Journal of Education Policy
ISSN: 0268-0939 (Print) 1464-5106 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tedp20
‘Creative destruction’: knowledge economy policy
and the future of the arts and humanities in the
academy
Elizabeth Bullen , Simon Robb & Jane Kenway
To cite this article: Elizabeth Bullen , Simon Robb & Jane Kenway (2004) ‘Creative destruction’:
knowledge economy policy and the future of the arts and humanities in the academy , Journal of
Education Policy, 19:1, 3-22, DOI: 10.1080/0268093042000182609
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0268093042000182609
Published online: 20 Feb 2007.
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Journal of Education Policy
Vol. 19, No. 1, January 2004
‘Creative destruction’: knowledge
economy policy and the future of the
arts and humanities in the academy1
Elizabeth Bullen*, Simon Robb & Jane Kenway
University of South Australia, Australia
Journal
10.1080/0268093..........
TEDP100603.sgm
0268-0939
Orignal
Taylor
102004
19
00000January
and
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of
Article
Francis
Education
(Print)/1464-5106
Francis
2004
Ltd
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Policy (online)
Policy conceptualizations of the global knowledge economy have led to the channelling of much
Higher Education and Research and Development funding into the priority areas of science and
technology. Among other things, this diversion of funding calls into question the future of traditional humanities and creative arts faculties. How these faculties, and the disciplines within them,
might reconfigure themselves for the knowledge economy is, therefore, a question of great importance, although one that as yet has not been adequately answered. This paper explores some of the
reasons for this by looking at how innovation in the knowledge economy is typically theorized. It
takes one policy trajectory informing Australia’s key innovation statement as an example. It argues
that, insofar as the formation of this knowledge economy policy has been informed by a technoeconomic paradigm, it works to preclude many humanities and creative arts disciplines. This paper,
therefore, looks at how an alternative theorization of the knowledge economy might offer a more
robust framework from within which to develop humanities and creative arts Higher Education and
Research policy in the knowledge economy, both in Australia and internationally.
Introduction
The combined forces of globalization and the global economy have exerted pressure
on higher education and research institutions to serve the needs of the emergent
knowledge economy.2 Knowledge economy policy increasingly tends to evaluate the
worth of knowledge along economic lines rather than as a social good.3 Thus, the
academy increasingly situates itself as a supplier of knowledge and knowledge
workers—those capable of converting research and knowledge into economic
* Corresponding author: Centre for Studies in Literacy, Policy and Learning Cultures, University
of South Australia, Holbrooks Road, Underdale SA 5038, Australia. Email: elizabeth.bullen@unisa.edu.au
ISSN 0268–0939 (print)/ISSN 1464–5106 (online)/04/010003–20
© 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/0268093042000182609
4 E. Bullen et al.
commodities. In Australia, this trend has been accompanied by the diversion of
much education and Research and Development (R&D) funding into the priority
areas of science, maths, engineering, and technology. Although the importance of
the humanities and creative arts4 has been acknowledged in policy, there is no
specific mention made of education or research funding for these disciplines in the
key policy statement, Backing Australia’s Ability: An Innovation Action Plan for the
Future (Commonwealth of Australia, 2001). This lack raises questions about the
value of particular categories of knowledge. It also raises questions about the future
of the arts and humanities in the knowledge economy.
How these disciplines are to be accommodated within this emergent economy has
become a dilemma of increasing significance in higher education, both nationally and
internationally. In response, the Australian Research Council (ARC) undertook a
review in 2003 with a view to better understanding research outcomes in the humanities and creative arts, and their economic, social, and cultural benefits. As the ARC
notes, the same measures of research impact used in the sciences are inappropriate
for the humanities and creative arts. In 2002, a research team in the School of Humanities at Griffith University conducted a pilot project to explore the nexus between the
workplace and liberal arts programmes in the academy (Buckridge et al., 2002). They
note the difficulties of quantifying the skills students in these programmes acquire,
especially when contrasted with explicitly vocational academic programmes.
We agree that the techno-economic orientation of current knowledge economy
policy is an impediment for the humanities and creative arts. However, we seek to
open some further lines of inquiry into this dilemma by looking first, not at the
features of creative arts and humanities for which policy might make concessions,
but at the way in which the knowledge economy itself has been conceptualized. As
we will show, even though many of the arguments about the benefits of education
and research in the humanities and creative arts are valid, they are simply not
persuasive in terms of the techno-economic imperatives of current knowledge economy policy.
This paper begins with an analysis of the way the knowledge economy has been
conceptualized in Australian Federal Government policy and shows why the theoretical origins informing one policy trajectory have worked to limit understandings to this
narrow science and technology focus. It explores some of the responses from Australian humanities and creative arts faculties to the new policy imperatives created by the
techno-economic paradigm, before considering how these imperatives might be
reshaped using an alternative paradigm. The techno-economic paradigm informing
knowledge economy policy is only one of many possible frames for theorizing socioeconomic change in these times.5 In order to postulate an alternative, we take the
concepts of disorganized capitalism (Lash & Urry, 1987) and reflexivity (Giddens
1990, 1991, 1994; Beck, 1992a, b; Lash & Urry, 1994) as our starting point. Whilst
drawing attention to some of the limitations of Lash and Urry’s (1994) thesis, we argue
that the notion of various forms of reflexivity offers a more useful theoretical framework for understanding change, and for formulating knowledge economy policy in
general, and humanities and creative arts higher education and research policy in
Creative destruction 5
particular. Further, it provides a theoretical space from which to argue a place for the
humanities and creative arts that might potentially reconcile traditional humanist
values with the new cultural and commercial imperatives of the knowledge economy.
To conclude, we take two examples of innovation in the creative arts in two Australian
universities to show how notions of reflexivity might provide a more compelling basis
from which to secure the future of the humanities and creative arts in the 21st century.
Australia’s innovation policy
In 2001, the Australian Federal Government released Backing Australia’s Ability: An
Innovation Action Plan for the Future. The aim of this policy is to provide effective
support for the ‘three key elements in the innovation process’, which involve:
●
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strengthening our ability to generate ideas and undertake research;
accelerating the commercial application of ideas; and
developing and retaining Australian skills (Commonwealth of Australia, 2001,
p. 14).
The Government intends to achieve these aims via economic, taxation, and education
reform. Its strategy seeks to promote R&D and business and entrepreneurial activity,
with a focus on partnerships between government, education, private sector, and
research institutions. It will provide greater research support via grants, salaries, and
infrastructure; the creation of centres of excellence in information and communication technology (ICT) and biotechnology; funding and tax incentives designed to
encourage R&D in industry and small enterprise; and education spending with a
priority on science, mathematics, and technology. The strategy includes a funding
package worth $2.9 billion.
Backing Australia’s Ability builds on a number of earlier federal government policy
initiatives including Investing for Growth (Commonwealth of Australia, 1997), and the
higher education White Paper, Knowledge and Innovation (Kemp, 1999). It responds
to the Chief Scientist’s report, The Chance to Change (Batterham, 2000), and the
recommendations made in Innovation: Unlocking the Future (Innovation Summit
Implementation Group, 2000). It also responds to what is seen as the imperative
created by an increasingly competitive global environment and the economy that
underpins it:
We are in the midst of a revolution from which a new order is emerging. The solutions of
past decades will not suffice in the new knowledge age. Intangible assets – our human and
intellectual capacity – are outstripping traditional assets – land, labour, and capital – as the
drivers of growth. If we are to take the high road, a road of high growth based on the value
of our intellectual capital, we need to stimulate, nurture, and reward creativity and entrepreneurship (Commonwealth of Australia, 2001, p. 8).
In the view of the government, success in this new knowledge age ‘will depend
predominantly on the innovative capacity of nations, their industries, and their
research and educational structures’ (Commonwealth of Australia, 2001, p. 4). As
Backing Australia’s Ability argues, the intellectual capital that counts in the innovation
6 E. Bullen et al.
process derives from science, mathematics, and information technology and, as a
consequence, much education and research funding targets these priority areas.
The humanities and creative arts are conspicuous by their absence in Australia’s
knowledge economy policy. Indeed, they suffer from funding contraction. The future
of the arts and humanities is at stake, certainly in their traditional form. One way of
thinking about how they might secure their place in the knowledge economy is to look
more carefully at the reasons for their absence from the policy. To do so, we look at
one strand of the policy trajectory leading to Backing Australia’s Ability, focusing on
the theory of economic change outlined in Shaping Australia’s Future (Department of
Industry Science and Resources (ISR), 1999). This innovation framework paper was
prepared for the Department of Industry, Science and Resources (ISR) as background reading for the National Innovation Summit held in February 2000. It was at
this summit that the Innovation Summit Implementation Group (ISIG) was formed
and assigned the task of refining the recommendations of the Summit. Many of the
recommendations the ISIG made in Innovation: Unlocking the Future (2000) were
subsequently taken up in Backing Australia’s Ability. Shaping Australia’s Future offers
what is a fundamentally techno-economic definition of innovation and change with a
focus on science and technology.
The techno-economic paradigm for a knowledge economy
The theory of economic change described in Shaping Australia’s Future draws on the
work of Freeman and Perez (1988). The reference to Freeman and Perez signals the
theory’s origin in the neo-Schumpeterian school of post-Fordism, also known as the
Fifth Kondratiev or the techno-economic paradigm. Nikolai Kondratiev’s work in the
1920s on 50-year long waves of ‘boom’ and ‘bust’ in the development of capitalist
economies formed the basis of economist Joseph Schumpeter’s work in the 1930s. A
focus of Schumpeter’s work is the role of innovative entrepreneurs in giving birth to
a new technical paradigm for future growth (Amin, 1994). This is the process Schumpeter famously describes as ‘creative destruction’.
According to this view, a range of typical social and economic changes occur during
each wave, the particular character of which is determined by the dominant ‘factor’
industry. In neo-Schumpeterian analysis, the fourth Kondratiev or long wave was
Fordist. It was typified by mass production and consumption and underpinned by
electro-mechanical technologies. Microelectronics are the major factor industry of the
fifth Kondratiev, referred to in Shaping Australia’s Future as the ‘fifth wave of technological development’ or ‘the information and communications technology (ICT)
wave’ (ISR, 1999, p. 10). The ‘key “carrier” sectors’ include computers and software,
telecoms, computer integrated manufacturing/new materials, information technology
(IT) services, biotechnology, space/satellite, and environmental technologies (Perez,
1985). The authors of Shaping Australia’s Future are careful to argue, however, that
innovation itself is not ‘predominantly the province of new, “leading edge” sectors
such as IT&T [information technology and telecommunications] and biotechnology’,
but will ‘sustain the competitiveness of more traditional sectors such as agriculture,
Creative destruction 7
mining and transport’ (ISR, 1999, p. 11). They follow Freeman and Perez (1988) in
arguing that ‘These revolutions depend upon clusters of mutually supporting technological innovations being accompanied by social innovations in areas ranging from
organization and management to taxation and employment law’ (ISR, 1999, p. 10).
As Amin (1994, p. 17) explains, it is speculated that the ‘knowledge-intensive’ fifth
Kondratiev will not only involve technological innovation, but innovation in regard
to ‘managerial best practices’ and ‘inter-sectoral and inter-firm relationships’.
Critiques
Theorizations of the knowledge economy which represent technological innovations
as harbingers of epochal socio-economic change have been widely criticized (see for
example, Webster, 1995; May, 2002). The neo-Schumpeterian perspective has been
criticized as being technologically deterministic. It also tends to assume a ‘developmental trajectory’, whereby revolutionary technological innovation brings sharp
increases in industrial productivity and, with it, new principles of production and best
practice. Such approaches, it is argued, tend to stress ‘the independence of technology from social forces’ and focus on the ‘logical development of one innovation to the
next’ (May, 2002, p. 26). As Bimber (1995, p. 84) explains, there is an assumption
that ‘technological developments occur according to some naturally given logic,
which is not culturally or socially determined, and that these developments force
social adaptation and changes’.
These critiques raise several issues in regard to the adoption of this paradigm in
Shaping Australia’s Future. First, by adopting a techno-economic paradigm and,
second, by positioning technology as the catalyst of revolutionary change, the drivers
of the knowledge economy are located outside of society and culture. These are positioned as forces over which we have no control, thus inviting passive accommodation
of technologically-induced change (May, 2002). The sense of inevitability this
assumes is reproduced in Shaping Australia’s Future when it describes the social and
economic changes which occur during each long wave: ‘Just as these changes have
occurred in the past, they are strongly evident in the current “ICT wave”’ (ISR,
1999, p. 10). The changes enumerated do not merely locate the current ICT wave
within a historical trajectory. As indicators, they are not only descriptive, but
prescriptive and potentially self-fulfilling. According to Elam (1994, p. 45), ‘As a
critical stage of advancement is reached, it becomes very difficult for national economies and individual firms to opt out of the new technological regime; they become
“locked-in” to a universal developmental trajectory’. Elam (1994) identifies a further
consequence of the focus on technology. He argues that, within the neo-Schumpeterian perspective,
Tangible but impersonal technologies have always been given precedence over the less
palpable forces shaping economy and society. Even within the techno-economic sphere
itself, the realm of embodied technology has continually dominated over that of disembodied
technology which can now all too easily fall into a catch-all socio-institutional context’
(Elam, 1994, pp. 46–47, emphases in original).
8 E. Bullen et al.
It is not surprising, then, that the policy initiatives in Backing Australia’s Ability tend
to focus on ‘intangible assets’ which will lead to embodied technologies, relating not
only to emergent new technologies, but the primary industries (agriculture and
mining) which have been Australia’s traditional economic mainstays. From this we
may also speculate that understandings of commercial value and profitability remain
constrained by understandings of products as tangible objects. Social initiatives are
largely focused around generating further technological innovation via entrepreneurialism, IT skills, and partnership networks.
Knowledge understood in this context becomes highly circumscribed. Neither is it
surprising, therefore, that the knowledge that matters in a knowledge-based economy
thus theorized is technological knowledge. This tendency is reinforced by the likes of
the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), whose
influential research on the knowledge economy also informs Shaping Australia’s
Future: ‘in the long run, knowledge, especially technological knowledge, is the main
source of economic growth and improvements in the quality of life’ (OECD, 1996,
quoted in ISR, 1999, p. 13). The ultimate test of its worth, however, is its commercial
value. Given that risk and uncertainty surround the economic outcomes of creative
activities (Caves, 2000), so they surround the level of both public and private investment in the arts. This has major implications for arts and humanities in Australian
educational institutions.
New imperatives for arts and humanities
As universities change to meet the demands of these times, new pressures are placed
on the arts and humanities and questions are raised about their role in the knowledge
economy. The techno-economic paradigm for the knowledge economy impacts on
what research is supported or promoted. Traditional arts and humanities faculties
fare poorly according to this new rubric. Here we canvas some of the issues facing
these faculties and some of the arguments marshalled to defend them.
Current knowledge economy policy in Australia works to intensify the already
‘pervasive view of a dichotomy between learning for its own intrinsic pleasure and
learning which is vocationally, commercially, scientifically and technologically
oriented’ (Cass, 2001, online). Within institutions of higher education, learning for
its own sake has become a luxury that increasingly few students can afford, and disciplines in the humanities and creative arts are increasingly unable to provide. These
disciplines are under pressure from funding contractions; higher staff–student ratios
and casualization; the privileging of corporate values over academic values in decision-making; priority areas of research and entrepreneurial imperatives, and more
(see Ruthven, 1998). Scholars are less able to fulfil such traditional notions of the
humanities as the preservation of knowledge ‘for its own sake’ and the recovery of
‘lost’ knowledge. These pursuits are ‘perceived as past-directed’ and ‘interest-driven’,
and are not amenable to the ‘methods-and-outcomes criteria applied to applications
by research-funding bodies’ (Ruthven, 1998, p. 98).
Creative destruction 9
Of course, research and learning in the arts and humanities is not a luxury
(Bigelow, 1998). Some of the benefits of humanities research Bigelow (1998, p. 37)
identifies include:
●
●
●
●
●
●
●
the vital role it plays in intellectual freedom;
the indispensable service it provides through critical analysis;
the provision of a sense of place in history and the world;
its function as a key player in public culture;
the preservation and transmission of traditions from one generation to the next;
the questioning and maintenance of ethical values; and
thinking constructively about what the future may hold.
However, these things are also largely intangible, certainly not technology-driven, and
problematic in terms of producing measurable economic outcomes—and ‘embodied
technologies’ (Elam, 1994). Linked to national benefit, they may indeed contribute
to policymaking, social cohesion and inclusion and provide employer-friendly skills
such as those identified by the Royal Society of Arts as ‘communicating effectively,
teamwork, negotiation, co-operation’ (Bayliss, 1999, p. 15). However, the benefits of
higher education and research in the humanities and creative arts is difficult to
measure quantitatively, and this places pressure on faculties to justify their existence
within the techno-economic understandings of the knowledge economy via the rhetoric of technologization and commercialization, innovation, and hybridization. Foregrounding the imperative to commercialize, Gillies (2001, p. 42) iterates some of the
particular difficulties commercialization poses for the humanities and social
sciences,6 but concludes that these disciplines ‘risk deeper penury and even depiction
as the Luddites of the twenty-first century, unless they can embrace the commercializing spirit’.
Responses from the Australian Academy of the Humanities to these imperatives
vary from the defence of tradition (Macintyre, 2001) and liberal education (Coady,
1998) to full scale renovation of arts and humanities faculties (Cunningham & Hartley, 2001), and the reinvention of academics as ‘trainers’ rather than ‘educational
commentators’ (Gillies, 2001). Those working in the arts and humanities, some
argue, must not underestimate the social and intellectual capital they bring as potential partners with industry, government, and community (Stannage & Gare, 2001).
They need to make governments, industry, and community aware of the vital public
culture function which the humanities and creative arts have always fulfilled (Morris
& McCalman, 1998). Ultimately, arguments veer between exhortations to preserve
the integrity of the humanist disciplines and attempts to reinvent them for the 21st
century—often at the same time. Therein lies part of the problem. In regard to the
key planks of Australian innovation policy, commercialization and technology,
humanists can be but ‘followers of scientists and business people’ (Gillies, 2001,
p. 47), rather than leaders.
It is perhaps for this reason that some of the proposals for rejuvenating the humanities can seem weak, strained, or ambivalent. For instance, the submission which the
Australian Academy of the Humanities (2002) put to the Higher Education Review—
10 E. Bullen et al.
in which it proposed the creation of Research Innovation Centres for the Humanities,
Arts and Social Sciences—is characterized by the rhetoric of the Government’s innovation policy. The concept is based on the science and technology oriented Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs) programme initiated under Backing Australia’s
Ability. According to the submission, the proposed research centres would focus less
on the commercialization of innovation, but would have ‘the capacity to link with
science and technological counterparts’ (2002, p. 1). We ask, is the concept of CRCs
a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution?7 And how should the humanities and creative arts link
with science and technology? How, in the more abstract disciplines, can innovation
in these disciplines according to a techno-economic paradigm do something more
than offer opportunities for the application of digital technologies or commentary on
science and technology-driven research and innovation?
Partnerships between arts and humanities and commerce, industry, community,
and government organizations have the potential to offer more than financial rewards.
They offer opportunities for dissemination of knowledge. However, we need to
unpack some of the arguments here. It may well be true that industry is already recognizing the value of knowledge in the humanities and social sciences, but what does it
mean when the reason a mining company needs the ‘soft sciences’ is ‘to win social
acceptance of their practices’ (Stannage & Gare, 2001, p. 70)? How do the humanities uphold their traditional critical function when cooperative alliances may be about
creating a credible corporate image for an industry partner? Examples such as these
suggest that the arts and humanities sit uncomfortably with the imperatives of a
techno-economic understanding of innovation and socio-economic change in the
new economy.
An alternative paradigm for the knowledge economy
An alternative paradigm for these times needs to be able to accommodate technological and economic change as well as social, political, and cultural change. It
needs to account for changing occupations, production, and management regimes
and markets. To this end, we draw on the inter-related concepts of disorganized
capitalism and reflexive modernization. We see these notions as offering a starting
point from which to develop a more comprehensive paradigm for conceptualizing
current social and economic change. Taking such a perspective makes us better
placed to understand the inter-relationships between the economy and society,
between structure and agency. In terms of the themes of this paper, we look at the
possibilities an alternative paradigm holds for resolving somewhat the fault-lines that
currently exist between applied and pure research, education and training, the
cognitive and the aesthetic. Thus, we look at how it might resolve the polarization of
science and technology and the art and humanities that informs knowledge economy policy.
Disorganized capitalism (Lash & Urry, 1994) refers to capitalism typified by fragmented and specialized production which takes place on an international scale. It has
certain resonances with the techno-economic paradigm insofar as new technologies
Creative destruction 11
are regarded as a catalyst for economic growth and altered forms of production and
labour relations. Disorganized capitalism is likewise post-Fordist and post-industrial.
At the same time, however, the centrality of information technologies is understood
as an outcome not simply of innovation and entrepreneurialism, but of the decline of
trust in traditional social structures and institutions—what Giddens (1994) calls posttraditional society. Information technology, specifically Information and Communication Structures (ICSs), provides the new structural basis for disorganized capitalism, knowledge-intensive production, and, crucially, a growing reflexivity. Thus,
whereas technology becomes a juggernaut of economic change under the technoeconomic paradigm, reflexivity under disorganized capitalism links change with
agency rather than what Lash and Urry understand as structure alone.
ICSs make possible the flow and accumulation of signs, of which there are two
types: post-industrial or informational signs, which are primarily cognitive in content,
and post-modern or cultural signs, which are primarily aesthetic in content. Lash and
Urry (1994, p. 7) argue that the structured flows of information via ICSs—the economies of signs and spaces—‘are the basis of cognitive reflexivity’, while the ‘structured
flow and accumulation of images … are the condition of burgeoning aesthetic reflexivity’. Their formulation of reflexivity places the emphasis on the content rather than
the coding of information, on consumption as well as production, agents as well as
structures, the social as well as the economic, aesthetic as well as cognitive and, thus,
the arts and humanities as well as sciences and technologies. It focuses on the ‘causes
and consequences of a subjectivity engaged in a process of “reflexive modernization”’
(Lash & Urry, 1994, p. 3).
In addition to the forms and processes theorized by Lash and Urry, reflexivity and
reflexive modernization have also been theorized by Beck (1992a, b; 1994) and
Giddens (1990, 1991, 1994). All three permutations of reflexivity involve agency and
judgement, but with differing emphases. As Beck (1994) describes it, reflexivity is a
consequence of a risk society created by techno-economic progress, techno-scientific
instrumentality and commodification, by changing formations of class, family, occupations, and, more recently, global terrorism (Beck, 2002). Risk society supersedes
industrial society and is reflexive in that it involves a confrontation with those risks that
cannot be assimilated by an industrial paradigm (Beck, 1994, p. 6). Combined with
greater access to knowledge, it promotes a sub-politics which shapes society ‘from
below’ (Beck, 1994, p. 23).
Gidden’s self-reflexive project is also a product of risk heightened by globalization
and the ‘evacuation, the disinterring and problematizing of tradition’ (Giddens, 1994,
p. 57, emphasis in original). In the absence of the monitoring function of such structures, the self becomes self-monitoring and self-interpreting, and knowledge is
subject to constant revision. Giddens’ (1991) attention centres on the individual
‘reflexive biography’. Self-reflexivity is more inward looking than Beck’s notion and
tends towards the reproduction of social structures rather than social change.
Giddens (1991, p. 149) links this phenomenon with the ‘accelerating processes of
surveillance’ and reflexivity, which, he says, provide the conditions under which
‘social reproduction becomes self-mobilizing’.
12 E. Bullen et al.
It is Lash’s and Urry’s contention that Giddens and Beck focus too much on the
cognitive dimensions of reflexivity at the expense of the aesthetic, but it is also the case
that aesthetic reflexivity shares features with both. Aesthetic artefacts are the objects
of taste and style through which individual and other identity is expressed. In this
regard, aesthetic reflexivity shares features of Giddens’ self-reflexive project. It potentially partakes of the social and political critical function of Beck’s reflexive modernization. If techno-scientific progress has created a risk society, the global culture
industries have created a consumer society and, likewise, contribute to reflexive
modernization. Aesthetic expert systems (film, television, poetry, travel, and painting) mediate in the reflexive regulation of everyday life just as do Giddens’ social
scientific knowledge and technologies of self-therapy and Beck’s lay knowledge in
regard to science and the environment.
We suggest that disorganized capitalism and these three dimensions of reflexivity
provide a better paradigm for understanding these times. They offer the possibility of
a more inclusive criterion for evaluating what knowledge matters not simply for a
knowledge economy, but for a knowledge society. Because they go further than the
science-oriented techno-economic paradigm currently informing Australian innovation policy to include the aesthetic, they provide a better basis for policy development.
In the following sections, we explore two ways in which the principles of disorganized
capitalism and reflexivity might be applied to the issue of how arts and humanities
education might be better accommodated by policy, and how these disciplines might
respond to the challenges of the knowledge economy and society.
Creative industries and universities
The cultures industries are undergoing unprecedented growth in the global economy.
This is a trend to which the Blair Labour government responded with the formation
of its Creative Industries Unit and the subsequent publication of the Creative Industries Mapping Document (Department for Culture Media and Sport, 1998, 2001).
These publications document the significant contribution to the knowledge economy
of creative industries including publishing, film and television, advertising, radio and
music, visual and performing arts, software, architecture, and fashion. The notion of
aesthetic reflexivity provides a theoretical account of this growth area and the role
culture industries might play in the knowledge economy. Had it informed the conception of the Australian Federal Government innovation statement, the arts and
humanities might not have been overlooked in policy.
The Queensland University of Technology, however, has responded with the
development of its Creative Industries Faculty and Research Centre (CIRAC) and,
with the support of the Queensland Government, a Creative Industries Precinct. For
Director of CIRAC, Stuart Cunningham, and Dean of Faculty, John Hartley, the
imperatives of the knowledge economy have provided the catalyst for much needed
change in the arts and humanities. The answer to their own rhetorical question,
‘What are the arts and humanities for?’ is that they are ‘for the analysis of code and
content in the new economy’ (Cunningham & Hartley, 2001, p. 1).
Creative destruction 13
The creative industries have the potential to revive and modernize the creative arts
and humanities. At QUT, this means study options including Acting/Technical
Production, Communication Design, Creative Writing and Cultural Studies, Dance,
Fashion, Film and Television, Journalism, Media Communication, Music and
Sound, Theatre Studies, and Visual Arts. These programmes will equip graduates for
employment in Australia’s leisure, entertainment, cultural, and creative sectors. In so
doing, QUT is creating not so much knowledge workers but, we suggest, the ‘new
cultural intermediaries’ (Bourdieu, 1984) of the knowledge economy, those involved
in the production, marketing, and dissemination of symbolic goods (Featherstone,
1991, p. 19).
The QUT initiative is significant in its capacity to respond to the techno-economic
imperatives of knowledge economy policy and to the demand for ‘graduates with
creative talent who are trained in content-provision for the new technologies’
(Creative Industries, online). At the same time, it is critical of the way policy continues to perpetuate the opposition between science and arts, industrial innovation, and
individual creativity. It is Cunningham and Hartley’s (2001, p. 7) contention that the
concept of creative industries ‘delivers a fresh angle on the old dualisms. Creative
industries are an integral part of the new economy, not only a way to understand and
manage it’. In addition, they argue that not only do the creative industries ‘assist us
to think anew about cultural democracy and economic development, they also allow
us to think about how universities might modernize their curriculum’ (Cunningham
& Hartley, 2001, p. 1).
According to Cunningham and Hartley (2001, p. 2), the benefits are more than
economic:
By bringing the arts into direct contact with large-scale industries such as media entertainment, it allows us to get away from the elite/mass, art/entertainment, sponsored/commercial, high/trivial distinctions that bedevil thinking about creativity, not least in the old
humanities and social sciences.
At stake in these other old dualisms is the idea of civic humanism, and the assumption
that if it inheres in the fine arts, public culture, and the academy, it is perforce absent
in the applied arts, popular culture, and commerce. This is a debate far older than the
knowledge economy, but one which Cunningham and Hartley use to argue the need
to reconceptualize the humanities and creative arts. ‘Creativity’, they argue, ‘needs to
be reconceptualised in line with the realities of contemporary commercial democracies’, thus understanding art as ‘something intrinsic, not opposed to the productive
capacities of contemporary global, mediated, technology-supported economy’
(Cunningham & Hartley, 2001, p. 3). However, in making this case, the sub-text
implies that ‘acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the
world, and thus with the history of the human spirit’ (Arnold, 1873 [1970], p. 9) is
somehow less than democratic (see also Buckingham & Jones, 2001).
In training the next generation of cultural intermediaries, it is arguable that QUT can
reconcile some of the dichotomies itemized above. These graduates’ work will fulfil the
demand for symbolic goods, and, thus, the demand for ‘cultural specialists and intermediaries who have the capacity to ransack various traditions and cultures in order to
14 E. Bullen et al.
produce new symbolic goods, and in addition provide the necessary interpretations on
their use’ (Featherstone, 1991, p. 19). Notwithstanding the provocative use of the
word ‘ransack’, the notion of the cultural intermediary thus construed can potentially
bring together tradition and innovation, theory and practice, critique and commerce.
At the same time, however, we note McRobbie’s (2002) scepticism about reflexivity
in regard to these industries. She points to the way in which culture industries, following the neo-liberal model, privilege entrepreneurialism, individualization, and reliance
on commercial sponsorship at the expense of workplace democracy, equal opportunity,
and so forth. This is in part a consequence of the way in which much creative industries
work is disembedded in time and space from the traditional workplace. Drawing on
Bauman (1999), she suggests that reflexivity as self-surveillance (rather than reflexivity
as social critique) occurs because this disembedding has made the structures of social
injustice and inequality increasingly opaque. This opacity, McRobbie (2002, p. 522)
suggests, serves the interests of ‘the new capitalism’ well, reducing reflexivity to ‘a form
of self disciplining where subjects of the new enterprise culture are increasingly called
upon to inspect themselves and their practices’. If this is the case, ‘then reflexivity marks
the space of self-responsibility, self blame’ and it is ‘a de-politicizing, de-socializing
mechanism’ (McRobbie, 2002, p. 522) that serves the interests of power.
We do not suggest that the commercial and vocational orientation of the creative
industries is inevitably problematic—work in the arts and humanities has long existed
‘within larger psycho-political-economic-cultural frameworks’ (Wilson, 2002, p. 6).
What we do suggest is that, insofar as the creative industries project responds to the
current paradigm for the knowledge economy, the knowledge that counts becomes
highly circumscribed. Where do the traditional and new humanities disciplines such
as languages, literary studies, classical studies, gender studies, Australian Studies,
mediaeval studies, philosophy, and cultural studies, for example, fit? How are critical
and disciplinary values to be reconciled with market values, the notion of the public
intellectual with the entrepreneur, intellectual freedom with intellectual property, the
past with the future, tradition with innovation? What will be the long-term effects of
subsuming the traditional disciplines within programmes which are more transparently compatible with the aims, priorities, and rhetoric of knowledge economy
policy?8 To embed disciplinary knowledge is to risk obscuring the critical tools and
critical heritage of the individual disciplines. It is to make those disciplinary resources
‘invisible’ and, therefore, to contribute to the ‘opacity’ of the mechanisms of social
structures to which McRobbie (2002) draws our attention. Bringing the humanities
and creative arts education and research into the 21st century may well involve a
process of ‘creative destruction’, but it need not be at the cost of the breadth and
depth of disciplinary knowledge.
Cognitive and aesthetic reflexivity: a symbiosis
Higher education and research in the creative industries offer one means of reviving
what some see as moribund arts and humanities faculties. The creative industries
offer a vibrant, future-oriented, relevant, and, therefore, compelling alternative to
Creative destruction 15
many of the arguments marshalled in defence of traditional arts and humanities faculties. We argue, however, that the capacity of the creative industries to respond to the
push towards the use of new technologies, commercialization, and collaborative partnerships must be approached with caution lest these become the governing imperatives for humanities education and research policy development. The concept of
aesthetic reflexivity accommodates these imperatives, but a notion of the creative
industries thus theorized is able to do much more than one understood in terms of
the techno-economic paradigm.
Here we are thinking of preserving those benefits of humanities research and education (Bigelow, 1998), itemized above, which are concerned with critical understandings of cultural and symbolic objects and processes. In order for aesthetic reflexivity
to serve such a purpose, we believe it is necessary to resolve tensions which exist in
Lash and Urry’s theorization, in particular its relation to consumer capitalism. For the
production and consumption of cultural objects and images can, it seems, as easily
provide the conditions, on the one hand, ‘for genuine aesthetic reflexivity, for
aesthetic-expressive individualization. And, on the other hand, it can create not individualization of reflexive subjects, but individuation, in the sense of the atomization
of normalized, “niche-marketed” consumers’ (Lash & Urry, 1994, p. 113). While
Lash and Urry insist on the moral and critical dimension of aesthetic reflexivity, we
suggest that a more critical, emancipatory, and agential form of aesthetic reflexivity
requires a synthesis of the cognitive and aesthetic, the self-reflexive project of
Giddens, and the social and politically-oriented reflexivity theorized by Beck. It needs
to hybridize the cognitive and aesthetic, the critical and affective.
Reflexive action is mediated by abstract systems. Popular culture increasingly
provides those ‘universals’ and ‘particulars’ through which people classify and judge.
Increasingly, we understand the output of the global culture industries as popular
pedagogy, corporate cultural pedagogy, and the corporate curriculum (see, for example, Kenway & Bullen, 2001), and this gives us pause. When considering the role of
cultural intermediaries in the global culture industries, we might well take heed of the
view that modernization ‘brought about by decision-making institutions dominated
by techno-scientific elites is not reflexive’ (Lash & Urry, 1994, p. 35). Beck, for
instance, identifies an ‘alliance between science and capital’ which has led to the
erasure of ‘the boundary between laboratory and society’ in the risk society, and a
technological monopoly that becomes a ‘monopoly on concealed social change’ (Beck
1992a, p. 156; 1992b, pp. 108–109). In Beck’s view, it is the critique of the technoscientific elites which produces true reflexive modernization.
The global culture industries are also instruments of social change, but we agree
with Buckingham and Jones (2001, p. 12) when they express doubt as to ‘whether the
market can provide genuinely emancipatory possibilities, or indeed provide equality
for all’, whether its alliance be with cultural or scientific enterprises. Further, as we
argue elsewhere, knowledge economy education policy encourages the formation of
the entrepreneurial subject rather than a reflexive subject, and the commodification
rather than the free flow of cultural and aesthetic knowledge, ideas and artefacts in
the public realm (Robb et al., 2003).
16 E. Bullen et al.
In order for the reflexive production and consumption of aesthetic goods and
concepts to be critical, they must necessarily be cognitive as well as aesthetic and,
therefore, able to sensitize one to the meanings of signs and images rather than flattening or depleting them of meaning. Such reflexivity sensitizes one not only to one’s
own place in the world, but also the place of others. In broad terms, critical reflexivity in the humanities and creative arts has been conventionally achieved through
either aesthetic or cognitive means. Learning in the applied arts (painting, for example) emphasizes aesthetic reflexivity, the thinking through issues within an aesthetic
tradition and production of cultural and aesthetic objects. Learning in the nonapplied arts and humanities (Literary Studies, for example) has been more a matter
of cognitive reflexivity. It has involved thinking through a range of issues evoked or
mediated by cultural and aesthetic objects and processes. It is arguable that this has
traditionally been done within a rational-philosophical tradition. The orientation has
been towards reflexive consumption. The recent growth of creative writing courses in
schools of English in Australia can be understood as incorporating aesthetic reflexivity in ways that respond to the emphasis on reflexive production in knowledge economy policy. It has been accompanied by a reduction in literary studies programmes
available and, thus, occurred at the expense of the cognitive tradition. We suggest
that the way forward for the humanities and creative arts is to combine these forms of
reflexivity.
To demonstrate the kind of critical or cognitive–aesthetic reflexivity we envisage,
we take the example of SymbioticA and its Tissue Culture and Art (TC&A) Project,
an initiative in which aesthetic objects provide the means for critique in ways which
engage with some of the pressing issues of these times. SymbioticA operates within
the Department of Anatomy and Human Biology at the University of Western
Australia. However, this is not a science research programme—although it involves
tissue engineering—nor is it conducted by scientists. SymbioticA is an art studio, not
a laboratory. Initiated in 1996 by Oron Catts, the TC&A Project ‘explore[s] questions arising from the use of living tissue to create/grow semi-living objects/sculptures
and to research the technologies involved in such a task’ (Catts & Zurr, 2002, p. 365).
In so doing, it also calls into question new knowledge and raises debate about the
direction of biotechnology.
Intentionally contentious and culturally and ethically ambiguous, the ambivalence
that tissue culture art provokes in the viewer is designed to draw attention to ‘our lack
of cultural understanding in dealing with new knowledge and control over nature’
(Catts & Zurr, 2002, p. 370). It is Catts’ (2002, online) view that ‘As biological
research departments in universities are encouraged by governments to partner with
“industry” and “defence”, the need for research into non-utilitarian purposes become
urgent’. For, as Catts (2002, online) explains:
Developments in technology are actualized possibilities, not necessarily the only ways
knowledge can be utilised … The exploration of contestable possibilities is important to
the understanding of the ways technology may develop. By fostering artistic critical
engagements with biological research, SymbioticA provides a ‘greenhouse’ for developing
alternatives to the commercial mainstream.
Creative destruction 17
In producing and exhibiting its tissue culture sculptures, the artists working in
SymbioticA are not just cultural intermediaries, but critical cultural intermediaries.
SymbioticA deliberately promotes reflexivity and critique, not only the sort of technoscientific critique outlined by Beck, but critique of the aesthetic process which transcends the sort of reflexivity or self-surveillance described by McRobbie (2002)
above. For instance, the TC&A project prompted those involved to consider the
‘aesthetics of care’. What, for instance, are the ethical obligations in regard to the care
of semi-living sculptures? Paradoxically, looking for ways to overcome the limitations
of the bioreactors in which the sculptures are both grown and exhibited has led to
research and innovation which may ultimately have commercial applications in the
knowledge economy.
In one sense, SymbioticA can be understood as simply a continuation of aesthetic
reflexivity, in other words, working on the issues surrounding biotechnology in a way
that draws on an aesthetic tradition. However, it is doing something important in
addition to this. In cultivating living tissue, the project deploys basic and applied
research from a scientific discipline. The project enacts the disciplinary procedures of
scientific knowledge that are highly valued within knowledge economy discourse. Yet,
at the same time, SymbioticA enacts a process—aesthetic reflexivity—which is devalued in knowledge economy discourse. SymbioticA can be thought of as an hybrid
knowledge practice that brings together ‘incommensurate’ knowledge disciplines and
knowledge values. By demonstrating that these different knowledges are commensurate, SymbioticA deconstructs the differences that current knowledge economy policies see as inevitable and normal, and which marginalize the humanities and creative
arts. By doing this deconstructive work, SymbioticA suggests one way forward for the
humanities and creative arts. The particular deconstructive process at work here
shows how the humanities and creative arts might work with scientific (or technical)
knowledge methodologies as well as on them. At the same time, and as importantly,
it also shows how science and technology might work with humanities and creative
arts knowledge methodologies as the way towards authentic and critical reflexive
modernization in the knowledge economy.
Conclusion
Globalization and the rise of knowledge economy policy are exerting immense pressure
on higher education institutions in general, and the disciplines of the humanities and
creative arts in particular. Change is inevitable. However, we argue the need to think
more carefully about the modernization of faculties, programmes, and research. The
techno-economic paradigm offers one version of social and economic change, but, as
we have argued, there are alternative theorizations. A different theorization does not
alter the material conditions to which we are currently subject, but it does provide
opportunities for envisaging different ways of responding to these conditions, and so
a different future. Disorganized capitalism and reflexive modernization offer one such
alternative, an alternative which, we suggest, allows more room to respond to, as well
as describe, change in ways that are far less prescriptive than the techno-economic
18 E. Bullen et al.
paradigm. As a theoretical frame within which to modernize the arts and humanities,
it points to the possibilities of change which is reflexive, not reflex.
Here, we have offered examples of two possible applications of an alternative
theory, both of which show how those working in the creative arts and humanities
might respond to and shape the knowledge economy by situating themselves as critical cultural intermediaries. Although we acknowledge that both examples are drawn
from the creative or applied arts, we believe that a notion of reflexive modernization
which incorporates cognitive–aesthetic reflexivity offers a paradigm with the potential
to argue a place in the academy and, indeed, the knowledge economy, for other traditional humanities disciplines.
Notes
1. This article draws on the Australian Research Council project, Knowledge/economy/society: a sociological study of an education policy discourse in Australia in globalising circumstances, being conducted
by Jane Kenway, Elizabeth Bullen and Simon Robb. This 3-year project looks at how understandings of the knowledge economy and knowledge society inform current education policy
and, in turn, how this policy translates into educational practice. The methodology includes
policy analysis, interviews with policy makers in government, and supranational organizations.
It also includes cameo studies of innovative educational practice, two of which we draw on here.
2. Here, we use the term knowledge economy, but acknowledge the use of variants including the
new economy, knowledge society, information economy/society, and others.
3. For an overview of the impact of globalization and knowledge economy policy on education
systems, see Kenway et al. (2003).
4. The arts and humanities encompass a raft of disciplines and we are aware of the inability of this
paper to respond to the specificity of each. We are, indeed, aware of the difficulties of speaking
of the performing, applied, and media arts in the same breath as we do Classical Greek Studies
or English Studies. For the purposes of this paper, we consider humanities and creative arts disciplines as being concerned with cultural knowledge and artefacts, and the creative and conceptual
work entailed in their production and consumption/reception.
5. The knowledge economy can be theorized in a number of ways and in terms of a variety of theories of socioeconomic change. Post-Fordist approaches, for example, include the technoeconomic strands—the neo-Schumpeterian (Freeman & Perez, 1988) and regulation school
(Aglietta, 1979; Lipietz, 1986; Boyer, 1990)—as well as flexible specialization (Piore & Sabel,
1984) and disorganized capitalism/new times (Lash & Urry, 1987) strands. Other alternative
theorizations include post-industrialism (Bell, 1973), flexible accumulation (Harvey, 1989), and
network society (Castells, 1989).
6. According to Gillies (2001, pp. 41–42), commercialization ‘counters the principle of the free
dissemination of ideas which has traditionally resided at the heart of fundamental, publicly
funded research’ and raises ‘ethical questions about the transfer’ of intellectual property.
Further, it undermines ‘the credibility of public-good research, because of a suspicion that its
finding may not have emerged “without fear of favour”’ or to accommodate the interests of
personal and/or institutional acquisition of wealth.
7. For instance, according to humanist convention, authorship has tended to be individual in
humanities disciplines (Morris & McCalman, 1998, p. 2). In spite of increased inter-disciplinarity, over 90% of humanities research publications are single-authored (Australian Academy of
the Humanities, 1998a, p. 13).
8. Some of these issues are taken up and explored in more depth in the edited collection, Arts,
Humanities and the Knowledge Economy (Kenway et al., 2004).
Creative destruction 19
Notes on Contributors
Jane Kenway is Dean of Research in the Division of Education, Arts and Social
Sciences and Professor of Education, Centre for Studies in Literacy, Policy and
Learning Cultures, University of South Australia. She is author of seven books
and has published widely in edited collections and journals. She is currently
working on two Australian Research Council funded projects, one exploring
knowledge economy discourse and the other, economically marginalized young
women. Jane is Managing Editor of The Australian Educational Researcher (AER)
and on the editorial board of numerous international journals.
Elizabeth Bullen is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Studies in Literacy, Policy and
Learning Cultures, University of South Australia. She has contributed chapters
to edited editions and published on various aspects of gender and education
policy in international journals and is co-author with Jane Kenway of Consuming
Children: Education–Entertainment–Advertising (Open University Press, 2001).
Her most recent research focuses on knowledge economy policy and feminist
appropriations of Bourdieu.
Simon Robb is currently a Research Fellow in the Centre for Studies in Literacy,
Policy and Learning Cultures at the University of South Australia. His research
background is in English, and he completed his PhD thesis in 2001 at the
University of Adelaide. The thesis, Fictocritical Sentences, investigated postmodern representations of trauma events. Simon has published articles on electronic writing for the Electronic Writing Research Ensemble and co-written and
produced radio features for ABC Radio National. He has tutored in postmodernism at Adelaide University and Communication and the Media at
University of South Australia.
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