Lifelong Learning as a Mechanism of Neoliberal Control

Today’s posting is the third in a summary and reflection on a 2008 Routledge book entitled

Foucault and Lifelong Learning:

Governing the Subject

and edited by Andreas Fejes and Katherine Nicoll.  I am posting every other day and each post will summarize one of the chapters in the book.

The third chapter is written by Mark Olssen and is entitled

Understanding the Mechanisms of Neoliberal Control:

Lifelong Learning, Flexibility and Knowledge Capitalism.

In this chapter, Olssen will argue that Foucault has provided us with an alternate view of superstructures in society than what Marx put forth.  This understanding will help us understand how education and economics condition and adapt to each other and that this vision is not plagued by the excesses of a Marxist analysis.  Olssen will position LLL as a neoliberal form of state reason concerned with serving economics.  But he will also suggest that LLL can move beyond economic interests if the structures and discourses that develop around LLL are used for a “…progressive emancipatory project based upon egalitarian politics and social justice” (p. 34).

Foucault’s Concept of Governmentality

As did the authors of the previous 2 chapters, Olssen reviewed the concept of governmentality.  I have summarized from the works of the previous 2 authors, so will not go into great detail here.  I will rather refer readers to the previous 2 postings. Suffice it here to say that he reviews the concepts of governmentality, power and strategies.  He does, however, use the term reason of state to refer to art of governmentality, which previous authors in this book did not, and he does expand upon the notion of security more than did the previous authors.

Security can be seen as the link that stabilizes and legitimizes the connection between the ruled and the ruler, and the way in which a ruler/government deal with uncertainty and unpredictable events. Although this became more important in the 18^th century, it is of particular interest in contemporary society where change is rapid and uncertainty is rampant. 

Lifelong Learning as a Neoliberal Reason of State

Olssen presents LLL as a “model of governing individuals in relation to the collective” (p. 37) and indicates that this constitutes it as a neoliberal governmentality.   I want to challenge that this on its own qualifies LLL as a neoliberal governmentality. As a model of governing that is accomplished through a pervasive and discursively-distributed value system which results in individual adaptation of a learned subjectivity, I would accept, as per Edwards in the previous posting/chapter, that LLL is involved in a form of governmentality.  However, governing individuals in relation to the collective alone is not sufficient to classify LLL as neoliberal.  I would expect an argument for neoliberal governmentality to at least include the following elements: 

• ·         Driven by faith in the free-market
• ·         Emphasis on the corporate sector in politics and economics
• ·         An emphasis on individual autonomy and risk/responsibility assumption. 

I am not saying that LLL is NOT a form of neoliberal governmentality, only that this statement in and of itself is insufficient to make that claim. 

I also want to connect this statement to the work of Jarvis (2008) which I summarized in earlier blogs.  Jarvis argues that the development of society in general, and the learning society specifically is faced with negotiating a tension between the individual and the collective. He too positions LLL as one attempt in which this tension can be negotiated but suggests that LLL need not take the role of centring the individual or the collective in so doing.  He proposes a vision of LLL based in relationships in order to accommodate both individuals and the collective without marginalizing either. 

Olssen refers to the significance of LLL in EU policy discourse and suggests that it is critical in the EU’s efforts to unite 25 populations under one identity.  LLL is seen as a solution for regional development and integration as well as modernization, human capital development and employability initiatives.

Olssen presents Foucault’s vision of neoliberalism.  First of all, it is an economic model, but it has implications and effects throughout society. It involves practices and discourse that relate economics and knowledge/learning in particular ways. Keynesian economics became difficult to sustain in the 1970s.  (Olssen relates this to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, but I will not explore that here.) Olssen points out that neoliberalism developed out of deliberate policy initiatives that allowed capital to move freely across borders.  It was not an inevitable and natural evolution toward something necessarily better.  The point that Olssen want to be clear is this:

…the forms of governmentality that are shaping learning have been directly engineered [by influential economic policy elites and state officials in advance states] as a consequence of the neoliberal revolution since the 1970s. (p. 38).

Lifelong learning as an Instrument of Flexible Governmentality

LLL is a technology of power, one that according to Olssen, enables the flexible preparation of subjects.  He draws a parallel to Marx’ superstructures:  social domains (like education) are “rendered compatible to the imperatives of economic management.”  (p. 38).  He argues that LLL subjects labour to a form of flexible rationalization.  Keynesian economics did not lead to global economies because, according to Boyer (1988) it had no way of controlling workers.  LLL provides a means of constituting workers globally as knowledgeable subjects.

LLL puts responsibility for learning on the individual, which amounts to a reduction of a nationally-assured right in favour of a globally-situated field of competition.  This is a flexible technology. 

• ·         Business and governments can avoid responsibility
• ·         Labour becomes mobile between organizations and nations.  (I would add that workers are to be developed as mobile between industries as well.  This signifies the degree to which workers not only have to upgrade within their areas of expertise, but also may be involved in complete over-haul of their skill sets and continue to develop transferable skills)
• ·         Labour becomes mobile within organizations.

Olssen presents the following chain of logic:

• a.       LLL allows relaxation of legal restraints around conditions of employment.
• b.      Employee rights and job security are threatened
• c.       The looming threat ensures workers will become adaptable
• d.      Responsibility for employment (and continued employability) resides with the individual
• e.       By making themselves more adaptable (through LLL and in other ways, I imagine) workers have more opportunities, and are more mobile.
• f.       Employment contracts become more flexible

I wonder about points a) and f).   In Canada, employers are under specific legal obligations for employment that are not so easily relaxed.  So I wonder what such relaxation would look like and how it would come about.  When I read such generalities, I often try to picture industries and jobs that would be so affected.  For instance, I consider low-skilled manufacturing jobs, especially unionized work, and suspect that (at least in the immediate future) an employer would have a difficult time firing an employee if that employee did not continue to make themselves more marketable. Another example I consider is pharmaceutical sales because of my exposure to the industry.  In a recent article in the Journal of Workplace Learning (Hunter, 2010) I showed that agents in this industry learn for work pretty much on a daily basis and from a variety of sources.  These agents generally do engage in LLL and make themselves more marketable and flexible and do take personal responsibility for learning that will benefit the organization.  I also have seen that those who learn the minimum that is required (and those also who do not conform to the prescribed identities) eventually find themselves on the list of redundant positions when the periodic restructuring and resizing occurs.  In this context, I can see how instability and market fluctuations can create the opportunities to selectively cull the workforce.  However, it is still difficult for me to accept broadly, that LLL itself allows a relaxation of legal constraints around employment.

Olssen presents us with an interesting paradox however. The flexibility developed through LLL, which was encouraged by the instability of the labour market, can lead to stability in the employment market because it allows organizations to be more adaptive to change and unexpected circumstance. 

Regardless, LLL is not only a product of restructuring but it also is an enabler of restructuring.  Education finds itself in new contexts and then adapts itself in such a way as to allow for restructuring in the interests of efficiency through flexibility.

Tuschling and Engemann (2006, p. 460) refer to the inter-instituionalizing of learning.  This involves

• ·         Totalizing learning into all imaginable situations, and
• ·         Evoking a subjectivity in individuals that will encourage them to act as learners in all imaginable situations
•   This involves the ability to process all actions as learning.

Changes in the nature and Management of Knowledge:

            From Collective to Individual Responsibility

Even though we popularly hear that we are in a knowledge-economy, knowledge is being downplayed in favour of skills, learning, and information (which is short lived and for which we can never be saturated). This relates to a mentality necessitating the individual to take personal responsibility for up-grading adapting to external, and not internal, needs which can be seen as nothing short of permanent education.  He or she has to amass a collection of competencies, trading them in for others when they expire. This mentality is predicated on a claim of equality of opportunity for all (although not only internationally, but intra-nationally this is not the case) and necessitates at least opportunities to develop key qualifications, basic skills and primary knowledge. 

What Olssen, I suggest, doesn’t present strongly enough is that with the emphasis on basic skills, concomitant with an emphasis on individual responsibility, we have a recipe for the abandonment of state responsibility for even the most basic of education.  If we envision basic skills as a personal-commodity held by individuals who are responsible for their own marketability in the labour market, this has implications for basic skills provision, particularly for immigrant adults who, for instance, do not meet literacy requirements of the market.  It is consistent with the logic of personal responsibility and basic skills and the free market to require new immigrants to find and fund their own ESL programs through private institutions (which would develop in a context of profit-maximization and competition) and to allow those who cannot or otherwise do not so engage, to live the consequences of marginalized participation, not only in the labour market, but in all of society.  Those who fail to participate (and I choose the word ‘fail’ intentionally to call up the neoliberal mentality) will not be seen as victims of a system for which they were ill-equipped to participate, but rather as inadequate persons who are deserving of a lesser life. 

LLL not only manages to shape populations through governmentality, but it also is a form of bio-power, says Olssen, in that it disciplines subjects. He refers to busno-power (Marshall, 1995) as a form of bio-power which acts to create subjectivities through educational practices and pedagogies. LLL encourages self-regulation of workers to reduce the ‘lag time’ between their learning and external technological and economic changes. Learners should be ready to respond to changes as quickly as in necessary and possible.

Olssen foreshadows shifts in the financial burden for LLL to the individual as well.  What I find an interesting irony is that associated with this shift in responsibility to the individual (financially and other ways such as identification of what needs to be learned) there is also a shift in the over-arching perceived aims of education (both for education in general and specifically for adult education) which is not consistent with the direction in shift of responsibility.  Whereas historically, a major theme of education (and adult education) has been emancipation and personal development (benefits for the individual), the discourse in LLL is now shifting toward national and organizational competitiveness (benefits organizations and countries in the first instance).  I am not suggesting that which benefits the organization or nation does not in some way benefit the individual.  I am pointing out, however, that to some degree LLL is being positioned as a moral obligation of a good citizen to ensure competitive advantage for the organizations and countries in which he or she works.  Responsibility is shifting from the collective to the individual, and yet benefit is being represented as shifting primarily from the individual to the collective. The state’s role is being reduced to providing the mechanisms by which to audit learning (Olssen, p. 42). 

  Olssen concludes this section by stating that these discussions illustrate that knowledge is being managed differently now, in an ethos of flexibility, and a major component of that change is in the shift of responsibility to the individual.

In the reading that I’ve done on LLL emphasizing the ways in which the labour market will (is?) make (making?) demands on the individual, one glaring fact seems conspicuously omitted, and I would like to see it become a more prominent part of the conversation.  This fact is the aging population.  As baby-boomers retire we may see a situation where labour demand exceeds labour supply.  Add to this the growth of the low-skilled service sector and one has to ask if the pressures theorized to work on the individual to continually up-grade will indeed have the force to create the situations envisioned.  I wonder how this figures into the conversation. 

Learning for Democracy

For Foucault, “the way the institutional realm is patterned does not necessarily reflect the base, or only those of the base.” (p. 43).  So, education can support more than just the capitalist superstructure.  It can be used to promote democracy.  LLL is indeed being used as a discourse of neoliberal governmentality but is need not, and IS not confined to that.  In this section, Olssen presents what he sees as the normative criteria that LLL should contain should it seek to be more than a servant of neoliberal discourse.  He claims not to want to prescribe but rather to “safeguard learning from neoliberal appropriation” (p. 44).

Specifically to promote democracy, learning should:

• ·         Orient itself to the security and well-being of all
• ·         Support customs and traditions that encourage community
• ·         Develop the political arts of democratic communication and negotiation
• ·         Be concerned with more than quantitative accumulation of knowledge, but with qualitative transformation of individuals through democratic participation
• ·         Transcend the nation-state through cosmopolitanism and the engagement of the other
• ·         Evokes the principles of freedom and participation as in Dewey’s pragmatism and praxis involving the development of the individual and society
•    Olssen borrows the term ‘unfinished cosmopolitanism’ from Popkewitz (2006)
•    Makes the individual inseparable from the community and learning inseparable from teaching and from community support
• ·         Sees the learning society not as an educational ideal, but as a political one

In two days, I will post a summary and ruminations on Chapter 4 by Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein entitled

Our ‘Will to Learn’ and the Assemblage of a Learning Apparatus.

In this chapter, the authors look at a conceptualization of learning as a collection of competencies which extend beyond work-based competencies into other realms of our lives.  The authors will explore the importance of this conceptualization of learning today and address the question:

Who are we, as people for whom learning is of major importance, who refer to learning as a way to constantly position and reposition ourselves?

They will explore how this subjectivity emerges by drawing on the concept of governmentality and will show that learning has become a matter of both government and self-government. (reference Delanty, 2003)