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Imagination and the globalisation ofeducational policy researchFazal Rizvi aa University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign , USAPublished online: 15 Aug 2006.

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Globalisation, Societies and EducationVol. 4, No. 2, July 2006, pp. 193–205

ISSN 1476-7724 (print)/ISSN 1476-7732 (online)/06/020193–13© 2006 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14767720600752551

Imagination and the globalisation of educational policy researchFazal Rizvi*University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USATaylor and Francis LtdCGSE_A_175218.sgm10.1080/14767720600752551Globalisation, Societies and Education1476-7724 (print)/1476-7732 (online)Original Article2006Taylor & Francis42000000July 2006FazalRizvifrizvi@uiuc.edu

A number of theorists, including Charles Taylor, Arjun Appadurai and Dilip Gaonkar all associatedwith the University of Chicago based journal, Public Culture, have developed the idea of social imag-inary. Their notion of imagination departs significantly from traditional philosophical and sociolog-ical analyses that view imagination as an individual capacity, located within the aesthetic realm.Instead, Public Culture theorists interpret imagination as a collective social fact that, in the era ofglobalisation, has become a critical part of everyday life, a form of labour in the formation of subjec-tivities. This paper will explore the major implications of this contention for thinking about educa-tional policy research.

Keywords: Educational policy; Globalisation; Intergovermental organisations; Nation state; Policy research; Social imaginaries

Introduction

The idea of imagination is central to Arjun Appadurai’s highly insightful and genera-tive analysis of the relationship between the knowledge of globalisation and theglobalisation of knowledge. According to Appadurai, globalisation is not simply thename for a new epoch in the history of capital or in the biography of the nation state,but is also marked by a new role for the imagination in social life. In relation to thevarious ways in which global processes now work, through the flows of people, capitaland the images found in the media, he has suggested, imagination has become ‘a crit-ical part of collective, social, everyday life and is a form of labor’ (Appadurai, 2001,p. 8). It involves processes through which people engage with ordinary life, consideroptions and make decisions, now in new forms of collaborations that are no longerconfined to local communities but span across national boundaries.

*Educational Policy Studies, 377 Education Building, 1310 S. 6th St. MC 708, Champaign, IL,61820, USA. Email: frizvi@uiuc.edu

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In this way, imagination is not a matter of creative genius, within the aestheticrealm, but is a ‘collective, social fact’ that is at ‘work’ in a variety of ways with whichpeople define themselves and construct their relations to others, and build a world inand through modernity. Appadurai (1996, p. 5) thus believes that ‘imagination hasbroken out of the special expressive space of art, myth, and ritual and has nowbecome a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people in many societies’. Itis reflected in patterns of consumption and style, and ‘it is a place where matters ofwealth and well being, of taste and desire, of power and resistance come together’(ibid.).

This view of imagination has major implications for thinking about research, andits globalisation. Most significantly, it suggests that globalisation of research does notonly concern issues of its global portability, its funding and the uses of its products,but that it involves rethinking the concept of research itself, especially in the socialsciences and the humanities. It demands attention to issues of the optics through wewhich we typically learn something, the methods we employ, and of the ethic thatdefines the link ‘between new knowledge, systemaicity and an organised communityof criticism’ (Appadurai, 2001, p. 10). Research is hence always a collective activitythat emerges from a professionally defined field of prior knowledge and is directedtowards a body of its readers, judges and users. If the notion of ‘communities of refer-ence’, both prior and prospective, is conceptually linked to the idea of research thenthe issues of what that community consists of becomes central to its globalisation.

This is so because in a world characterised by increasing levels and intensity ofinterconnectedness and interdependence, both the subjects and objects of researchneed to be reconsidered. The notion of ‘communities of reference’ needs to beenlarged, because actors in different regions of the world are now able to ‘elaborateinterests and capabilities in constructing world pictures whose very interaction affectsglobal processes’ (Appadurai, 2001, p. 13). This implies the need to take subjectivi-ties associated with different groups around the world seriously, to deliberate uponthe ways in which they imagine their relationships to rest of the world. Appadurai(ibid.) concludes that ‘such deliberation is a vital prerequisite for internationalisingsocial science research, especially when objects of research themselves have acquiredinternational, transnational or global dimensions of vital interest to the socialsciences’. The idea of imagination is thus central to Appadurai’s clarion call for thedeparochialisation of the research ethic, and indeed of the idea of research itself.However, his analysis of the concept of imagination is largely programmatic andsuggestive, and needs to be filled out with a more detailed analysis, especially since itdeparts so markedly from the traditional philosophical and sociological understand-ings. A highly influential philosophical understanding of imagination can be foundencapsulated in Maxine Greene’s book, Releasing the imagination (1995). There sheviews imagination as a capacity that individuals possess for forming new images and‘the possibility of looking at things as if they could be otherwise’ (p. 16). She quotesapprovingly John Dewey’s (1934) contention that ‘imagination is the “gateway”through which meanings derived from past experience find their way into the present;it is the conscious adjustment of the new and the old’ (p. 20).

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In the sociological traditions too, imagination is viewed largely as an individualcapacity. Both the followers of Weber and Durkheim have interpreted imagination asa factor in facilitating social change, and thus a methodological imperative. Accordingto C. Wright Mills (2000, p. 5), for example, ‘the sociological imagination enables itspossessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for theinner life and the external career of a variety of individuals’. In this way, throughimagination individuals can understand their own experiences in terms of their rela-tions to others, and also project alternatives. Mills regards sociological imagination asthe ‘most fruitful form of self-consciousness’ that enables individuals to ‘providethemselves with adequate summations, cohesive assessments, comprehensive orien-tations’ (p. 8) Highly influential though this analysis has been, what is missing fromit is any treatment of how imagination comes to be social constituted and politicallyutilised. In my view, it is this analysis of imagination that is necessary for fully appre-ciating the call for the globalisation of research, and for appreciating the importanceof Appadurai’s critical interventions.

It is important to note that Appadurai’s notion of imagination is itself locatedwithin a broader set of ideas explored by scholars associated with the journal PublicCulture. These scholars have provided accounts of how people around the world arebeginning to think about contemporary realities in interconnected ways; and howcollectively they are inventing and administering discursive and social systems thatsurround and sustain them. The still-developing idea of ‘social imaginaries’ is centralto this theoretical work; and provides the backdrop for thinking about contemporaryforms and shifting practices of modernity. This work has sought to pluralise thenotion of modernity, preferring to speak of modernities that name a number of moralorders that can be imagined, shared and shaped by people struggling to understandtheir sociality. In its particularity, the contemporary moral order, called ‘western’, isjust one of many such orders, and this too is not static but constantly evolving.

Much of this analysis refers back to Cornelius Castoriadis seminal work, The imag-inary institution of society (1987), which grew out of Castoiadis’s progressive disillu-sionment with the determinism of classical Marxism in the 1960s. Castoriadis saw inthe idea of social imaginary an enabling concept that described the ways people actedas world-making collective agents within a given symbolic matrix that did not assumean ‘ontology of determinism’ but was constantly subject to change. In this way,Castoriadis sought to identify the creative force in the making of social-historicalworlds, a force that had to be attentive to the ‘signs of the time’ and interpret all thoseparticular, rather uneven and emotionally charged, events that make up everyday life(Maffesoli, 1993).

Imagination therefore involves a collective social force that is not only specific totime and space but is also always multiple and highly contested within particular andacross communities. Without this collective sense of agency, Castoradis suggests, itwould be impossible for us to be able to recognise the real in the first place and to makethe elementary distinctions between form and content, object and image, the originaland the copy. It is through the collective sense of imagination that a society is created,given coherence and identity, and also subjected to social change, both mundane and

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radical. In this way, each society is created differently, subsists differently, and trans-forms itself differently through the exercise of collective political agency.

Gaonkar (2002, p. 4) summarises these ideas about the social imaginaries in thefollowing manner:

… social imaginaries are ways of understanding the social that become social entitiesthemselves, mediating collective life. Often, social scientists and historians have tried tounderstand these entities in terms of ideas, theories, philosophies—what might be called‘third-person’ or ‘objective’ points of view. But some crucial self-understandings are notformulated in explicit or theoretical molds. They are first-person subjectivities that buildupon implicit understandings that underlie and make possible common practices. Theyare embedded in the habitus of a population or are carried in modes of address, stories,symbols, and the like.

Profoundly then social imaginaries exist in a double sense. They exist through repre-sentations or implicit understandings embodied in what Wittgenstein (1974) called‘ordinary language’; and they are the means by which individuals understand theiridentities and their place in the world, and are able to suggest transformations of theprevailing order. In the traditional ontology, the imaginary was seen as derivative, themere reflection of what was already there, of the real, treated with suspicion as asource of distortion. In contrast, Castoriadis’ views imagination as the constitutivemagma of meaning, the structuring matrix, without which discursive and social chaoswould reign.

Charles Taylor (2004) has further elaborated these ideas, in relation to his discussionof the formation of contemporary western modernity and its various alternatives, andthe relationships among them. Although Taylor shares Castoriadis’s view of the socialimaginary as generative matrix, he emphasises its role in the hermeneutics of everydaylife. In this manner, his understanding is closer to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’,or Raymond Williams’s idea of ‘structures of feeling’, or what Wittgenstein called the‘background’. It is a complex, unstructured and contingent mix of the empirical andthe affective, and not a ‘fully articulated understanding of our whole situation withinwhich particular features of our world become evident’ (Taylor, 2004, p. 21).

For Taylor, then, the social imaginary is the thinking shared in a society by ordinarypeople, the common understandings that make everyday practices possible, givingthem sense and legitimacy. In this sense, the social imaginary is both implicit andnormative: it is embedded in events and ideas, and carries within it deeper normativenotions and images, constitutive of a society. Taylor insists that imagination involves:

… something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertainwhen they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the waysin which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how thingsgo on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and thedeeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations. (Taylor, 2004, p. 23)

A social imaginary is thus carried in images, myths, parables, stories, legends andsongs and most significantly, in the contemporary era, in the mass media. It isthrough the social imaginary that relations and sociability among strangers within asociety become possible.

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Taylor maintains however that the social imaginary is not only embedded in theeveryday notions and images, but also in theories and policies. He thus regards ashighly significant the distinction between social theory and social imaginary. Theoriesare often in possession of a relatively few people, he suggests, while social imaginaryis more broadly shared, and make possible a widely shared sense of legitimacy. Whiletheories emerge out of an established social imaginary, they often also suggest analternative way of interpreting the world. So while they might start off as theories heldby a small group of people, for them to be successful they infiltrate the wider commu-nity, and then the whole society, creating a new sense of imaginary. For a theory tobecome part of the social imaginary, it must evolve into a kind of common under-standing that enables us to carry out our everyday social practices. In this way, socialimaginary is both factual and normative, ‘that is, we have a sense of how thingsusually go, but this is interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go, of whatmissteps would invalidate the practice’ (p. 24).

Appadurai largely accepts this analysis of the role of the social imaginary in theformation of subjectivities, but wishes to extend this analysis to the globalisingcontexts in which we now live. These contexts are characterised by the diffusion ofsocial imaginaries across most communities around the world. This diffusion is facil-itated by electronic media, mass migration and the mobility of capital and labor, creat-ing conditions through which most societies around the world have become culturallydiverse and hybrid, and cannot avoid, in a fundamental sense, engaging with socialrelations globally. As he puts it, the ‘system of nation states is no longer the only gamein town’, not only as far as international governance and transnational economic andpolitical traffic is concerned, but also with respect to cultural formations. We live ina world in which ideas and ideologies, people and capital and images and messagesare constantly in motion, transforming the vectors of our social imaginaries.

People now live amid many social imaginaries, in addition to those that are dictatedby the dominant national formations. They have different points of origin, differentaxes, travel through different routes and different relationships to institutional struc-tures in different communities and nations. As Gaonkar (2002, p. 5) points out:

Other modern social imaginaries—such as the ethnos, the mainstream, the public, andhumanity—differ from the national model in important ways. Some are not articulated asa we but are third-person objectifications of society; these include the market, the main-stream, and ethnic and census categories. Some are experienced vicariously or throughindirect mediation. Some are not collective agents like the people but are experiencedthrough affects, such as mass sentiment or grief, rather than through will formation.

In such circumstances, people are forced to interpret and negotiate different, oftencompeting, social imaginaries. In the public sphere, social imaginaries are thus strug-gled over, as different interests seek to influence perceptions through a whole rangeof communication and other social technologies.

Given this account of the social imaginary, I want to explore in the rest of this paperits implications for thinking about educational policy research, and how it might beglobalised. As a field of study, policy research in education revolves around a rangeof key questions about the ways in which public policies relevant to the provision of

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education are and should be developed, enacted and evaluated, and the manner inwhich Government agencies exercise their authority, seeking to manage communityexpectations and to develop subjects who are sufficiently vested in their politicalpriorities. But how is this authority secured?

In my view, social imaginaries play a major role in making policies authoritative, insecuring consent and becoming legitimate. They provide the backdrop against whichpeople develop a common understanding that makes possible common policy prac-tices and a shared sense of legitimacy. They bring together factual and normativeaspects of policies, and enable people to develop a shared understanding of the prob-lems to which policies are proposed as solutions. Indeed, it is in an effort to securepopular legitimacy that Governments spend large sums of money to develop acommon understanding of policies so that they are evenly implemented, in line withtheir expectations. Indeed, Governments recognise the importance of developing asocial imaginary within which policy practices are located.

Policy research, according to Stephen Ball (1994) involves an examination of threekey aspects of policy: texts, discourses and effects. Policies, Ball argues, can beviewed as representations that are encoded in complex ways through struggles,compromises and authoritative allocations and decoded in complex ways through avariety of interpretations and meanings; they are always contested, value-laden anddynamic. While Ball’s discussion of the concept of policy is most useful in highlight-ing the complexities of the various ways in which policies are constructed and inter-preted, and through which authority is exercised, it does not problematise the issuessurrounding the nature and extent of this authority itself. Where does this authoritycome from?

Like most other theorists of policy, Ball assumes policy authority to be locatedwithin the structures of the nation state, from where policy texts and discourses gettheir purchase. Indeed, public policies in education have traditionally been thoughtto emanate from a national Government and its agencies, designed by the nation stateto deliver educational provision in a most effective and efficient, and sometimes equi-table, manner. Not surprisingly therefore most policy analyses assume the stateauthority to be sovereign. This assumption is based on a Westaphalian understandingabout the nature of political authority (Krasner, 2000), including the view thatauthority can only be exercised over a defined geographical territory, and that eachstate has autonomy to develop its own policies; meaning that no external actor enjoysauthority within the borders of the state.

Modern states are thus assumed to hold ultimate territorial jurisdiction, organisedaround a specific set of administrative functions. This assumption of the taken-for-grantedness of territoriality can be found in the work of most twentieth century socialtheorists; and has indeed been considered a fundamental feature of modernity uponwhich the political architecture of the modern state system is based. Thisview represents modern nation state as a kind of container that separates an ‘inside’of domestic political interactions from an ‘outside’ of international or inter-state rela-tions (Brennar et al., 2003, p. 2). The state is given an authoritative monopoly oversubjects residing within its given territory.

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However, this conception of policy authority, involving the institutional, territorialand centralised nature of the state, cannot be sustained without popular consent. Ittherefore requires a social imaginary concerning the nature and scope of its politicalauthority. It demands that people necessarily link their sense of subjectivity to thestate; and sustain an imaginary that regards national formations as inevitable, timelessand natural, territorially bounded and entirely legitimate.

This view is in line with Benedict Anderson’s contention (1991) that nations are‘imagined communities’ that were brought into existence in the early modernisationprocesses initially by intellectuals, artists, political leaders and others, and which onlylater became infiltrated into the whole society, through myths, stories, songs, nationalnarratives and the like. Processes of formal schooling of course play a major role indeveloping and sustaining national imaginaries. But assumptions surroundingnational authority have come to be widely accepted not only through the exercise ofviolence (Mann, 2004) but also through a powerful social imaginary that discouragespeople from even conceiving how things could in fact be otherwise. Educationalpolicy studies continue to operate within this Westphalian imaginary.

Contemporary theories of globalisation have however destabilised this imaginary,even if the authority of the states has not entirely declined, and even if many statesremain influential and strong. This has led to shifts in our own social imaginary, whichare encapsulated in the concept of ‘deterritorialization’ of culture (see Tomlinson,1999), it is now possible to ask: whether the authority of educational policy necessarilycomes from the nation states; and if does not, then what are some of the other sitesof policy development and sources of political legitimacy; and how do contemporaryglobal processes intersect with the mechanisms of national policy development,dissemination and evaluation?

The assumption that policy authority is always located within the structures of thestate can no longer be taken for granted. In analysing the ways in which values areallocated in and through policy, we can no longer merely attend to issues internal tothe state, but need to ask also how the interior of the state is itself being reconstitutedby forces outside its borders, becoming ‘relativized’ (Waters, 1995) by the processesof globalisation. If this is so, then educational policy researchers need to examinehow policies are produced and legitimated within a broader framework. Ultimately,what is at stake here is the need to understand an emerging social imaginary that isbeing created and promoted by the global forces of capital and corporate interests. Ifwe are to develop alternatives to its growing authority then we need a different socialimaginary, which is better aligned to popular sentiments for democracy and socialjustice. The battle over the creation of this imaginary is ideologically fierce, becauseglobal capital is invested heavily in capturing it. However, as Appadurai (2001, p. 6)points out, imagination as a collective social fact in the era of globalisation has a splitcharacter.

On the one hand, it is in and through imagination that modern citizens are disciplinedand controlled, by states, markets and other powerful interests. On the other hand, it isalso the faculty through which collective patterns of dissent and new designs for collectivelife emerge.

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This view implies a major political struggle over our social imagination between, onthe one hand, a dominant neo-liberal imaginary underpinning educational policyand, on the other hand, a democratic alternative to it, conceived as a radically differ-ent way of interpreting the facts of global interconnectivity and interdependence.

The neo-liberal imaginary in education policy appears to have become globallyconvergent (Schugurensky, 1999), showing an unmistakable trend towards anacceptance of similar set of policy solutions to educational problems by a wide vari-ety of nation states that otherwise have very different social, historical and economiccharacteristics. This hegemonic trend represents an almost universal deepening of ashift from social democratic to neo-liberal orientations, manifested most clearly inprivatisation policies and a heavy reliance on the market to solve various crises facingthe state.

The social imaginary within which these policy solutions are articulated regardsindividuals as consumers and education as a private good. This imaginary seeks toreplace an older imaginary that associated education with the public good, throughwhich social collectivities were created in relations of cultural exchange and reciproc-ity. Nation states were responsible for sustaining this image, and by and large people’simaginary included the view that education policies had an important role to play inarticulating and working for the public good.

Over the past two decades however there has been a profound shift in thinkingabout educational policy, with neo-liberalism precepts becoming ubiquitous—a partof our social imaginary. How has this happened? How have the languages, concepts,categories, imagery of thought, and systems of representation associated with neo-liberalism become so globally dominant? We cannot address this question withoutunderstanding how social imaginaries are formed and travel through time and spaceunder the conditions of contemporary globalisation; how knowledge is now globallydistributed and networked not only through systems of intergovernmental communi-cation but also through popular media; and how the normative discourse of globali-sation has itself contributed to it becoming politically hegemonic.

Some factors affecting this shift in social imaginary, of course, lie within thepolitical dynamics of a particular nation state, which involves local systems ofcommunication, political configurations and corporate interests. The state remainsvitally implicated in forging neo-liberal formations in a particular manner, against thepolitical and historical backdrop relevant to that nation state. But in the era of global-isation, the processes internal to the nation state are affected, in a deep sense, by thebroader global processes, even if these are articulated and refracted through the localspecificities. Indeed, as Wood (2003) has pointed out, the globalisation of capitalistimperatives presuppose a central role for the state in providing the social conditionsnecessary for capital accumulation. It requires the state to forge subjectivities whoseimagination is aligned with the interests of capital.

This is a highly significant observation because if we are to avoid the determinismof much of recent globalisation theories then we need to be mindful of our politicalagency, and not simply reify global processes, and regard the basic tenets of neo-liberalism as natural and inevitable. They will appear natural and inevitable only if we

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allow ourselves to be so disciplined and controlled, by states, markets and otherpowerful interests. To regard the neo-liberal shift in contemporary social imaginaryas a necessary consequence of globalisation is to presuppose a broader discourse ofcapitalist triumphalism, which is suggestive of Fukuyama’s (1992) flawed vision of‘the end of history’. It is to assume that recent neo-liberal education policy reformsare a necessary outcome of the structural conditions under which they are developed;and that these conditions are anchored in a global economy that shape, in some func-tional way, the policy options we have.

However, the view that globalisation has its own deterministic logic draws ourattention ‘disproportionally upon the global economy, reified as a pre-given “thing”,existing outside of thought’, the logic of which not only explains the development ofpolicies but even determines the subjectivity of people, ‘without ever interrogatingthem about what they are up to’ (Smith 2000, p. 6). It moreover privileges theeconomic over the sociocultural and political processes. And as Michael Smith adds,it gives ‘scant attention to the discursive and material practices by which people createthe regularised patterns that enable and constrain them; these discourses lack aneffective theory of political agency, or any other kind of agency’ (2000, p. 6). It over-looks the contention central to this paper that our imaginaries are socially created andsustained, and that it is possible to have a different social imaginary with respect tothe contemporary global processes.

If this is so, then we need to explain the wide-ranging acceptance of neo-liberaleducational policies by national Governments around the world in terms of a set ofhistorically specific processes articulated through various power configurations. Inthe contemporary era, these processes are inherently global, even if they work in vari-ous locally contingent and historically specific ways. In a recent paper, I have soughtto understand these processes as involving circulation of ideas; convention andconsensus; competition and cooperation; and coercion (Rizvi, 2004). I have arguedthat, together, these processes combine to explain what appears to be an unmistak-able trend towards global convergence of educational policy ideas around neo-liberalprecepts.

The first of these processes relates to the global circulation of ideas and ideologies,increasingly powered by developments in transportation, information, and commu-nication technologies. With the developments in technologies, the internationalmobility of people and information has never been greater. This mobility has enabledideas to be exchanged among policy makers and researchers coming together fromdifferent countries, even if this exchange is not symmetrical in its power configura-tions. So, for example, the ideas emanating from the west have a greater chance ofbecoming accepted, even if they are self-serving. A new policy space has thus emergedthat allows ideas and ideologies to be produced and distributed instantaneously, butin ways that are uneven.

This space has often been sponsored by intergovernmental organisations such asthe OECD, UNESCO and the European Union. While these organisations often insistthat they are only providing forums for open and free exploration of educational ideas,they find it hard to hide their own positions committed with respect to neo-liberal

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presuppositions. In recent years, for example, the OECD, which views itself as a forumof the free exchange of ideas, has become a major carrier of neo-liberal policy thinkingabout education: it has become a policy actor in its own right (Henry et al., 2001). Atconferences and in journals where educational ideas circulate, it is often difficult todiscern the extent to which there is free exchange of ideas or if indeed the policy debateshave already been constructed within the dominant neo-liberal framework. It is impor-tant to recognise that the circulation of educational ideas and ideologies is not merelya function of globalisation but involves actual historical processes, human agents,organisations, and Governments within a framework of particular configurations ofpower and hegemonic relations.

A second set of processes through which the neo-liberal imaginary is becomingdominant relates to international conventions, embodying consensus betweenparties. These conventions have invariably led developing countries in particular toaccept neo-liberal ideologies, even if there has been political opposition to them.Perhaps the best-known recent example of a neo-liberal convention is the WashingtonConsensus. The term, Washington Consensus, refers to ‘the lowest common denom-inator of policy advice addressed by the Washington-based institutions to LatinAmerican countries’ (Williamson, 1990, p. 9).

According to Williamson, the Washington Consensus is a product of ‘the intellec-tual convergence’, which is designed to get most of the countries of Latin Americaand elsewhere to accept a set of common assumptions about economic reform andinstitutional governance. George Soros (1998) calls these assumptions ‘marketfundamentalism’ and suggests that much of their acceptance worldwide is in no smallmeasure due to the persuasive rhetoric of right wing think tanks in the US, devotedto the creation of a neo-liberal imaginary about economic, social and indeed educa-tional policy.

A third set of processes relates not so much to the covert pressures of consensusand conventions but much more explicitly to coercive strategies, such as those repre-sented by Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP). These programs are created osten-sibly because developing countries are unable to meet the payment schedules on theirdebts to international banks, such as the World Bank and the International MonetaryFund (IMF). But before these countries are permitted to renegotiate schedules ofdebt repayment, they are forced to meet a range of conditions—in order to ‘bettermanage their economy’ and ‘get their house in order’. And while these conditions areoften assumed to have the status of contracts, they often are negotiated under coer-cive demands of the banks and require debtor nations to pursue the privatisation ofeducation, among other policies, as a condition of loans.

It is not only the international lending agencies that demand neo-liberal restructur-ing of educational systems in the developing countries as a condition of loans to them,the transnational corporations (TNC) offering to invest do as well. The relationshipbetween TNCs and Governments is a complex one, involving dynamics of bothconflict and cooperation. Dicken (1998) argues that sometimes Governments andTNCs may be rivals, but they also collude with one another. In the global economy,Governments need the TNCs to help them in the process of material wealth creation,

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while TNCs require the nation states to ‘provide the necessary supportive infrastruc-tures, both physical and institutional, on the basis of which they can pursue theirstrategic objectives’ (Dicken, 1998, p. 276) A major component of their demand isthat education be restructured along market lines, with policies more conducive tothe creation of a human resource pool better to meet their labor needs.

And finally, a fourth set of processes involves cooperation among nations. Perhapsthe best example of such cooperation is the Bologna Declaration (1999). Signed by29 European countries in 1999, it pledges to reform their higher education systemsin a convergent way. The Declaration insists that the reform process it prescribes isnot a path towards an imposed uniformity over national higher education withinEurope but ‘reflects a search for a common European answer to common Europeanproblems’. It uses the ‘harmonisation’ instead. The action programs set by theDeclaration are designed to enhance the employability and mobility of citizens,supposedly conditioned by globalisation. But the Declaration barely masks its ideo-logical assumptions. Despite its insistence upon the principles of diversity andnational autonomy, it nonetheless assumes the importance of Europe-wide commit-ment to neo-liberal reforms in higher education. While it does not completelysupport liberalisation and deregulation of higher education, its main objectives arenevertheless informed by a market logic—the need for the European system tobecome a more effective and efficient player in the highly competitive global marketin higher education.

Of course, I do not want to claim that these four processes represent an exhaustivelist of the processes through which neo-liberal policy ideas have become globallyconvergent. But what my analysis does suggest is that, in combination with eachother, they are working very effectively to create a new social imaginary around neo-liberal precepts; and that we need to understand these processes not only analyticallybut through sound empirical research designed to locate local and national educa-tional policy developments within a broader framework of the global systems ofcommunication and power relations and the global processes of interconnectivity andinterdependence.

If national policies, which have been the objects of our research efforts, have them-selves acquired international, transnational and global dimensions, then we need toask how this has become so, and what implications this has for thinking aboutnational policy programs, local policy initiatives and internationalising policydialogue. It is this research agenda that is, in my view, fundamental to the globalisa-tion of educational policy research. But beyond this, it is essential to our attempts todevelop an alternative educational policy agenda to neo-liberalism, which demandsnot only fine sounding policies but also the creation of an alternative social imaginarycommitted to strong democracy and global justice.

I believe that it is abundantly clear now that the policy manifestations of neo-liberalism are globally distributed; and if this is so then the resistance to neo-liberalimaginary has to be globally articulated as well. This requires, as Appaduraisuggests, both a deparochialisation of the research ethic and attempts to give realsubstance, beyond rhetorical gestures, to the idea of ‘globalization from below’.

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This demands an understanding of the differentiated impacts of neo-liberal globali-sation on the first world and the third, an effort to take seriously the needs andinterests of the marginalised nations within the narrative of global capitalism, andan dialogic engagement with educational policy researchers in global networks in amanner that is both serious and reciprocal. Given the interconnected and interde-pendent nature of our communities and interests, the need to develop a genuinelyinternational and democratic community of educational policy researchers is indeedvital and urgent.

Notes on contributor

Fazal Rizvi is Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at theUniversity of Illinois. His previous appointments include PVC (International)at RMIT and founding Director of the Monash Centre for Research inInternational Education. He, with others, recently completed a major reportfor UNESCO on globalisation and recent shifts in educational policy in theAsia Pacific region. He is an international panel member on UK’s ResearchAssessment Exercise (RAE 2008).

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