The discourse of problems and solutions in education needs to be understood in a wider policy context which can be broadly characterised as neoliberal. Since the 1970s, neoliberalism has been the dominant political-economic ideology in the UK, proposing individual freedom as the best way to advance human well-being, and, in practice, requiring states and institutions to maintain private property rights, free markets and free trade at every level of society (Harvey, 2005). As part of this, public institutions, including universities, have shifted towards operating on the principles of the market in order to encourage efficiency and personal freedom, and these institutions are understood in terms of their function in economic production (Olssen and Peters, 2005).
Within HE institutions (and the education sector more generally) neoliberal ‘policy technologies’ borrowed from the private sector (Ball, 2017: 50) have changed the ways in which individuals interact with each other within systems, and what is perceived as valuable. This technocratic approach affects the way in which educators understand the purpose of their own practice. If education is seen as a process of production, education policy’s role at a national and local level is to solve problems in an efficient way. Writing about schools, Ball refers to a continuous cycle of improvement, as old problems are solved and replaced by new ‘needs’, requiring successive interventions (2017: 133). This is part of the logic of management in education, and implies a certain type of intervention that can be measured, assessed and transferred to other contexts.
WP is subject to this cycle, to the extent that it can be seen as an archetypal ‘issue’ in HE. Though the question of who has the right and ability to participate in HE has been posed since the foundation of the first universities, WP as it exists today really began to emerge alongside neoliberal economic and social policies (Kettley, 2007). Whilst it is not by definition a neoliberal issue, its entanglement with neoliberalism has led to it being understood in instrumentalist ways; HE has an impact on the economy, and WP contributes
to this by producing a greater quantity of qualified graduates. In response to increasing policy-steering from central government, WP as a field has become professionalised, and is seen as a process separate from the day-to-day functioning of university teaching and learning. Successful participation is interpreted as the result of interventions from national and institutional WP policies which are essentially recruitment strategies, especially at elite universities (Rainford, 2017). This implies that what happens after recruitment is not a WP ‘problem’. Williams (2013) claims that this approach to WP has in turn led to students behaving as consumers, to the extent that they now tend to make decisions about participation on the basis of employment prospects for graduates, offset against the actual or perceived cost of education. Budd (2017) contests this idea, arguing that it oversimplifies students’ relationships with their education and justifies a distorted ‘passive’ notion of students in pedagogy. Whilst this challenge is valid, the very fact that students can be seen as consumers means that universities may presume they are, and frame interactions with potential and existing students in terms of the customer-value judgements they are assumed to make (Woodall et al., 2014). This is the result of neoliberalism as a dominant discourse; it encourages individuals and organisations to act as if they are subject to market forces even when they are not.
The task of widening participation in HE, even when this is framed in terms of employability and skills, seems directly at odds with other policies which permit higher tuition fees for undergraduate study; the student-as-customer of education cannot behave exactly as the deregulated market dictates a student-as-product should, and one policy undermines the other. For non-traditional (particularly working class) students, the consumerist attitude can manifest as doubt as to whether participation in HE is worth the time, money and effort (Archer, 2003), which seems directly at odds with the equitable aims of WP policy. This has been particularly relevant since increased fees and cuts to national WP organisations by the 2010-15 Coalition government have led to even high-
achieving school-leavers choosing to skip university in favour of entering work (Burke, 2012). These kinds of responses, along with the apparent mismatch between ‘passive’ students-as-consumers and the desire for ‘active’ learning technologies like games, highlight that neoliberalism is not a consistent set of policies but rather a ‘complex, often incoherent, unstable and even contradictory set of practices’ that effectively operates as an epistemology in its own right (Shamir, 2008: 3). In academia, this incoherence can contribute to the sense of alienation that Hall (2018) identifies as stemming from competition, metrics and league tables, all of which dominate staff and student time to the extent that they have no control over the chaotic system of institutional demands.
It is worth acknowledging, of course, that play and games are just as much tied up with neoliberalism as education. Sport and video games are mass-market, multi-billion- dollar industries and discussions of play and games have expanded as leisure time has become more commodified in contrast to work. Under neoliberalism, games and play spaces are colonised by market forces (Harambam et al., 2011), and in return organisations co-opt the structures and mechanics of games in order to increase productivity and/or affect consumer behaviour. We can understand the idea of ‘gamification’ in these terms in that it reduces gameplay to a score in order to provide extrinsic motivation for engaging in specific activities, but potentially destroys play in the process (Bateman, 2018). Ferrara (2013: 291) argues that the use of serious games and gamification (in education) ‘implies an impoverished, cynical and exploitative view of games as inherently frivolous and mostly useless’, and that its use involves games being ‘strip-mined for their “useful” elements’. What he captures here is a sense that, as in education, there is something valuable beyond the instrumental outcomes of games, but that under neoliberalism this is often ignored or deemphasised.
Ball (2016) acknowledges that the word ‘neoliberalism’ is used as a catch-all for any problem with HE in the twenty-first century; it is often evoked uncritically, or without
considering the ways in which individuals respond to and interpret policy. Ball (2016: 1047) points out that it can refer to concrete policies, but also to the neoliberalism ‘in here’ that affects our interpersonal relationships on an intimate level (by, for instance, encouraging us to see ourselves as rational consumers, or alienated in the face of chaos). This is a more insidious conception of neoliberalism that ultimately affects what we see as ‘common sense’, and which undermines many of our fundamental values. For example, Brown (2015) argues that neoliberalism’s economic reason goes beyond policy, placing it as a threat to democratic values. We might question the extent to which the neoliberal bogeyman actually exists, but regardless of its existence, it has a tangible effect on individuals’ actions. At the very least, it encourages us to re-examine concepts like participation and play at a more fundamental level given a context that many interpret as neoliberal, and to attempt to view them outside of the logic of educational problems/solutions in order to raise new questions. As hinted throughout discussion so far, many of these questions are ‘how’ questions rather than ‘why’ ones, shifting from the motivation to use games as a way to solve problems like participation, and towards trying to understand how these concepts are experienced by people inside and outside of educational contexts. The next task, then, is to dive deeper into the concepts of participation and play in order to establish how they might be approached from a different direction.