Researching the
Future: Towards an
Inclusive Global
Knowledge Economy
Professor Louise Morley
Centre for Higher Education and Equity
Research (CHEER)
University of Sussex, UK
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer
Provocations/ Being Untoward
• What is the field of social science
research and who is defining it?
• Who are the standard makers?
• How have neoliberal and austerity
policy cultures influenced social
science research?
• Does social science research
detect some forms of knowing and
exclude others?
• What does research do to
academic identities?
• Who/ what is excluded from the
global research economy?
• What is the future for critical
scholarship?
Shifting Research Rationalities
• The Knowledge Economy
• Neo-liberal Corporate
Logic - Competition/
Convergence/Compliance
• Audit Culture - measuring
products/outputs
From Industrial Capitalism to
Information/Knowledge Capitalism
• Emphasises knowledge in creating:
economic growth
global competitiveness
• Recognises that information/
knowledge are:
highly mobile
can be globally marketed
• Driven by the Network Society
(Castells, 1996)
• Promotes dominance of economic
theories in education (Robertson, 2010)
(See Drucker, 1993, Peters, 2010; Porter, 1990)
Innocent Knowledge?
Knowledge production/
custody/ dissemination:
•Not neutral
•Infused with power
•Situated and contingent
•Largely an invested
process
•Embodied.
(Wickramasinghe, 2009).
Economics Imperialism
•Research colonised by the ‘cultural
circuits’ of capitalism (Mills and Ratcliffe,
2012)?
•Instrumentalisation of knowledge/
Quantifiable use value.
•Research funded for government
priorities e.g. security?
•Non-economics scholarship becoming
unfundable or unknowable?
•Counter-hegemonic/ critical scholarship
in danger of becoming ‘socially
illegitimate’ (Butler, 2006).
Value, Not Values
Research productivity =
•Income-generation
•Indictor for performance
management
•Exchange in the global prestige
economy
•Innovation for the market
Where is?
•Creativity
•Discovery
•Pleasure
•Intellectual contribution
•Social justice
(Blackmore & Kandiko, 2011; Leathwood &
Read, 2013).
Globalisation of Scientised
Knowledge/ Power of Number
Natural sciences
•assigned matters of fact
Humanities and Social Sciences
• matters of concern.
•‘Gold-standard’ of research methods is
the randomised controlled trial… (Colley, 2013)
•Results are prioritised over processes,
numbers over experiences, procedures
over ideas, productivity over creativity
(Ball and Olmedo, 2012:91) .
•Can scientific understanding alone
provide the resources for understanding
the social world?
Management by Number
• RAE, ERA, REF Accounting
Systems
• Quantification to grade research.
• Reducing activity to a common
managerial metric.
• Research = performance indicator
for individuals, organisations, and
nation states.
• Global League Tables =
Comparison, bench-marking and
ranking
• Aspirational framework
• Prestige Economy
(Collini, 2013; Lucas, 2006)
Paradigm Wars/ Cultural Clashes
• Binaries = every concept haunted by its
mutually constituted excluded other.
Big Science v Anthropological models.
Scientific Realism v Social
Constructivism.
Positivist/ neo-realist v Interpretative/
relativist epistemologies.
Quantitative v Qualitative methods.
Problem-solving v Critical.
Peer Reviewers: Assemblage
of Regulation?
• Guardians of ‘standards’
• Democratising intervention disguising the
steering at a distance power base.
• Part of the measuring apparatus constituted
through norms, practices and epistemologies.
• Scarce resources capriciously allocated by
non-accountable and non-transparent
processes.
• Externality problematic in resourceconstrained economies?
• Reluctance to sign over competitive
advantage to other researchers?
• Determine what remains outside of the
domain of intelligibility.
• Captured by hegemony?
Optics and Apparatus
• What is it that people
don’t see?
• Why don’t they see it?
• What do current optics/
practices/ specifications
reveal and obscure?
(Barad, 2007)
Impact/ Knowledge Mobilization
• Demand for ‘value- for-money’ accountability for publiclyfunded research.
• Demonstrable, auditable benefits:
 Economic
 Environmental
 Social
Implications
• Burden of meeting social, economic and environmental
needs placed on grant recipients?
• Research critical of government/ stakeholders?
• Metric to redirect research in politically approved
directions?
• Forcing research to conform to market ideology/ use
value?
• Demonstrating impact – resource intensive and possibly
impracticable?
• Can impact be known/ predicted/ quantified in a causal
way?
• Imposed performativity
(Brown, 2013; Colley, 2013; Fielding, 2003)
Academic Identities
• Research/ knowledge capital = KPI,
reputation, power, status and rewards.
• Identities formed and evaluated in relation
to mutable and constructed differences
and boundaries.
• Researchers positioned as supplicants for
diminishing/ highly targeted public
resources.
• Logic of relationality = for every winner
there are many losers.
• Psychic economy- shame, pride,
humiliation, anxiety.
• ‘Cruel optimism’? (Berlant, 2011).
Exclusions/Misrecognitions
Who is deemed capable of reason?
71% of researchers globally are men
29% women (UNESCO, 2012).
Women less likely to be:
Journal editors/cited in top-rated
journals (Tight, 2008).
Principal investigators (EC, 2011).
On research boards
Awarded large grants
Awarded research prizes (Nikiforova,
2011).
Keynote conference speakers
(Schroeder et al., 2013).
Are gender differences factored into
research itself? (EU, 2013)
Summary: Knowledge…
• Important form of global capital.
• Reduced to its economic/ exchange value
in neo-liberal economies.
• Scholarship shaped by market demands.
• Linked to performance management.
• Purports to be neutral/objective, but is
invested, situated and exclusionary.
• Production/ custody processes overlap
with social hierarchies.
• Productivity connected to predictability of
research utility.
• Value indicators can be unstable,
transitory, contingent and contextualised.
Making Alternativity Imaginable:
Social Science Researchers To…
• Resist being co-opted by narrow
research policy agendas.
• Inform policy with evidence, not vice
versa.
• Challenge and expose increasing socioeconomic inequalities/ exclusions.
• Re-invigorate knowledge production as a
site of transformation and possibility.
• Act as Socratic ‘gadflies’ (Colley, 2013).
• Trouble neo-liberal realism.
• Transgress and re-signify.
• Re-work tired, stale categories/
vocabularies.
• Identify new optics for viewing social
world.
• Imagine and research the future that you
want to see.
Follow Up?
CHEER
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/education/cheer/
Morley, L. (2014) Lost Leaders:
Women in the Global Academy.
In press, Higher Education
Research and Development.
Morley, L. (2014) Researching the
Future: Closures and Culture
Wars in the Knowledge
Economy. In press, Critical
Studies in Education
28 June, 2016