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Having established an understanding of neoliberalism and its relationship to a ‘Knowledge Economy’ it is now useful to understand the neoliberal impact on Higher Education as part of the move towards securing the Knowledge

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Economy. Importantly, the relationship between knowledge as a social reality and knowledge as a cultural construction is very much at play within the arguments between a liberal understanding of learning and the instrumental skill acquisition form of learning most commonly ascribed to a neoliberal form of Higher Education. The role Higher Education plays within the contemporary neoliberal framework and how it may have arrived in this position are presented within literature as a predominantly negative occurrence, particularly in reducing Higher Education into a 21st century mode of production. In particular, the

relationship between the state, a neoliberal agenda and Higher Education can be problematic due to the resulting Massification and Commodification. This is perceived to serve the interests of the neoliberal hegemony rather than the more traditionally liberal notion of learning that is more readily ascribed to Higher Education.

5.2.1 The conditioning of knowledge and the status of learners in the Knowledge Economy

HEIs have traditionally been identified with the ‘University’ but more recently have developed alternative contexts for provision including ‘HE in FE’ that sees Further Education Institutions providing local Higher Education programmes, ostensibly as part of the Widening Participation agenda. Giroux and Myrsiades (2001, p. 2) [HESB12]suggest the way in which HEIs construct their meaning can be located in having missions that ‘entail both the development of

individuals and a contribution to public policy’. The increase in sites of Higher Education may be seen as a disruption to this role. Naidoo (2010) [HEJA04] suggests this can be located as inhabiting a Higher Education that imbibes a ‘master economic imaginary’ of the Knowledge Economy… a hegemonic discourse closely linked to the idea of global competiveness that frames political, intellectual and economic strategies as well as a wide range of

government policies’ (pp. 67-8). Naidoo, here reinterpreting Jessop, Fairclough & Wodak (2008) [HESB13] suggests that the way in which HEIs are understood as culturally constructed sites indicates their position within a Knowledge

Economy. This position is not just local or national but also has a role in the way global power is articulated through knowledge creation.

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Education as a part of a broader repositioning of how intellectual power is contained and controlled has had a significant impact on the way that learning and teaching within Higher Education is conceptualised. In particular, Jessop et al (2008) [HESB13] make this link to the development of intellectual strategies with institutional fields of knowledge, i.e. defining what subjects and disciplines should be promoted as most beneficial or profitable according to variable performance indicators controlled by a range of stakeholders.

The status of learners is also affected by the way in which intellectual power is contained, defined, articulated and created. In this way the purpose and style of the curriculum, pedagogy and the relationship between institution, tutors and learners then becomes: ‘rather than being cherished as a symbol of the future, youth are now seen as a threat to be feared and a problem to be contained’ (Giroux and Giroux, 2004, p. 218 [HESB14]). Here Giroux and Giroux are discussing “youth” as something that is feared by dominant power. Reapplying this to the learner it is possible to understand the repositioning of students as a consumer of their education in a similar way: it contains them within a mode of production and alters the potential relationships between educational systems, learners and teachers.

Giroux and Giroux (2004) [HESB14]. describe the changes in the relationships between the learners, the teacher and the institution as part of a war on youth (p. 56) and educational practices as a normalising process. They continue (p. 219) that ‘students begin to look more like criminal suspects to be searched, tested, and observed, under the watchful eye of administrators, who appear less concerned with educating them than with containing their every move. Nurture, trust, and respect now give way to fear, disdain, and suspicion’. For Giroux and Giroux then, Higher Education becomes a way of producing carefully constructed social identities. These identities are those that will best serve the Knowledge Economy.

The normalisation process that Giroux and Giroux (2004) [HESB14]. is further explained by Naidoo (2010, p. 69) [HEJA04]. who describes this as:

‘[B]ursts of creativity in capitalist countries are followed by the

routinization of work to enable profits to be made. Innovations are therefore translated into sets of routines that do not require the creativity and

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independence of judgement that are often associated with the Knowledge Economy rhetoric…’permission to think’ has only been given to a minority. The majority of knowledge workers are faced with routinization, surveillance and exploitation’.

There are clear resonances with Giroux and Giroux’s (2004) [HESB14] claim, but in addition, at the same point as the ‘youth’ are becoming conditioned, so too is knowledge. The Knowledge Economy, therefore only gives a certain minority the elevated position of thinking and contributing. This is disguised by the perception that the adaptation of the market model in Higher Education results in more choice in educational routes and therefore opens up the knowledge within Higher Education to more than before. This therefore, becomes part of the justification of a massification of Higher Education.