The Impacts of Neoliberal Discourse and Language in Education

Critical Perspectives on a Rhetoric of Equality, Well-Being, and Justice

Mitja Sardoč, Mitja Sardoč

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000360639
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This edited collection combines quantitative content and critical discourse analysis to reveal a shift in the rhetoric used as part of the neoliberal agenda in education. It does so by analysing, uncovering, and commenting on language as a central tool of education.

Focussing on vocabulary, metaphors, and slogans used in strategy documents, advertising, policy, and public discourse, the text illustrates how concepts such as justice, opportunity, well-being, talent, and disadvantage have been hijacked by educational institutes, governments, and universities. Showing how neoliberalism has changed discourses about education and educational policy, these chapters trace issues such as anti-intellectualism, commercialization, meritocracy, and an erasure of racial difference back to a contradictory growth in egalitarian rhetoric.

Given its global scope, this volume offers a timely intervention in the studies of neoliberalism and education by developing a holistic vision of how the language of neoliberalism has changed how we think about education. It will prove to be an essential resource for scholars and researchers working at the intersections of education, policymaking, and neoliberalism.

1 The Language of Neoliberalism in Education

Mitja Sardoč

Neoliberalism in Education: Some Preliminary Considerations

Writing more than a century apart, the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville and the British historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin pointed to an interesting phenomenon that seems to dominate several of our contemporary discussions. In Book II of Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville emphasized eloquently that ‘[a]n abstract word is like a box with a false bottom: you can put in any ideas you please and take them out again without anyone being the wiser’ (de Tocqueville, 2000: 553). In a similar vein, Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ points to a vexing problem plaguing the idea of liberty, ‘[l]ike happiness and goodness, like nature and reality, the meaning of this term is so porous that there is little interpretation that it seems able to resist’ (Berlin, 2002: 181).

A number of concepts and ideas from our contemporary discussions might qualify to fill the problematic position referred to by the two luminaries. Yet, one of them fits this observation particularly well. Scattered throughout the social sciences and the humanities, neoliberalism has been a staple in disciplines as diverse as political philosophy (Brown, 2015), critical neoliberalism studies (Peck, 2010), applied linguistics (Block, Gray & Holborow, 2012), critical sociology (O’Connor, 2010), migration studies (Gao, 2020), anthropology (Wacquant, 2012), geography and urban studies (Brenner et al., 2010), social work (Ferguson, 2004), feminist studies (Fraser, 2013), eldercare (Andersson & Kvist, 2015), security studies (Eichler, 2013), education (d’Agnese, 2017; Giroux, 2014; Olssen, 2010; Peters, 2011). In fact, the study of neoliberalism, as John O’Connor emphasizes eloquently, has become a sort of ‘cottage industry’ (2010: 691).

Yet, as Kean Birch emphasizes, ‘[n]eoliberalism means many things to many people’ (Birch, 2015: 571). Neoliberalism, as Neil Brenner et al. have accentuated, ‘has become something of a rascal concept – promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested’ (2010: 184). Its pervasive character and the accompanying phenomenon of conceptual inflation ultimately results in a reduced analytic value of the notion of neoliberalism. This ‘conceptual malfunction’ associated with the (mis)use of the term neoliberalism (Venugopal, 2015) has actually resulted in a ‘conceptual sprawl’ (Dunn, 2017). The notion of neoliberalism is therefore ‘neither intellectually precise nor politically useful’ (Dunn, 2017: 1). Moreover, the confusing character of the notion of neoliberalism associated with the lack of a clear definition points also to an important shift in understanding neoliberalism not as a static phenomenon but primarily as a process. In fact, the phenomenon of neoliberalization (Brenner et al., 2010; Peck, 2010 [emphasis in the original]) is best characterized as a process of constant transformation, evolution, remodelling, adaptation, renewal, progression and ‘development’.

This is proven by neoliberalism’s most distinctive ‘developmental stages’ represented also by its many slogans, metaphors, buzzwords and other thought-terminating clichés [not to mention bureaucratic jargon]. In fact, the ‘first-wave’ neoliberalism associated with free-market fundamentalism evangelized by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and 1980s has been advanced under the banner of privatization and deregulation. In contrast, following the ‘end of history’ thesis propagated by Francis Fukuyama and the advent of Bill Clinton’s administration in the US and Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ in the UK, the ‘second-wave’ neoliberalism aimed to bridge the gap between social democracy on the one hand and the neoliberal rationality characterized by both divination and faith in market forces (Ramey, 2015) on the other by somehow blending the two. The ‘second-wave’ neoliberalism is best depicted as a hybrid bringing together the progressive agenda of social democracy with a neoliberal vocabulary, e.g. individual responsibility and accountability. As Steger and Roy have accentuated this ‘neoliberal turn’: ‘[i]t is a remarkable testimony to the power of Reaganomics and Thatcherism that the forces of the democratic Left started to incorporate major portions of the neoliberal agenda into their own political programmes’ (Steger & Roy, 2010: 49).

Moreover, the ‘end of history’ parable representing the post-1989 ideological vacuum following the fall of the Berlin wall helped to establish the illusion of a possible cohabitation between the market mentality [at least as it is understood by neoliberalism] with progressive and emancipatory ideas associated with social democracy. Both stages of neoliberalism’s evolution have been characterized by the strategy of marketization, i.e. the ‘extension of the economic form of the market into areas of the social where it was previously illegitimate’ (Ball, 2020: 23). This has had a negative transformative influence on social spheres previously thought to be outside of its realm of application and influence, e.g. the corroding effect of neoliberalism on care and relationships in general (Costas Batlle, 2019). As Wendy Brown points out,

neoliberalism transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic. All conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetized. In neoliberal reason and in domains governed by it, we are only and everywhere homo oeconomicus, which itself has a historically specific form. Far from Adam Smith’s creature propelled by the natural urge to ‘truck, barter, and exchange,’ today’s homo oeconomicus is an intensely constructed and governed bit of human capital tasked with improving and leveraging its competitive positioning and with enhancing its (monetary and nonmonetary) portfolio value across all of its endeavors and venues.

(2015: 10).

Interestingly enough, the current phase of neoliberalism departs considerably from the previous two explicated above. The current ‘third-wave’ neoliberalism – not to be conflated with the ‘Third Way’ associated with the previous phase of neoliberalism –marks an important shift in the process of neoliberalization and the reinvention of neoliberalism itself. The current ‘developmental stage’ of the neoliberal ‘evolution’ represents a prima facie departure from the two previous stages as its archipelago of concepts and ideas allegedly moves away from a free-market fundamentalist rhetoric the previous two phases have been replete with.

This ‘neoliberal shift’ results in a turn to ideas broadly associated with egalitarianism, e.g. equality, justice, well-being, fairness, equality of opportunity, etc. In fact, for more than a decade now major global intergovernmental [neoliberal] institutions have propagated a form of ‘progressive neoliberalism’ (Fraser & Brenner, 2017; Raschke, 2019). As Rune Møller Stahl emphasizes, ‘[t]he annual summit of the World Economic Forum in Davos is now discussing inequality and political instability every year, and even traditional bastions of neoliberal orthodoxy such as the IMF or OECD have started to warn against inequality […]’ (Stahl, 2019: 334).

To an ill-informed [or naïve] reader, the adoption of the egalitarian vocabulary might sound like a [long-awaited] ‘conversion’ from free-market fundamentalism associated with the ‘mainstream’ neoliberal ethos and its ‘rationality’ to a more progressive and sustainable worldview. In contrast, anyone seriously researching the phenomenon of neoliberalism has been far less optimistic. As Nancy Fraser pointed out how a progressive project [in her case feminism] got somehow ‘hijacked’ by neoliberalism: ‘[a] movement that started out as a critique of capitalist exploitation ended up contributing key ideas to its latest neoliberal phase’ (Fraser, 2013). The constant transformation, evolution, remodelling, adaptation, renewal, progression and ‘development’ of neoliberalism is the very essence of what the process of neoliberalization is all about.

One of the most important mechanisms associated with this shift of emphasis in neoliberalism’s rhetoric has been the re-semanticization of the egalitarian and progressive vocabulary which strips it of its historical legacy and emancipatory potential. The indirect indication that the neoliberal ‘semantic shift’ (Mangez & Vanden Broeck, 2020: 1) is actually underway is proven by the gravitational orbit of concepts and ideas of fairness, equality, well-being, equality of opportunity and justice echoing Firth’s principle of co-occurrence [‘You shall know a word by the company it keeps’] (Firth, 1957). The direct indication of this seismic semantic shift in the vocabulary of neoliberalism has had important implications also for how we come to consume, ‘digest’ and ultimately make sense of the global authoritarian pushback against democracy and human rights composed of anti-democratic and neoliberal tendencies including hate speech, fake news, populism, conflicting diversity [e.g. racism] and other phenomena headed under the banner of ‘uncivil society’. As Aihwa Ong emphasizes in Neoliberalism as Exception, neoliberalism ‘is reconfiguring relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge, and sovereignty and territoriality’ (2006: 3).

This recurrent reinvention of the neoliberal ‘order of reason’ (Brown, 2015) sketched above has actually had an important implication for the notion of neoliberalism itself: it has become a ‘sliding signifier’ (Ball, 2020). Interestingly enough, two distinct interpretations can be associated with the vagueness, imprecision and conceptual confusion neoliberalism is characterized with, i.e. [i] the optimistic and [ii] the pessimistic interpretation. The first interpretation maintains that neoliberalism is so complex a phenomenon that no genealogy, ideational analysis or conceptual...