differing locations points to the significance of a focus on the discursive conditions that produce, surround, and maintain them. However, this does not mean that themes or conditions will necessarily be the same within differing policy locations and times. Discourses are never uniform or unitary. They have emerged at differing times and locations over the last years and with differing emphases. John Field (2000a) traces how policies of lifelong education, rather than learning, for example, emerged within European policies during the 1960s and 1970s and were taken up by intergovernmental agencies such as UNESCO and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Lifelong education appeared again in 1993, within the European Commission in Jacques Delors’ White Paper on competitiveness and economic growth (European Commission 1993). However, it re-emerged as lifelong learning in 1996 within European and national policy vocabularies after the European Commission declared that year as the European Year of Lifelong Learning.

Similarly, policy ideas of flexibility have been part of a discourse of the marketization of the economy, labour market and education within most OECD countries since the end of the 1980s. Flexibility was advocated in 1996 within a UNESCO report, also produced under the direction of the then former President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, and at the same time within the European Union (European Commission 1996), although this was in relation to policies promoting open and distance learning. This points to both the regularity in the emergence of lifelong learning and flexibility as policy themes, as well as some of their differing meanings.

The focus on discourse and rhetoric within this book has not emerged out of a void. Not enough consideration has been given within education policy studies to the means by which flexibility and lifelong learning are co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1 Departures and beginnings
• 2 Meanings of flexibility and lifelong learning
• 3 A political, discursive and rhetorical terrain
• 4 A realization of flexibility
• 5 Mobilizing flexibility and lifelong learning
• 6 Realizing lifelong learning
• 7 An ‘odious’ but slender wedge
• Bibliography