Susan Lee Robertson

• PhD
• Professor at University of Cambridge

This paper explores how, in what ways, and with what outcomes, deep structural transformations have reconstituted higher education in England, and are deeply implicated in the rise of authoritarian populism. We focus particularly on the ways in which our understandings and lived experiences of class, social mobility, meritocracy, social inequality,...

Drawing on Marion Fourcade’s notion of ordinalization, we develop a conceptual grammar of comparison to explain a shift in the nature and outcomes of the governing capacity of the OECD over time. We argue that comparison as a mode of governance has been bound into the DNA of the OECD as a lever for advancing political liberalism since the inception...

This paper presents and engages with Basil Bernstein’s rich conceptual grammar in order to generate a sociological account of the outcomes for teachers’ work, identity and social class, of strategic shifts in governance to the global scale. Our aim is to develop a two-way conversation between Bernstein’s conceptual grammar and how best to theorise...

This paper uses the global trade negotiations and agreements, which include education sectors as potentially tradable services, to show the complex processes at work in making global education markets. Drawing on the work of Jens Beckert and others, I focus on the micro-processes of making capitalist orders and the challenges at hand in bringing de...

This paper explores a less well-examined aspect of time in relation to higher education and the academy; that of ‘time-future’. The paper takes the case of education trade strategies being pursued by governments and allied agencies, and explores the multiple ways in which time-future is mobilised. Drawing on trade documents, government statistics,...

This paper examines the growth of global non-state and multilateral actors in the ‘global south’ and the creation of frontier markets in the higher education sector. These developments are part of market-making changes in higher education as the sector is opened to new actors, logics, and innovative services, aimed at ‘the global south’. Yet making...

When Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-first Century was released in 2014, it became an overnight success. Piketty focused on the concentration of wealth in a tiny social elite, and showed that their wealth had increased following the financial crisis in 2008. Yet the value of Piketty’s book offers something more than this for social scientists...

Globalisation has often been seen as throwing a lifeline to comparative education (CE), because that seemed to be the academic approach most suited to identifying and evaluating the consequences for education policy and practice in a globalising world. However, our argument in this chapter is that such contributions from comparative education have...

Recent research has shown profound impacts of institutional settings of education systems on educational inequalities, i.e. systematic disadvantages and advantages in education being structured by characteristics like class, gender, ethnicity, (dis)ability and their intersections. The main education system characteristics which have been identified...

This paper examines the rise and rise of a range of individual, institutional, national and regional mobility projects in the global higher education sector, and explores the implications of these dynamics for the economisation, and thus instrumentalisation, of English as a global language, as a medium of instruction and a competitive advantage. Ye...

Introduction This chapter explores the methodological challenges in comparing education policies in a globalising world. We begin with the claim that, for the most part, education policies, programmes and practices have been, and continue to be, located in national territorial spaces, although this does not mean the global element is absent. Rather...

This paper examines what to some is a well-worked furrow; the processes and outcomes involved in what is typically referred to as ‘marketization’ in the higher education sector. We do this through a case study of Newton University, where we reveal a rapid proliferation of market exchanges involving the administrative division of the university with...

This chapter examines the unprecedented attention now being directed at the “quality” of school teachers in education systems around the world by a small group of global actors. The global governing of teachers’ labour is not new; in the post-World War II period up until the early 2000s, we see a “thin” global governance of teachers’ work in action...

The teaching profession has been the subject of international political debates for decades, though until more recently, this was largely around the conditions of work in sub/national settings and in relation to those agencies that might ensure teacher professionalism. The argument put by international organizations such as the World Bank (2012), t...

This chapter examines the processes of entrepreneurial network and capital formation at a university-based incubator. Incubators could help overcome start-up firms to gain access to entrepreneurial networks and credibility with external stakeholders, by supporting the entrepreneurial processes including the acquisition of variety of capitals and re...

W niniejszym artykule przedstawiamy wyniki badania tego, co wiele osob uznalo za dobrze juz opracowaną nisze, a mianowicie procesow i rezultatow czegoś, co najcześciej określa sie mianem ‘urynkowienia’ sektora szkolnictwa wyzszego. Podejmujemy te kwestie w oparciu o przygotowane przez nas studium przypadku Newton University, w kontekście ktorego od...

This paper outlines the basis of an alternative theoretical approach to the study of the globalisation of ‘education’ – a Critical, Cultural Political Economy of Education (CCPEE) approach. Our purpose here is to bring this body of concepts – critical, cultural, political, economy – into our interrogation of globalising projects and processes withi...

This chapter offers the reader a conceptual tool for reading education policies, projects and their implementation - Cultural Political Economy of Education. CPE/E is particularly attentive to the explanatory power derived from holding together connections between the cultural, political and economic dimensions of educational life and lives. Using...

This paper explores the social justice implications of two, ‘linked’, governance developments which have been instrumental in reshaping many education systems throughout the world: the ‘privatising’ and ‘globalising’ of education (Klees, Stromquist, & Samoff, 201229. Klees , S. , Stromquist , N. and Samoff , J. , eds. 2012. A critical review of...

Over the past decade, the globalization and governing of education through Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) have generated considerable debate as to their meaning, purpose, status and outcomes. This debate is particularly heated in the education sector because of the widely-held view that education is a complex social and political activity that...

This article examines the focus on teacher policies and practices by a range of global actors and explores their meaning for the governance of teachers. Through a historical and contemporary reading, I argue that an important shift in the locus of power to govern has taken place. I show how the mechanisms of global governance of teachers are being...

This paper considers the underlying processes and contexts of incubation as critical factors in accelerated firm growth in a university-based technology incubator. At the heart of the study is a concern to understand these dynamics in the early stages of incubation, including processes of firm network formation, the capacity to access and use combi...

The slogan “world-class education” is ubiquitous in education circles. This essay looks closely at who is advancing this idea, why, and where, and the kind of work it is asked to do. Though instruments for determining the world-class status of education institutions were first launched in the 1980s, they have grown exponentially in the past decade,...

Engaging with the work of Hartmut Rosa, this article offers an account of the politics of time in the contemporary corporatizing and enterprising university. It examines the emerging "third mission" for the university, and the ways in which this has enabled an array of new actors and their projects and practices to operate in, and on, university sp...

This paper proposes that the relationship between schooling, citizenship and democracy--so often taken for granted and discussed using idealistic perspectives--is better understood when using the lens of “embodied cognition” (Lakoff, 2008) and a focus on metaphorical and prototypical ways of thinking. Our goal is to examine the always conflictive a...

This paper discusses the strange "non-death of neo-liberalism" (Crouch, 2011) in the Bank's education sector policy priorities. A key point of entry will be the two education sector strategy reports, Education Sector Strategy 1999 (World Bank, 1999) and the Education Strategy 2020 (World Bank, 2011), to guide the Bank's education operations. The ar...

Far from simply being a form of cost sharing between the "state" and the "market," PPP has been celebrated by some, and condemned by others, as the champion of change in the new millennium. This book has been written by the best minds in education policy, political economy, and development studies. They convincingly argue that public private partne...

This article aims to discuss the relationship between higher education (HE), globalisation and regionalism projects focusing on HE in Latin America and Brazil. It is claimed that HE has predominantly taken the diverse, yet concerted and co-ordinated routes of globalisation and regionalisation and, by doing so, been profoundly transformed. The first...

One outcome of more than three decades of social and political transformation around the world, the result of processes broadly referred to as globalisation, has been the emergence of a complex (and at first glance, contradictory) conceptual language in the social sciences that has sought to grasp hold of these developments. Throughout the 1990s, t...

The concept of 'city-regions' has gained popularity in both policy and theoretical discourses in the UK. This is accelerated by the recent new government policy landscape and 'scalar' shifts in economic and social developments, particularly in England. However, there is a lack of clear understanding of the influences of such spatial processes in th...

In this paper drawn upon Walby’s framing of explanations and Hazelkorn’s recent conclusions the authors suggest there are three main explanations in circulation regarding rankings of universities and academic work more generally: as a discrete project aimed at accountability and transparency; as part of a programme of strategies aimed at generating...

This paper examines the changing form and scope of higher education in the UK with a specific focus on contemporary ‘globalising’ developments within the sector and beyond. Situated within an analysis of transformations under way in the wider global and regional economy, and drawing on Jessop’s strategic relational approach (SRA), I examine the way...

Jayasuriya's conceptualisation of ‘regulatory regionalism’ is particularly useful for examining the presence, significance and effect of new higher education governance mechanisms in constituting Europe as a competitive region and knowledge‐based economy. In particular he argues that we need to take sufficient account of the role of domestic politi...

O artigo examina a interligação progressiva dos espaços da política de educação superior no mundo, focalizando em particular a Europa e o seu projeto de globalização da educação superior, assim como as implicações do mesmo para outras economias nacionais e regionais. O trabalho começa com o Espaço Europeu de Educação Superior, esboçando as principa...

[A] whole series of key concepts for the understanding of society derive their power from appearing to be just what they always were and derive their instrumentality from taking on quite different forms. (Smith, 2006, p. 628)

From the early 1990s onwards, various European Union (EU) reports have commented on the low level of European exports and foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Asian region, and the invisibility of Europe in the Asian imagination in comparison with the United States. To overcome this problem, a series of policy and programme initiatives have been...

Improving Classroom Learning with ICT examines the ways in which ICT can be used in the classroom to enhance teaching and learning in different settings and across different subjects. Weaving together evidence of teachers' and learners' experiences of ICT, the authors: explain why the process of integrating ICT is not straightforward; discuss wheth...

In many parts of the world, higher education is viewed as a prime ‘motor’ for the development of a knowledge‐based economy. Under the banner of this ‘new economy’, higher education policies, programmes and practices have been increasingly co‐opted and shaped by wider geo‐strategic political and economic interests. This paper explores three, interli...

Traducao do texto “Public-Private Partnerships, Digital Firms and theProduction of a Neo-Liberal Education Space at the European Scale. In:(2007) K. N. Gulson and C. Symes (Eds.), Spatial Theories of Education:Policy and Geography Matters, London & New York: Routledge, feita peloProf. Dr. Jesse Rebello de Souza Junior e Sophia Marzouk.

One of the components associated with the widely heralded shift to ‘new managerialism’ in the public sector has been an increased emphasis on coordination between government departments as a means to enhance effective service provision. This article examines the capacity for coordination to fulfil this objective. Drawing upon a case study of coordi...

This paper sets out to outline the way in which neo-liberalism has transformed how we think and what we do as teachers and learners. A core argument of the paper is that the mobilisation of neo-liberal ideas for reorganising societies and their education sectors is a class project with three key aims: the (i) redistribution of wealth upward to the...

This paper sets out to outline the way in which neo-liberalism has transformed how we think and what we do as teachers and learners. A core argument of the paper is that the mobilisation of neo-liberal ideas for reorganising societies and their education sectors is a class project with three key aims: the (i) redistribution of wealth upward to the...

'Europe's' approach to internationalising higher education is a multi-facetted set of political strategies that, over time, has become more complex as an array of European-level actors, and most importantly the European Commission, respond to pressures in the regional and global economies. In this article I explore this complexity, suggesting that...

In his paper ‘Grassroots globalization and the research imagination’, Arjun Appadurai challenges academics to develop ways of researching and engaging with the victims of globalisation. A key objective of Appadurai's is to sketch out the problematic and build up the terrain on which a democratisation of research about globalisation might take place...

An important aspect of schooling is to enable students to enter new knowledge worlds, such as the world of history, of English, of foreign languages, of science, of music, or of mathematics. In the InterActive Education project we have worked in partnership with primary and secondary school teachers, to investigate ways in which information and com...

Incl. abstract, bib. Using critical discourse analysis as a methodology for analysis, this paper sets out the nature and form of the challenges directed to the compulsory schooling sector by the knowledge economy that is contained in key policy and related documents put out by the OECD, the World Bank and the UK government. The OECD and the World B...

This is a guest editorial to a special section of this journal which derives from the work of one of the ESRC Teaching and Learning Programme projects, InterActive Education: Teaching and Learning in the Information Age (http://www.interactiveeducation. ac.uk), whose overall aim is to investigate the ways in which new technologies can be used in ed...

This paper seeks to show how ‘policy’, ‘management’ and ‘information and communications technology’ (ICT) were constructed for schools in England between 2000 and 2003 and to discuss some effects of these constructions on teaching and learning in the institutions involved in the InterActive Education Project. It argues that their contribution colle...

Special issue. Incl. bibl., abstracts.

One consequence of the hype around globalization and education and debates on global political actors such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO—is that there has not been sufficient attention paid by education theorists to the development of a rigorous set of analytic categories that might enable us to make sense of the profound changes which now charact...

In the present paper, we argue that neo-liberal governance regimes are deeply contradictory and that these contradictions are increasingly evident within the education sector. Drawing on a case study of the consequences of restructuring in education in New Zealand, arguably a paradigm case of neo-liberal governance, we suggest the state is faced wi...

Les questions relatives a la nature de la mondialisation et sa dynamique sont developpees dans cet article qui s'interesse ensuite a la croissance et aux structures diverses des organisations regionales et a leur role dans la mondialisation. Dans la derniere partie, les auteurs analysent la structure et les objectifs de trois organisations internat...

Using scale, space and territory as a conceptual frame, this article sets out to explore the changing social class relations for teachers as a result of restructuring along with the strategic implications for organized political struggles by teachers and traditional means of presenting their interests. It begins, first, with some brief comments on...

In this article questions are raised about the adequacy of our theoretical frameworks for analysing teachers as class workers and actors, and as an occupational group. The problem of adequacy stems from using labour process theory and production relations as the only sphere for determining class location and class relations and in doing so fails to...

This article addresses the increasing importance of 'risk' for understanding the changing nature of community governance in New Zealand education. Risk, as a dynamic, is viewed both as a risk mentality arising from a particular attitude toward the future and an administrative tool of government and technology of governance. Drawing upon the 'risk s...

In this paper I examine the way the rise of the neoliberal state in New Zealand since the early 1980s, and neoliberal approaches of marketisation, contractualism and community governance in the education sector, have combined to create a new regulatory framework which shapes teachers' labour in schools. This has involved deregulating the contexts a...

We would like to thank our anonymous reviewer for detailed comments on the paper, including a suggested change of title. These have been extremely helpful in refining the paper.

In this paper I argue that in order to understand the deeper significance of the Review of Teacher Education in New Zealand, the Review itself must be located within a broader understanding of the restructuring agenda in New Zealand. This agenda has at its heart the embedding of the new competitive contractual state settlement. Not only are the pre...

The characteristics of the industrializing era of world capitalist development — a highly differentiated workforce, strong unions, powerful states that guarantee economic security and promoted economic growth-no longer describe our new era. Scientifically based technological change in the midst of sharpened internationalization of production means...

This paper uses secondary school students’ understanding of the technology/environment interface to highlight the problems associated with curriculum fragmentation. It identifies the structure of the school day as a strong factor in forcing students to create boundaries between subjects and implicates the unitization of the curriculum in Western Au...

This paper locates the phenomenon of self-managing schools within the framework of "fast capitalism" and identifies themes of organization central to fast capitalism, which are argued to also underpin the self-managing schools. "Fast capitalism" refers to the rapidly intensified integration of regionalized productive activities into the global circ...