Australia has traditionally lacked a strong ‘rights’ culture and this lack is noticeable in an ‘age of terror’. The Australian Constitution contains no guarantee of freedom of religion or freedom of conscience. Indeed, it contains very few provisions dealing with rights. Many of those in political and media authority--especially conservatives associated with the Murdoch Press--are deeply opposed to a Bill of Rights.
Last night John Howard, the former Prime Minister argued in the 2009 Menzies Lecture at the University of Western Australia that a Bill of Rights would lead to unelected judges making decisions that should only be made by parliaments. Howard understands his task to be one of:
preventing Australia going down the misguided path of embracing a Bill of Rights in the totally false belief that such action would expand our individual liberties...Tonight we can be certain of one thing, however. If Menzies were still with us he would most assuredly be passionately opposed to a Bill of Rights for Australia. It would have been against the instinct of every bone in his common law body. Moreover, it would impinge on his deep reverence for parliament,...Our Party’s founder also wrote, “…that the best guarantee of human rights in the future is to be found in our system of responsible government, where Ministers sit in Parliament, can be questioned, and give answers, and the government itself may be turned out if parliament feels that it is doing things which violate the proper rights of individuals.”
contrary to its very description, it reduces the rights of citizens to determine matters over which they should continue to exercise control. It does this by transferring decision making authority to unelected judges, accountable to no one except in the barest theoretical sense. I had always thought that a member of parliament was a decision maker and not a buck-passer. I have always held to the classical view that the public elects members of parliament who pass laws, hopefully in the public interest, and those laws are in turn interpreted and enforced by the courts. That sentiment is at the heart of my objection to a Bill of Rights.
There is no argument in Howard's passage to provide reasons for his claim that a Bill of Rights reduces the rights of citizens to determine matters over which they should continue to exercise control.
The argument he brings forward is that a Bill of Rights will weaken the liberal democratic process and transfer power to unelected judges. Rights adjudication would involve judges in deciding issues which are political in character, thereby eroding parliamentary sovereignty and politicising judges. Howard goes to say that:
A Bill of Rights would further diminish the prestige of parliament; it would politicise the appointment of judges; it would increase the volume of litigation and it would not increase the rights and protections now available to Australian citizens In the Australian context the adoption of a Charter or Bill of rights would represent the final triumph of elitism in Australian politics – the notion that typical citizens, elected by ordinary Australians, cannot be trusted to resolve great issues of public policy, and that the really important decisions should be taken out of their hands and given to judges who, after all, have a superior capacity to determine these matters.
At a Bill of Rights Conference in Canberra August 2009) entitled Cultural and Religious Freedom under a Bill of Rights Sir Anthony Mason argued that:
There is a popular perception that politicians are disconnected from the concerns of the people, that politics is all about gaining and maintaining power at all costs and that the political process is exploited by powerful lobby groups and stakeholders in their own interests. In addition, there is perceived to be an unhealthy relationship between the media and politics, a relationship in which politicians vie with each other for media attention and the media sensationalises and trivialises politics. In such a climate, there is little or no incentive for politicians to take action to protect the disadvantaged minority or the individual, unless to do so offers the prospect of political mileage. Unfortunately, very often that may be no more than a remote prospect.
One of the most entrenched ideas in Australian politics is that the good is economic growth and prosperity, and that this is the only good. The end of economic growth in the "regime" of liberal democracy is prosperity, and though economists and politicians talk in terms of happiness and well being, they generally reduce this to prosperity. As this position is monist not pluralist, so we have the rejection of sustainability and quality of life as an end of public policy; even though we have been getting prosperous by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows. What is constantly reasserted in the face of global warming is growth, growth, growth.
Paul Gilding, in his Eco Watch blog at href="http://www.businessspectator.com.au/">Business Spectator, had raised the issue in his The End of Economic Growth. post in March. He called it “The Great Disruption” in which he argued that the global economy had hit its ecological and resource limits so it can grow no more, triggering the global ecological and economic crisis now unfolding as the current system breaks down.
It was picked up by Thomas Friedman in his The Inflection Is Near? in the New York Times in March. Friedman asks:
What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...We can’t do this anymore.
It is is true that whilst writers in the Aristotelian tradition believed that politics has to be based on a fundamental conception of the good as an objective ultimate end for human beings, political theorists in early and late modernity have tried to base politics on anything but a shared idea of the good. The initial reason for this change was the fear of Hobbes that claiming the existence of one objective end for human life is too likely to lead to serious conflicts like the Wars of Religion.The Enlightenment was likewise largely a reaction against the Aristotelian tradition. As the Aristotle's Politics Study Guide says:
All liberal political theories, no matter how far-ranging in specific tenets and prescriptions, hold in common one fundamental premise: the freedom and equality of human beings...liberal political theory claims the ability to separate the virtues necessary for politics from an agreement on the foundations of those virtues. To effect this separation, liberals in the end must rely on a utilitarian conception of virtue based on enlightened self-interest, arguing that unless people act with at least a minimal amount of virtue, the society will collapse and all will be worse off.
I will be on one of the panels of The Future of Journalism: Blueprint for Progress Forum held at ABC Studios 24 August 2009, Adelaide. My talk notes for the forum are below.They are more or less some ideas that function as reference points for a free ranging discussion.
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There is common agreement that the rapid development of digital technology means that our mediascape will be almost unrecognizable in the near future. This commonness is what rhetoricians call a common place (common and community) that establishes a particular path for an argument about the future of journalism.
Newspapers have been hit by a ‘perfect storm’ of threats surrounding their business models, including: declining print circulation (particularly among young people); the shift of classified advertising to the Internet; the rise of low-cost alternative online news outlets; the rise of citizen journalism, blogging and self-publishing; and fundamental shifts in user behaviour toward accessing news content. In countries such as the United States and Britain, this has led to leading newspapers either going bankrupt or online-only, and threatens to bring down even flagship publications such as the New York Times.
However, there is limited evidence in Australia of a fundamental shift away from mass media such as television and radio. Rather, what appears to have primarily occurred is a substitution effect between print media (newspapers and magazines) and the Internet. Secondly, the decline in newspaper circulation has not been as sharp in Australia as in the United States. Crikey, On Line Opinion and New Matilda attract only about 5-10% of the readership of online sites such as theaustralian.com.au
Let’s be clear that the core problem is that advertisers--not readers--are deserting newspapers. And it is advertisers, not readers, who have always paid the expensive cost of newspaper journalism.
‘blue print for progress’
Before I make an argument some philosophical points need to be made about the terms ‘blueprints’ ,‘progress’ and ‘media’ used in the title of the forum---The Future of Journalism: Blueprint for Progress. These presuppose a certain mode of knowledge/power that underpins traditional journalism.
‘blueprint’. The process of change in the mediascape is such that there can be no blueprint. We just don’t know with certainty. Those who say they have one do so on the basis of ignorance and are more than likely to be engaged in deception than enlightenment. How many economists had any sense of the global financial crisis or the extent of its fallout? Their blueprint consisted of them all endlessly spinning about the eternal mining boom that would deliver utopia. Instead of ‘blue print’ we should use ‘threshold’ with a map. We stand on a threshold and we can make educated guesses.
"progress" is two edged not a linear path to the future akin to a yellow brick road. Some things will improve or develop whilst others will deteriorate or die. Consider the effects of the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme and the emergence of irrigated agriculture on the ecology of the Murray-Darling river system. Or, if that is not persuasive, consider the powering of capitalism’s growth engine with cheap black and brown coal. This enabled Australia to have a competitive advantage. It has given rise to a global heating now weaving a swathe of destruction through irrigated agriculture whilst drying out our landscape.
This implies a regime of knowledge that is universal, knowledge of truth is rock solid certain, accurate knowledge is an instrument for control and mastery. The role of the intellectual/journalist is privileged as a legislator articulating universal and necessary truths. Its a form of knowledge/power that underpins the traditional ‘gatekeeping’ models of journalism, where the process of news gathering is highly centralized and controlled, authority is exclusively held by credentialed professional journalists, and public input is restricted to token measures such as the Letters to the Editor page,
We have shift from the ‘high modernist’ era of crusading investigative journalism towards the 24-hour news cycle, and a growing public distrust of journalists increasingly being seen as the conduits for material provided to them by well-funded special interests (political, business etc.).
Let’s pick up on the term ‘threshold.’ The economics is that we are experiencing a transitional phase: the process of creative destruction in which old industries die and new ones emerge due to long wave structural change in media technologies. This creative destruction is the way that capitalism works and that means losers and winners in a changing mediascape.
We do have a bit of a map to guide us in this new terrain of digital connectivity emerging from the process of creative destruction. This enables us to make “educated guesses" about past and future processes based on our present knowledge about the way the world works.
And my argument on this point? We need to loosen up the way we habitually think about the media and journalism if we are to get a handle of the emerging multiplicities of the new media and our mutating digital connectivities. It is a history of the present”, grasping the present in its contingency, unsettling it from its prejudices and exploding their hold on reality, to understand life in its becoming.
An example of this is the professional ideology of journalists themselves. The interest of the profession is in preserving an insider/outsider distinction between journalists and the rest of society, not only as a means of safeguarding jobs and professional standing, but also because journalists fear the consequences of the opening up of information circulation to the wider public.
The professional ideology of journalism as it developed over the 20th century, where the expectation was that a small, self-defined professional cadre of journalists produced news according to established industrial techniques, on behalf of a mass public bumps up against the emerging participatory media culture.
educated guesses
What then are my educated guesses about past and future processes in the mediascape? They are:
(1)What is passing is the old industrial or Fordist order with its mass production and mass audiences to a more flexible economy based more upon services than manufacturing. In this process a more diversified, multiple and niche based media is becoming.
(2) What we know from the experience of the 1980s is that major structural change is always painful in that people will lose their jobs as the old industries contract whilst the jobs in the new industries expand. Traditional newspapers are old industries.
(3) Most newspapers aren’t watchdogs, and most of the rest don’t spend an inordinate amount of time being watchdogs. Most papers are instead lapdogs--the Most newspapers in the U.S. aren’t watchdogs, and most of the rest don’t spend an inordinate amount of time being watchdogs. Most papers are instead lapdogs--the arts and entertainment section is mostly promotional offering pages of fluff.
(4) Difference is crucial in the provision of media content buttressed by intellectual property rights a ‘media mix’, a term used to describe the creation of a series of connections between and across media texts: a photojournalist story about say the Snowtown murders is turned into a comic serialization then into an anime television series, then a live action film, a video game and a novel, which is read by a journalist who uses as context for story on a serial killer. Suddenly, we are talking about the culture industries.
(5) the assemblages or multiplicity of new media will be diversified and indeterminate as they constantly construct and dismantle themselves, break down and transform into something else.
(6) one of these transformations is that the binary divide between active, communication media and passive, silent, fixed subjects is being broken down with user generated content. As a blogger I consume the media but I also generate content.
(7) many of these media assemblages are a line of flight from the digital price wall erected by the extension of intellectual property right, will locate themselves in the public domain, and so develop the commons.
(8) these media assemblages will break down the traditional bifurcation of amateur versus professional; create multiple understandings of journalism as writing and image making; reconnect more with an active and critical audience turn more to the local and everyday life. Flickr gives us picture of what this might look like.
(9)within this multiplicity the knowledge workers become more interpreters of cultural meanings, political and historical events and social change.
(10) some argue that what is at stake in the media city is not the flow of information, which appears and disappears instantaneously, but the nostalgia and memory of traces of the past that will continue to remain in the urban space. Flickr suggests that the fleeting information will be used by media workers as a building block of a social narrative that forms part of an ongoing conversation in the public domain.
My argument about the media past is that vast swaths of a typical Australian daily is filled with news whose primary source is a press release of one form or another, from entities governmental, political, or corporate. The web mercilessly exposes the emptiness of the infotainment content of most papers, and it indicates that newspapers don’t have anything to sell that approximates the lost value of their monopoly.
With a personalized Google home page, to cite just one example, I can put together a much better window—one that comprises headlines, a clock, weather, recent postings on any blogs that interest me, and hundreds of other things—in about 15 minutes.
freelance, niche content and audience
I haven’t said much specifically about the future of journalism in this. It is just another form of writing isn’t it. It has historically been marked by certain professional conventions, ethos and codes and myths about the fourth estate as watchdog for liberal democracy. These forms of journalist writing are rapidly changing into multiplicities, or a swarm of differences.
One multiplicity is the ABC’s digital town squares based on content generated by citizen journalists trained by them. This form of web journalism is the recovery of the local hidden by the global. Presumably the digital town squares become the centre for the local.
The argument against this is that locally-based citizen journalism is dependent on newspapers. Difference is the key word. Difference or multiplicity means more than a low cost Fairfax newspaper in competition with Murdoch’s Advertiser, such as the Independent Weekly. Brian McCarthy, the CEO of Fairfax, has one strategy--cost containment. However, the low cost online newspapers in Perth and Brisbane do not make the turn to user generated content, because of the entrenched newspaper ethos of professional journalism.This limits its capacity to contribute to an expanded and more dynamic public sphere.
The innovation will come outside newspapers. Apart from the independent bloggers there will be an assemblage of sites and networks emerging around a variety of crucial local issues--eg., the River Murray, sustainable cities, the media, indigenous, health, music etc etc.
An example of an umbrella organisation is the Society for Responsible Design (http://www.green.net.au/srd). So a participatory media culture is being expanded, if this is understood in terms of media pluralism and it is connected to deliberative democracy and the conversation in the public sphere.
There are bits and pieces ---sites, blogs, newsletters, reports, papers, forums produced from a variety of sources--- already; but these configurations of desire will coalesce into assemblages and produce content that pulls from everywhere and does away with the old alliances and allegiances. It is possible that The Adelaide Review may reposition itself from a long established literary and cultural magazine to a magazine with strong political commentary on the basis of recruiting high profile bloggers who contribute to the magazine while blogging on a daily basis.
Three points can be drawn from this that go beyond the emergence of more channels or voices in the mediascape to give us some indication of the contours of the developments in the media landscape.We are entering into a different world to the one that we are leaving.
media landscape
Firstly, one innovation has to do with news framing: the way that sources in government and corporations frame issues and events in order to make information interesting and palatable to journalists, so they can then communicate their frames of an issue to audience members. Journalists cannot negate this framing of issues and events because they need sources’ frames to make news informative to audiences, and to keep their sources. So they add their own contextualization to their sources’ frames – news values and the like – in order to have some measure of professional autonomy in light of the fact that they know they are being used by their sources. The umbrella organizations will do their own framing of issues and events. So once excluded frames and narratives are bought into the public sphere.
Secondly, there is the significance of the public goods. This can be seen in the context of the role of the market. Adam Smith argued that you could only understand the role of the market against a background of public goods (including civil society), and one critically important question is how a society produces those public goods. Smith was fascinated by emergent public goods -- goods that were public goods (since nonrival and nonexcludable, as economists later would formalize the concept), but that were created not by any central actor like the state, but by the mutual and voluntary actions of individuals. Language is the simplest example -- language is a quintessentially public good, but no central coordinator is necessary to produce language. Currency is another public good.
These are emergent products of individuals seeking only their own private ends. Smith’s ‘market model’ in which public goods are the emergent and unintended product of private endeavors to meet private needs applies not just to the way markets serve the common good and produce public goods, but also to the way language, currency and social mores emerge – all of which are foundations of a market order.
Web 2.0 open source software is an emergent public good, as are blogging, Flickr and Wikipedia, as they are part of the the dialectic of human sociality. We are creating our own world through our communication, our interest in what each other are thinking – and our interaction. These free forms of open source culture are structures of knowledge that the Internet is enabling. Open source culture isn't meant to replace mass media but it is changing the way big media operates as we have a Read-Write" Internet with its “remix" and "mashup".
Thirdly, is the idea of an active process of remaking and remixing culture. The idea here is that you take creative work, mix it together and then other people take it and they remix it; they re-express it. In this sense, culture is remix; knowledge is remix; politics is remix. remix is free. It is free. In our tradition it has always been free, free in the sense of unregulated by the law. You need no permission to engage in this act of recreating your culture by commenting or transforming or criticising or praising. You need no permission: it is free. It needs to be free. Four hundred years of culture has produced a legal tradition that embraces this idea that writing is free.
Digital technology opens up the opportunity to speak and criticise and transform to anybody connected to this digital network--remixing images, text and sounds through technology taking the culture that is around us and re-expressing it through these technologies.
new ways of working
The second part of my argument addresses “niche” content and freelancers gathering audiences within a media landscape. Firstly, ‘the media’ no longer refers to television, radio, magazines and newspapers as it includes the assemblages of PDA’s, laptops, I-Phones, cameras etc. These offer greater possibilities for both downloading media content and capturing, recording, and transmitting images and sound. Secondly, we move through different worlds watched and recorded by CCTV cameras, the listening devices of spooks and computer spyware.
The city we move through is in the process of change as the production of space changes from the industrial doughnut city to a digital visual city in which the media record, transmit and process the global flow of information. A liquid culture of image and spectacle is producing new forms of text and image even as the image takes precedence over the text.
In this landscape the knowledge workers become more interpreters of cultural meanings, political and historical events and social change. Their form of knowledge is more local, contextual provisional; a learning to live with ambivalence, uncertainty, contingency and difference; and there is a greater acceptance of a variety of goods, values and truths.
Consider the shift from unsustainable way of life to sustainment in a low carbon economy opens up opportunities for content as what is involved is a change in our way of life and the significant failure to initiate adaptive measures to mitigate the effects of climate change. Lots to write about including the politics and culture of disinformation.
In doing so we become participants in a national conversation; participants struggling to find more sustainable ways of living, limited in capacity and ability, responsive to the suffering of others, and hoping to help make the shift to sustainment as best as one can.
How the web journalist/writers/imagemakers is financed is emerging. Crikey and Business Spectator point to one pathway towards a mixture of free and paid. The strategy appears to be one of not charging for an exclusive that will be repeated elsewhere; not charging for the most popular content on your site; and the content behind a pay wall appeals to niches, the narrower the niche the better.
The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library. On it we find the Preface by Gil Delannoi to the French Edition of The Sense of Reality. Scrolling down we come across some political philosophy--the distinction between negative liberty and positive liberty by which Berlin left an imprint on political philosophy. Delannoi says:
In the tradition of Locke, Constant, Mill and Tocqueville, he came to understand that the idea of independence, of self-realization, of struggling to be one’s own master, had taken the form of two concepts of liberty that could be at odds with each other and diverge to the point that each became the other’s victim. Negative liberty results from the clearing of an open space. It answers to the question : What are the boundaries within which I am not to be governed? Positive liberty stems from the definition of authority. It answers to the question : Who is to govern, how and why?
However, and this undercuts my understanding of Berlin as a defender of negative liberty in oppostion to positive liberty, Delannoi says that Berlin recognized the essential worth of each of the two concepts. Negative liberty means possibility of choice, including the possibility of not choosing. Positive liberty means capacity to achieve. Liberty always includes the two aspects. Delannoi says take an illustration even simpler than those proposed by Berlin.
Negative liberty: I am free to play tennis, to play football or not to play at all. Positive liberty: I have a racket and a ball.What good is it to have a choice if I don’t have the means to put my choice into effect? This explains why negative liberty implies positive liberty in order to be effective. On the other hand, what does liberty consist of when I have the means without having the choice, or when the choice is forced on me? Positive liberty, if it is positive only, is positive but is no longer free. Positive liberty requires the negative to be truly itself. We can thus grasp how this cardinal distinction accounts for the two sides of the same phenomenon.
Markets, private property and minimal government will achieve maximum welfare. Isn't that the core of neoclassical economics? Isn't that what is meant by the phrase 'thinking like an economist'? That markets, functioning on their own without interference, tended to an interdependence described as "general equilibrium." Neoclassical economists normally treat economic instability as the effect of exogenous, stochastic factors and not as endogenous to capitalist social formations--- economic fluctuations are seen as created by the processes of capitalism itself. So the economy is an equilibrium system regulated by nature in the same way as the solar system lends weight to the claim that such an economy exists in harmony and is best left to itself without government intervention.
The standard points of contention are that humans aren't rational, or not nearly as rational as the theory would have them be (and, further, that in the aggregate this creates market failures). Other points are that humans are social creatures, not individual agents, and their preferences and behaviors are forged by social structures: institutions, habits, social mores and culture all mediate and drive economic behavior. Others say that price and value aren't interchangeable and that prices don't arise from the simple intersection of supply and demand curves, while some argue that unequal power between different sectors of society affects how markets operate.
The Australian Academy of Science has been putting on a public lecture series on Australia's renewable energy future. Will the transition to this future be something along the lines of wind, solar and nuclear in the future with natural gas replacing coal quickly and eventually solar and nuclear replacing natural gas.
Mostly what we hear from the policy suits that hang around Canberra is an energy policy consisting of a little bit of renewables here, a little bit of that (gas) there and, 'Oh, let's get back to coal.' This policy of the miners and the coal fired power stations etc --is in opposition to the massive change to a renewable system. Their view when stated in the flat earth newspaper, The Australian, are characterised by the following: climate change caused by humans is fiction; coal power is the cheapest on the planet and should be developed to meet our energy needs; though solar and wind power will make some advances, they will supply only a small amount of energy compared to the gas, coal, and nuclear power supplies already operating.The reality is this low carbon economy will have a vastly different structure and composition than the one we have now.
The Australia's renewable energy future series was kicked off by Barney Foran's Australia's renewable energy future paper, in which he outlines the transition to a low energy carbon future. Foran says:
One of the transitions I am going to talk about tonight is the renewables transition. On your left is a graphical representation of the types of energy technologies that, if we just sit here, like we normally do in Australia, doing nothing much and just watching the Olympics and so on, we would be having brown coal, black coal, a bit of gas and all those sorts of things. The world that I am shifting Australia into through my numbers is that bigger one there where we try to get to a 20 per cent representation of our electricity production, in this case, from wind, solar thermal, solar photovoltaics and biomass. You will see there that we still have a bit of combined cycle gas turbines, the hydro we have already and also we transition out of the old coals into advanced coals.
Foran adds that the transition:
will be a pretty bumpy ride for the first human generation or so of making this scenario. The pressure of making such a massive change through our economy and replacing effectively very economically efficient generation infrastructure with stuff that is a lot more diffuse and collects sun and wind and so on certainly puts our GDP growth rates down. But, as we get into the second half of the transition – our children's children, if you like – Australia starts to encounter some potential problems caused by running out of gas and so on, and you will see that the scenario jumps up and is almost too buoyant.
My position is that the unipolarity of the US in international affairs is ending with the emergence of multipolarity (eg. the rise of China). And the US's attempts to establish an empire through US hegemony has lead to imperial overstretch. Overstretch is a cause of the demise of hegemonic powers.
This position is premised on balance of power theory. The core of this theory is simple:
States that are perceived as becoming too powerful or threatening to others will eventually find themselves opposed in a variety of ways by either a single state or a coalition of states. states that amass too much power inevitably generate resistance from the international system and a balance of power is restored.
Since the end of the cold war, American leaders have consistently claimed the ability to maintain a significant forward-leaning military presence in the three major regions of the globe and, if necessary, to wage two major regional wars at the same time. The harsh reality is that the United States no longer has the economic capacity for such an ambitious grand strategy. With 30 percent of the world’s product, the United States could imagine maintaining this hope. Nearing 20 percent, it cannot.
Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth challenge this argument in their book World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy that the United States does not face strong systemic constraints and that it has the ability to engage in a strategy of what they call “systemic activism.” In their view, “the United States can push hard and even unilaterally for revisions to the international system without sparking counterbalancing, risking the erosion of its ability to cooperate within international systems, jeopardizing the gains of globalization, or undermining the overall legitimacy of its role (217).” The current unipolar system is durable, the United States does not face strong systemic constraints and so external constraints will not meaningfully impede U.S. efforts to revise the international system. The overwhelming thrust of the book suggests that American hegemony can and will last for a very long time.
Many settler capitalist economies have had their economies based on a single or multiple set of 'primary' or resource industries, ranging from the US (North 1961), to Argentina, Chile, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Norway and many still do so, including oil-reliant states in the middle east and central Asia and mineral-reliant ones in Africa. Some of these countries have evolved from a staples base to a manufacturing or service one, but others have not, or have only partially done so.
Originally, the staples thesis, as developed by Canadian political economists, set out an export-led model of economic growth and attempted to how regional natural resource endowments led to the autonomous demands for and dependence upon exports, their spreading effects (linkages) to the rest of the economy, and to technological changes. Staples theorists view Canadian political economy as having been shaped by the export of successive staples over the course of Canadian history from the earliest colonial times to the modern era.
Michael Howlett and Keith Brownsey in Canadian Political Science Review say that:
While a mature staples political economy may still be characterized as "resource dependent", the economy is more diffused and diversified than in the past... , if this diffusion, diversification, and resource depletion continues, then an economy may make a further transition towards a "post-staples" one in which severe pressures on the critical resource sector coupled with the prospect of even more substantial contractions in the near future lead to an internal reconfiguration of growth and development as unprocessed bulk commodities can no longer compete with low-cost suppliers in traditional export markets. Typically this would involve a significant increase in metropolitan shares of population and employment, the emergence of regional economic centres, the decline of smaller resource-dependent communities and the increased prominence of the internal market for remaining, smaller-scale, resource industries
Mike Featherston in On Critical Paranoia: Political Surrealism and Kinetic Utopia in State of Nature refers to the kinetic or hyper-active utopia of the liberal/neo-liberal tradition of Hobbes, Locke, Smith, Hayek, Friedman, Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, Blair, and Brown. He says that this new kinetic utopia is secured by high speed communications across a more or less totally connected world that ensure that the symbolic system of post-modern capitalism, which tells us that goodness resides in the ability to transform all natural qualities into financial quantities in the most efficient ways possible, infects the lives of a large proportion of the world's population.
The problem that confronts us here is that the neo-liberal kinetic utopia, which evolved through processes of globalisation and emerged fully formed into the light of what Baudrillard (2005) calls our integral reality of endless events, shocks, and convulsions, has been progressively normalised, first by the mass media, which has over-loaded us with information about our catastrophic situation to such an extent that we no longer identify normality with stability but instead equate disaster with routine everydayness, and second by the adaptive qualities of the symbolic, or cultural, systems wired through our collective psychology, which have shown a remarkable ability to adjust to the new radical uncertainty of the world system in order to keep people in a state where they are more or less able to function in everyday life.
Featherston adds:
What we need today, then, is a new form of cultural critique able to derange or dislocate neo-liberal psychology through attacks on the processes of normalisation embedded in the symbolic form of the kinetic utopia. The central objective of this strategy would be to show why the kinetic utopia, which sells itself to the mass through the American myth of meritocracy, is in reality a dystopia, which produces inequality, violence, and misery on an enormous scale, and that even for the haves who believe that they can somehow evade the terrible effects of the new state of second nature through the machinations of the political economy of total segregation, there is really no way to escape the fate of the multitude of have nots forced to live in absolute poverty and total insecurity, simply because they must occupy the same biosphere.
In an earlier post entitled questioning economics I explored the relationship between economics and positivist in order to question neo-classical economics' claim to be a positivist science. I ended the post by saying that the self-questioning of neoclassical economics needs to include a discussion of its underlying positivist philosophy of science.
I now want to have a close look at positivism, using the work of Jorge Rivas in Scientific Realism and the Study of Political Economy. Rivas links positivism back to classical empiricism. He says that classical empiricism conflates the empirical and the actual levels of reality, as:
It holds that the only thing that really exists is our experience. The early Positivists adopted this empiricist ontology as the very core of their philosophy of science to distinguish themselves from metaphysical and religious explanations based on unobservables, and it continued to be the basic ontological position of some branches of Positivist philosophy of social science as late as the 1970s....However, most Positivists today recognize only the events which actually occur as real (often calling true empiricism “Naïve Empiricism”). This position is known as actualism.
Moreover, while actualist Positivists distinguish between the actual and the empirical domains (in other words, between events and perceptions of those events):
they do not distinguish between the actual and the generative domains (in other words, between events and the often unobservable underlying causes of those events). Actualism denies the reality of the generative domain. This form of empiricism does not accept that there are hidden, unknown or unrecognized mechanisms really generating actual events. Interpretivists also deny the generative domain.
The Positivist conception of explanation, exemplified by Carl Hempel (and still adhered to by philosophers of science critical of some other aspects of Positivism, such as Karl Popper), claims that science has explained an event when it has formulated a universal law, or “covering law”, from which the event can be deduced (known as subsumption under a generalization). In this nomological model of explanation, a scientific law is seen to reflect the actual constant conjunction of empirically observable events. This “constant conjunction” conception of scientific laws, first developed by David Hume, derives directly from the empiricism of early Positivism because it refers to the empirical instantiation of the law itself. In other words, due to the empiricist ontology of Positivism, a scientific law cannot refer to unobservable causes. Because it is referring to the constant conjunction of events, the basic form of the law is: “if y then z”. If we identify y, then we can predict that z will follow. This means that prediction is built into the Positivist formulation of explanation. Thus, the explanation of a phenomenon also entails the ability to predict it. This is known as the “deductive-nomological” (D-N), “Humean”, or “covering law” model of explanation and scientific laws and, importantly, it produces the Positivist thesis of the symmetry of explanation and prediction.
While we may see a person engage in some behavior, we do not see the complex sets of relationships between the ideas, beliefs, norms, and attitudes held by that person which generated their behavior. Some generative structures and mechanisms are inherently unobservable, like gravity and magnetic fields, but the fact that they are unobservable does not mean they are not real. This is just as true of social structures, such as, for example, marriage, religion, economic class, or racism, regardless of whether they are composed of and constituted by material relations, social institutions, belief-systems, discourses and/or psychological attitudes. Realism explains how it is that reality is “deeper” than both what we can observe and what actually happens, by arguing that real, causal structures generate the “surface” manifestations of phenomena.
A quote from Tony Fry from this text:
Observing the past critically requires an enormous amount of attention if we are concerned about the future. To do this in a culture that displays an almost unceasing capability to erase memory (or to technogically reduce it to bits of information) is to go against the grain. The purpose of such 'critical history' is not to moralise with hindsight but to learn what to destroy, conserve and remake - it is not just that we need to learn from history, but rather without the historical, learning is always followed by forgetting. One can even say, without history there is no ability to sustain (which, as indicated, in large part is the selection of the future from the past)
I have to admit that I don't really understand the basis for the Rudd Government's controversial indigenous housing policy. Why did they decide to support the linking of land tenure reform to the provision of basic services when they so strongly condemned this policy when Labor was in Opposition? Once in government they adopted a near identical plan to that of the Howard Government---a minimum 40-year lease over the land in exchange for housing. This is a complete reversal of position.
How come?
I appreciate that the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), which was a response to the "Little Children are Sacred" Report of the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse had bipartisan support. The Rudd Government does recognize that adequate housing is so fundamental to community health and safety that it has been willing to invest public funds in community housing. Overcrowding and the appalling state of housing in most communities impact upon the life chances of children and the wellbeing of communities generally.
As one clinician noted in a submission to the Senate Select committee on regional and remote Indigenous communities' inquiry:
I think it is vital that we work to insist on the supply of more housing and infrastructure as a meaningful and practical step for resolving the problems in the bush. If you are any parent white or black living in a household of 20 other people with limited sanitation facilities and income then your ability to protect your child from the ravages of recurrent strep infections, rheumatic fever, kidney disease, ear infections, trachoma, intestinal parasites, dental caries, anaemia, malnutrition or sexual predators is severely compromised whether you are drug and alcohol affected or not. If you have no where else to go and no one to offer reliable long-term assistance or protection what choice do you have but to continue to put up with it? As important as we doctors like to think we are, most of the major health advantages in our dominant culture have actually been achieved by plumbers, carpenters, civil engineers and teachers.
However, funding for new housing was not part of the NTER. Hence the Commonwealth government's Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program (SIHIP), which is a partnership between the Commonwealth government and the Northern Territory government and is intended to deliver around 750 new houses including new subdivisions, demolition of 230 uninhabitable houses, 500 housing upgrades, essential infrastructure to support new houses and improvements to living conditions in town camps. The Commonwealth government has stated that appropriate land tenure arrangements must be in place before construction can commence.
Keith Crome in The Nihilistic Affirmation of Life: Biopower and Biopolitics in the Will to Knowledge in Parrhesia (No 6, 2009) says that biopower is part related to what Foucault calls “a history of the present”, grasping the present in its contingency, unsettling it from its prejudices and exploding their hold on reality, understanding how we have become what we are rather than importing our prejudices on to the past, in the guise of their being eternal truths apprehended by a supra-historical intellect.
With the term ‘biopower’ Foucault designates the set of mechanisms, techniques and technologies through which the basic biological features of the human species become the object of political strategies in modern Western societies. Biopower is, then, for Foucault the application of power to the human considered as a living being:
Like disciplinary techniques and procedures, the technologies of biopower are addressed to a multiplicity, but they are addressed to that multiplicity in so far as it forms a global mass affected by the biological processes of life itself: birth and death, health and illness. To the techniques of discipline that came to hold sway over the human body and which are individualising are added the techniques and technologies of biopower which, on the contrary, but in a complimentary way, are massifying, directed towards humans in the genetic and species sense....Biopower is thus tied to the emergence of the discipline of statistical demography, and there begins the quantification of the phenomena of birth-rate, longevity, the reproductive rates and fertility of a given population, its state of health, patterns of diet and habitation
In Patriot Acts: Learning from America in The Monthly (June 2009), Waleed Aly explores the contrasts between American and Australian patriotism. He says that the genius of American patriotism (love of country) is that it manages to be inclusive. The same cannot easily be said of Australian patriotism, and certainly cannot be said of the European version, which is so often expressed in moral panics about the supposed disloyalty of migrants. He then asks:
What accounts for the difference? At first blush, the answer is as simple as it is patriotically appealing: that the patriotism of minorities simply mirrors the patriotism of the majority. That is, patriotism is a result of social pressure. If we only demand it stridently enough, our minorities will learn to love us. Or, to put it more acerbically, multiculturalism is a death wish. Such has been the diagnosis of a thousand culture warriors in recent years. Europe's flirtation with multiculturalism has killed its sense of self and allowed its recalcitrant minorities to disappear into a fog of cultural relativism and escape any sense of loyalty to the nation. Europe's multiculturalism is even said to have fostered subcultures hostile to it.
there is something different operating in America, something more subtle, complex and ingenious than the brutish social politics of monoculturalism. Something that is not ultimately about multiculturalism or migration, but about a more comprehensive phenomenon: national identity. There is something in the way America thinks and talks about itself that enables widespread national loyalty and astonishing diversity to coexist. Even its rioters rarely shun their American identity; instead, they assert their place in the nation.
Aly says that America has its creed, but one that corresponds to no particular religious tradition. It is a civil creed constructed on the central political idea of individual liberty. The US was settled by people fleeing religious persecution in Europe; it was thus almost inevitable that freedom, especially of religion, would become the new nation's touchstone. A people who had struggled to attain religious freedom could not easily found a nation on principles that denied that right to others:
The natural outcome of that - and this is the crux of the issue at hand - was a national myth based not on shared religion, ethnicity or culture, but on the shared enjoyment of liberty... American patriotism does not celebrate a country that exists or has ever existed. It is a celebration of the idea of America: of possibility, what Barack Obama calls "America's promise". Where we may look upon America as the country of slavery and racial segregation, Americans see a country that overcame these things. Theirs is a sense of self that is forward-looking, oriented towards constant improvement.
America's unique brand of national identity: it coheres principally around not a social culture but a political one. The values America so frequently celebrates are not cultural but civic: individual freedom, freedom of conscience, limited government. Personal and cultural values are rarely articulated in a national way. To do so would be to undermine the individual's freedom to determine his or her own values, free from government interference.In Australia, by contrast, national identity primarily means cultural identity .... The anti-multicultural commentary that filled our newspapers [held that] Australian values are under threat from migrants who refuse to accept the dominant culture; majority values must be protected by the insistence that they are embraced by minorities. In Australia, we were urged to remember that ours is a nation built essentially on the Judeo-Christian tradition, that ours is a culture derived essentially from Britain, and that we are an English-speaking nation.
Ever since modern economics started in the 18th century it has generally presented itself as a predictive scientific discipline, akin to a natural science. Neoclassical economics is widely accepted to be “the most scientific of the social sciences”, and unlike sociology, political science, etc, economics is regularly referred to as a “science” rather than a “social science”. This scientific status as a natural science is a major source of legitimacy for “economic” approaches in social science, and these neoclassical economic approaches to social phenomena, such as Rational Choice Theory have become very influential, if not dominant.
The failure of the economics profession – with a few exceptions – to foresee the global financial crisis does discredit its scientific pretensions. Economics is revealed to have no more clothes than the other social sciences, such as sociology. The neoclassical attempt to construct a ‘pure’ economics has failed. The economics profession has problems, given their identity in economics' status as a hard, predictive natural science. The positivist model of science as the appropriate model for social science and it this model of science (as distinct from a scientific realist one) that provides neoclassical economics with its seemingly unassailable scientific status. However, this problem in predictive failure does mean that the profession needs to address its self understanding as a positivist natural science.
These kind of anomalies can be found throughout the theoretical edifice. Thus neoclassical economics's claim that it is a positivist science (as distinct from normative economics) is undercut by its central core that appeals to metaphsycs. First, in a free market, competition establishes a price equilibrium that is perfectly efficient: demand equals supply and no resources are squandered. Second, in equilibrium no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off. This metaphysical core has deep roots in that neoclassical economics has its roots in the eighteenth century in a climate of Newtonian mechanistic science, with its belief in forces in balance. In Lakatosian terms this core is based on a hard ontological commitment of homo economicus; or, to use an older term, the metaphysical core of neo-classical economics. Economists view social reality through metaphysical windows.
The mathematical turn in the late 20th century reflects, and is based on, a persistent bias towards an idealised account of both human behaviour and markets, which stand in such contrast to the complexity of the mathematical theoretical edifice built up from its axioms. That edifice is used to understand the allocation of scarce resources among alternative ends and understanding such allocation is often considered the core of economics in the context of public policy.
Neoclassical economics works in terms of an excessive abstraction that conceptualizes the world as a mechanical world of interacting robots driven by the instinctual springs of a fixed human nature. The economy is simply the sum of microeconomic decisions of rational agents pursuing their own self-interest. Agent behaviour is fixed: market agents pursue a single goal regardless of what others do, and the only way one agent can influence another’s choices is via the indirect effect of trading on prices; even though it is abundantly clear that herding –---irrational, copycat buying and selling – provokes market fluctuations. In general, people gather limited information, reason poorly and act intuitively rather than rationally.
Hence, there are problems with its concept of rationality, which is deduced from its initial axioms. Most economists assume that the economic system works as if it consisted of rational, self-interested persons maximising utility or profits: it is a means-end or instrumental rationality centred around the agent's optimization of their preferences. The agent maximizes utility because they are rational.They are rational given the axiomatic definition of human nature as homo economicus.This is an axiom (the model posits the existence of rational agents as a theoretical assumption), as it is not considered to be falsifiable by empirical observation. So it does not really matter that individuals do not always maximize utility as the assumptions and deduced postulates hold. What matters are the axioms of the deductive theoretical edifice not the empirical evidence,and so there is a process of shedding many of the encumbrances reality places on theorizing.
Neoclasssical economics, therefore, is not the positivist science it claims to be. This can also be seen in the appeal to the value of instrumental rationality (it is a better concept of rationality than others and better than irrationality), which undercuts the neo-classical claim to be a hard edged positivist science. Logical Positivism, which arose in philosophy early in the twentieth century, proclaimed the sharp distinction between facts and values. Positivism was imported into economics in the 1930s and ethical considerations were eventually driven out of its core, even though the fact/value distinction is now discredited in philosophy. What we find are hidden or tacit appeals to the value of rationality buried in the theoretical edifice.
Reality has to be shaped to fit with the utopian model of a decentralised market system. Analysts talk about the market making ‘corrections’, as though there is some ideal or optimal state that it is trying to attain. But in reality, the market is intrinsically prone to leaps and lurches.Drawing on the mathematical apparatus named after Vilfredo Pareto neoclassical economic science eschewed reference to utility, basing itself exclusively on acts of exchange and choice.
In logical positivist terms, “utility” can only be defined in terms of each agent’s preference ranking as objectively manifested in the choices they make. The crucial concept here is the “Pareto optimum” — that state of the market where there exists no possible exchange, deemed by both parties to be beneficial, which remains to be executed. By this move, a new utilitarianism is established, in continuity with the old, in which the good is a Pareto optimum, in that it assumes that no mutually beneficial exchange is left unmade. Hence the idea of this is “the best of all possible worlds” even though Pareto optimality is entirely compatible with leaving some people in extreme misery while others roll in decadence and luxury.
Though neoclassical economics has reworked the homo economicus ontology to resemble us human beings more, this has not dislodged the neoclassical theory from its ontological and methodological anchorage. Thus neoclassical theory retains its roots firmly within the individualist ontology of liberal social science. The ontology of homo economicus (as in rational choice accounts) take individual preferences as given, and consider how preferences are aggregated within pre-specified institutional arrangements. Individuals are assumed to always maximise their utility functions specified in the model. In contrast, theories based upon the homo sociologicus model of man see agents acting out roles (a ‘typified response to a typified expectation’) in response to norms. Roles encode norms and conformity to norms is seen as being the motivationbehind agents’ behaviour.
Though it is acknowledged that the agent is a creature of her social context, and that social structure and individual agency are messily intertwined, the theory places the burden of explanation on the individual.The standard assumption still is that agents’ current preferences are separate from the structure of the interaction and power relations in which they are involved.
The method is still of the analytic-synthetic type: the socio-economic phenomenon under scrutiny is to be analysed by focusing on the individuals whose actions brought it about; understanding fully their ‘workings’ at the individual level; and, finally, synthesising the knowledge derived at the individual level in order to understand the complex social phenomenon at hand. Those working within a methodological individualist framework, using some variant of homo economicus are at pains to ‘explain’ observed behaviour by formulating, along Popperian lines of parsimonious falsifiable hypotheses, which in positivist political science should ideally have predictive power. If economists view social reality through metaphysical windows, then this places constraints on the empirical testing of falsifiable hypotheses.
If neoclassical economics is systematically grounded in the positivist philosophy of science then the consequences of using Positivism as the philosophical foundation for theory- building in neoclassical economics include: the reliance on anti-realist core assumptions; the centrality of deductive-nomological modeling; reductionist methodological individualism and the related mathematical problems of aggregation; equilibrium as a central concept of theory- building; and the neglect of temporality through the construction of static models. The unrealistic nature of all of these central axooms and postulates in neoclassical economic theories are explicitly defended through the deployment of Positivist explanations of what science looks like.
This is why the self-questioning of neoclassical economics needs to include a discussion of its underlying positivist philosophy of science.
The Gaia hypothesis, first proposed by British scientist James Lovelock in Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford University Press 1979), is the notion that all living things are interlinked as a single self-regulating body. This idea, which reaches back to Plato's Timaeus--in which Plato argued that the world is a giant organism fashioned by a God, the Demiurge--- and it is popular with some scientists and often expressed in popular culture as Mother Earth in perpetual balance.
The world as an organism was pushed to one side in favour of of the world as a machine by modern science (Newtonian physics) What was rejected was the holistic organic idea of seeing parts coming together to make living wholes that function only as complete systems and not as blind mechanisms built out of disparate bits and pieces. Lovelock's ideas are structured around balance, equilibrium and homeostasis. peaking of the new perspective on ourselves of looking at the planet from outer space, Lovelock writes:
We now see that the air, the ocean and the soil are much more than a mere environment for life; they are a part of life itself. Thus the air is to life just as is the fur to a cat or the nest for a bird. Not living but something made by living things to protect against an otherwise hostile world. For life on Earth the air is our protection against the cold depths and fierce radiations of space.There is nothing unusual in the idea of life on Earth interacting with the air, sea and rocks, but it took a view from outside to glimpse the possibility that this combination might consist of a single giant living system and one with the capacity to keep the Earth always at a state most favorable for the life upon it.Things are kept in balance because when something occurs to shift the natural order of things, then other things occur to compensate, bringing one back to the original state.
Instead of Earth being a stable, self-regulating organism where life begets favorable conditions for furthering itself, it is a place where living organisms foster major extinctions that will culminate in planetary biocide--ultimate extinction. It's a declinist thesis since life is globally self-destructive over the long haul.
I have just come across Stevan Harnad's For Whom the Gate Tolls?How and Why to Free the Refereed Research Literature Online Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving, Now. It starts with an excellent picture of the current dissemination of academic research--a system that works to prevent the dissemination of academic research, even though there is no longer any need for research or researchers to be constrained by the access-blocking restrictions of paper distribution.
Harnard is proposing the online self-archiving, free for all, of refereed, published research papers in the on-line PostGutenberg era. His reason can be seen in the following picture:
1. A brand-new PhD recipient proudly tells his mother he has just published his first article. She asks him how much he was paid for it. He makes a face and tells her "nothing," and then begins a long, complicated explanation...
2. A fellow-researcher at that same university sees a reference to that same article. He goes to their library to get it: "It's not subscribed to here. We can't afford that journal. (Our subscription/license/loan/copy budget is already overspent)"
3. An undergraduate at that same university sees the same article cited on the Web. He clicks on it. The publisher's website demands a password: "Access Denied:Only pre-paid subscribing/licensed institutions have access to this journal."
4. The undergraduate loses patience, gets bored, and clicks on Napsterto grab an MP3 file of his favourite bootleg CD to console him in his sorrows.
5. Years later, the same PhD is being considered for tenure. His publications are good, but they're not cited enough; they have not made enough of a "research impact." Tenure denied.
6. Same thing happens when he tries to get a research grant: His research findings have not had enough of an impact: Not enough researchers have read, built upon and cited them. Funding denied.
7. He decides to write a book instead. Book publishers decline to publish it: "It wouldn't sell enough copies because not enough universities have enough money to pay for it. (Their purchasing budgets are tied up paying for their inflating annual journal subscription/license/loan costs...)"
8. He tries to put his articles up on the Web, free for all, to increase their impact. His publisher threatens to sue him and his server-provider for violation of copyright.
9. He asks his publisher: "Who is this copyright intended to protect?" His publisher replies: "You!"
The article goes onto explore what is wrong with the picture. The core anomaly is that though researchers derive their income not from the sale of their research reports but from the scholarly/scientific impact of their reported findings, i.e., how much they are read, cited, and built-upon by other researchers all fee-based access-barriers are income-barriers for research and researchers restricting their potential impact to only those (institutions, mainly) who can and do pay the access-fees.
We have inherited two extreme points of view from modern (positivist) philosophy. Knowledge originates either in scientific, objective observation of the "real" world, or in emotional, highly personal apprehension of values expressed as I like or approve of this. This leaves us in the position that objective observations don't need to be argued for (they are facts) whilst emotionally apprehended values cannot be (they are personal expressions). Consequently, passionate commitment--that can be found in political life---has lost its connection with the provision of good reasons.
Rhetoric is not possible within this duality. We, can however, question this duality and this involves some border crossing from the territory modern philosophy into the old world of rhetoric that turns to study the particular sites where writing takes place to explore how writing and persuasion works. From this perspective the structure of a scientific report is not just a matter of superficial style, but rather a complex stock of argumentative moves or commonplaces that serve to reinforce and reproduce a view of the world that characterizes the discipline of science. In short, the *common* topics have become, in their way, as specialized as the *special* topics (or specialized knowledge that characterizes a particular discipline).
Knowledge is also discovered through dialectic. Knowledge is not created through the isolated self interacting with the physical world, nor even by groups of selves attempting to achieve Platonic certainty through the discursive testing of logical propositions or mathematical axioms. Rather, knowledge is developed communally through the process of making an intelligible world with my fellow human being. Hence we have the idea of an ongoing conversation with persuasion a necessary means of keeping the conversation (as a form of social interaction) going.
But how do we influence each other through language? In Why Does Rhetoric Need a Theory of Reading? Doug Brent says:
Traditional rhetoric simply had to have faith that an audience could interpret accurately. Rhetoric is traditionally defined as the art of using language to influence others' behaviour and belief. This implies that discourse is a reasonably reliable means by which one person can affect another. The rhetor must know that what he puts into his discourse will be roughly reflected in what the audience takes out. Otherwise persuasion is meaningless, for the rhetor has no predictable influence on his audience. To do his job, the rhetor must believe human beings act not at random, but rather for reasons that he can predict and use. This assumption, however, has been treated simply as an assumption, an article of faith.
Kenneth Mostern, in an interesting article entitled On Being Postacademic, says that at every level of the academic institution, a variety of individuals find that the best or easiest way to keep themselves going is by staying out of the way of department life. He adds:
The scariest thing a young faculty member experiences is not, as is conventionally supposed, the “need to produce” and therefore her/his experience is not aided by the “mentorship” of an experienced scholar. Rather, the young scholar’s fear stems from the fact that no one in the department is talking to each other about scholarship. Faculty are socializing, going out, schmoozing all the time, and the ideas that supposedly drive the work they do are not being discussed. The mentor, if assigned, will try to teach the young faculty member how to navigate the minefield of the department, but that is exactly what is alienating. . The mentor, especially when well-intentioned, may be the model for what is wrong, not an aid in coping. ...The one conversation everyone is having incessantly is the one about the micropolitical maneuvers within the department. This conversation is, of course always done with armor on, with an eye toward alliances and enemies already made, with everyone watching to find out which camp the new faculty member will join.
no one is talking about substance, only alliances, and because alienation is general, a vacuum exists at the center of institutional power which is not filled by talent or argument, but by those who feel most comfortable or justified taking advantage of it.
This kind of career change does cause fear, uncertainty, regret, self-recrimination and, in some cases, being regarded as a failure, by oneself or others within academia. But not outside. The sense of failure is an impediment to people leaving academia. Sabine Hikel at Leaving Academia says that the leaving academia = failure syndrome comes in large part from the fact that, within academe, there is so little acknowledgement of other careers as viable options.
In Study, Students, Universities: An Introduction in the latest issue of Polygraph
Luka Arsenjuk and Michelle Koerner say that the challenge presented by the current economic crisis appears in the field of education as a continuation of the shifts and transformations of the University into a transnational corporation that primarily views students as consumers or as an exploitable labor-force to be managed and which is concerned with the mere management of already accumulated knowledge. The corporate universities' narrative about themselves is that they are the new borderless agents of world economy and administration.
Arsenjuk and Koerner make reference to Duke University hosting a conference under the title The Collapse of Traditional Knowledge” in January 2007. They say that:
The conference was pitched as an attempt to “reflect critically on the conditions of our own thinking,” while expressly avoiding the pitfalls of a “simple political complaint about the corporate University.” Bringing together an impressive group of academics, the conference aimed at continuing the discussion—which has itself become a tradition of sorts in the humanities—of the transformations in the contemporary University’s guiding rationale and its corresponding models of the production and transmission of knowledge. In trying to identify the structural causes of a shift in the organization of knowledge, to relate them to concrete effects, and, it was hoped, to open up new possibilities for thought, “The Collapse of Traditional Knowledge” conference covered a wide range of questions: the crisis of public education and the erosion of academic freedom in the face of increasing privatization; the transformative effects on thought and knowledge of new technologies, new media, and digitally “revolutionized” modes of communication; and a reconsideration of “alternative” and “unstable epistemologies,” both in relation to the discourse of scientific rationality, as well as from the positions of marginalized and excluded subjectivities.
In a time of global crisis of capital the attempts are to privatize education and subsume it even more completely under the demands of the market and the criterion of profitability. The corporate university is not the victim of late capitalism; it is its agent.
What is currently happening in the coproate univerate university has little or nothing to do with humanistic paeans to the “value” of a liberal education or the fantasy of the pure pursuit of knowledge for its own sake; in fact, the intellectual mission of the University rapidly recedes into the background as a type of side business. Marc Bousquet in How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation says that the corporatist ethos rather, Bousquet argues, the deliberate choice of a management culture in university administration that has self-consciously stylized itself after Wall Street, with superstar CEOs, disproportionately high administrative salaries, and recklessly expensive, resource-squandering pet projects. Bousquet writes;
The university under managerial domination is an accumulation machine.... money squeezed from curriculum, faculty compensation, and student financial aid flows into a discretionary fund to be used by university higher-ups as they see fit, with little or no oversight from students, faculty, or the surrounding community at large