Discourses of research policy in New Zealand, 1984-2005 neoliberalism, tertiary education and national science

Abstract

This thesis analyses research policy in the fields of New Zealand tertiary education and national science in the period 1984 - 2005. It poses the question: How has what can be done, said and written in tertiary education and science research shifted and how have shifts been constituted in policy and related texts? In addition, the study considers the overlapping and increasing convergence of research policy between the two fields (tertiary education and national science) as an example of what happens to previously discrete areas of policy development and their constitutive discourses under a state logic (and pervasive discursive formation) of neoliberalism. The key hypothesis is that the economic genre has come to dominate research discourses and related practices with increasingly problematic effects. The study is underpinned by a poststructuralist/postmodern philosophical position which seeks to interrogate, historicise, problematise and politicise dominant research policy discourses. Jean Francois Lyotard’s prophetic work, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984) is mobilised to argue that since at least the 1950s, the western world has been moving into a recognisably different mode of societal organisation and production. In the 2000s the role of technology and particularly computerisation in shaping our societies, identities and, as Lyotard argued, knowledge itself, is indisputable. Lyotard’s analysis of the growing importance of innovation and ‘techno-science’ in the regeneration of international capital is highly pertinent to this study, as is his problematisation of notions of western ‘progress’ principally through a theorisation of the metanarrative of performativity. The thesis is also strongly informed by Michel Foucault’s work. Of particular interest is his work on the imbrication of power and knowledge, the value of close historical investigations and how subjects become governed and govern themselves through the (usually unconscious) uptake of circulating discourses. For both Foucault and Lyotard the study of ruptures, continuities, emergences and descents in institutional discourses provides evidence on which to base judgements about the limits of what can be said in the institution at any one time. They both advocate studying ‘what we know so well’ and ‘rendering the normal strange’ in order to consider how the contours of dominant discursive formations might be constituted and to generate the intellectual resources to explore how matters might be organised otherwise.