capacity building: beyond state and market
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Capacity building: beyond state andmarketTerri Seddon aa Monash University , Clayton, AustraliaPublished online: 23 Feb 2007.
To cite this article: Terri Seddon (1999) Capacity building: beyond state and market, Pedagogy, Culture& Society, 7:1, 35-53, DOI: 10.1080/14681369900200054
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Capacity Building: beyond state and market
TERRI SEDDONMonash University, Clayton, Australia
ABSTRACT This article considers what happens to education under theimpact of twin dynamics of neo-liberal reform and globalisation in anAustralian Institute of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) located in thestate of Victoria. The pattern of policy reform in TAFE is documented inorder to emphasise the significant extent of marketisation, commercialisationand decentralisation in the vocational education and training sector. Theresponses by TAFE teachers and managers to these reforms are illustrated.The analysis indicates that while some teachers and managers either activelyresist or espouse these reforms, most work out innovative ways ofreconciling their old educational commitments with new entrepreneurialdemands. These hybrid practices or capacity-building strategies aredescribed and theorised. The article suggests that capacity-building entails arenorming of educational practice, but questions the political significance ofthese emergent practices given the contested image of the capacity builder –as teacher or as soft-skill manager.
In the 1990s, educational provision in Anglo-Saxon countries, like theUnited Kingdom and Australia, is caught between two great historicaltrends. On the one hand, there is neo-liberalism, which is driving a retreatfrom interventionist state planning and a complementary reassertion ofthe market. On the other hand, there is ‘globalisation’, that array of socialprocesses associated with the emergence of globalised flows of capital andinformation alongside the grounded and regionalised organisation ofinformational capitalism (Castells, 1998). The critical question is whathappens to education in the context of these twin dynamics, whichconstitute an era in which profit-seeking rides roughshod over humanneed?
This special issue of Pedagogy, Culture & Society suggests that thesecontextual dynamics are driving change to the extent that a new
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problematik for education can be discerned. Recent preoccupations withinstructional content and classroom delivery are being sidelined byquestions about education and social formation, about curriculum andwhat people become (Hamilton, 1999). In this article, I discuss thisproposal, examining the way changes in vocational education and trainingin Victoria, Australia, are playing out in the work of teachers and managersin an Institute of Technical and Further Education (TAFE).
The article draws on ethnographic data collected in 1996–97 atStreeton Institute of TAFE, an educational organisation akin to UnitedKingdom Colleges of Further Education and North American CommunityColleges. These data are part of a larger, ARC-funded study ofrestructuring in schools and TAFE in Victoria that attempted to find outwhat happened to educational practice and provision in schools and TAFEas Australian governments, Commonwealth and State, retreated fromnation-building and asserted marketisation in the context of globalisation(Seddon et al, 1998).
My aim in this article is two-fold. First, I present data from theresearch at Streeton that provides some evidence of an emergent newproblematik in education. Specifically, I show that the changing regulatoryframes of vocational education and training encouraged many teachersand managers to develop complex responses to the conflicting demandsarising from globalised market reform, but not simply jettison theirprevailing educational commitments. Rather, they reworked theirday-to-day practices in ways that led to a renorming of educationalpractice. These renormed educational practices are named:capacity-building strategies. Secondly, I examine capacity-building as anemergent form of educational practice within the new problematik with aview to clarifying its conceptualisation. What emerges is that ‘capacitybuilding’ is contested, being conceptualised within differentmeta-theoretical frames. I suggest that this meta-theoretical framing is acritical issue in the analysis of the new educational problematik because itenables the imagining of preferred educational futures, and the capacity totranslate problematik into willed-for and worked-for practical organisationof pedagogy, culture and society.
The Trajectory of Neo-liberal Reform in Education
There is now a substantial literature that documents the contemporaryretreat from interventionist state planning in favour of market mechanismsof social organisation and regulation. Whether this literature explainsthese trends in terms of the ascent of the New Right (Chitty, 1989), theimpact of post-Fordism (Brown & Lauder, 1992) or the character ofneo-liberalism (Marginson, 1997), the outcome is clear. Universal publicservice traditions of educational provision have been reshaped asquasi-markets that serve particular interests (Johnson, 1989). Thesetrends are evident in schools (Menter et al, 1996) technical and furthereducation (Ainley & Bailey, 1998), and universities (Readings, 1996;
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Slaughter & Leslie, 1997). In each case, the mode of regulation, determinedby the relationship of state and market, has been reworked, extending themarket and the cash-nexus, and reconstituting the state as a small, strongsteering agency largely disconnected from service provision (Robertson,1996).
This neo-liberal dynamic of re-regulation has been described, in theEnglish context, as rupturing the organisation of ‘modern’ education,which:
... combined a Fabian organizational style with a conservative approachto self (social) preservation; a project to modernize education as partof an expanding state sector supporting manufacture and commerce; agrand narrative of progress shaped by a particular sense of“Englishness” and studded with essential myths; a clear sense of abeginning in crisis, a middle of reconstruction and a juddering andsharp end. (Lawn, 1996, p. 1)
This rupture has reformed policy making in the United Kingdom (Ball,1990) and created a diversity of effects in schools (Bowe et al, 1992). It hasprompted more market-like behaviour by schools and their staff, but alsoencouraged resistant practices, especially in the interpretation andenactment of policy. As Lawn & Mac an Ghaill (1996) note, these changeswere not superficial, but profoundly altered the organisation and cultureof schools, and what it means to be an educator and to do education in‘new times’.
Australian research has added to this picture of educationalrestructuring by emphasising the way neo-liberal reform is botharticulated with and intensified by globalisation (Taylor et al, 1997). AsMichael Pusey (1992) noted in his early research on economic rationalism,the trajectory of neo-liberal reform in Australia has been associated withgovernment retreat from a nation-building project. The direction instead istowards international competitiveness. In education, this has led to astrong emphasis on vocationalism and internationally competitive skilldevelopment. In other domains of public policy, the emphasis has been onre-organisation and re-regulation that makes Australian contexts attractiveand, therefore, competitive in the market for international investment.
As Marginson (1998) argues, the significance of globalisation as aforce in the reform of public education is greater in Australia and NewZealand than in the United Kingdom, Europe or US because of the locationand history of these countries as semi-peripheral settler societiesdependent on England. Australia’s colonial status and emergingnationhood through the twentieth century underwrote the importance ofthe nation-building project and its institutions. The contemporaryarticulation between neo-liberalism and globalisation now erodes thisnation-building project and creates a deepening crisis of its institutions,which hinge, in part, on questions of national identity. The upshot is acrisis of public educational provision, which encompasses:
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� a resource crisis brought on by declines in government funding, linkedto a declining commitment to the nation-building role of publiceducation institutions;
� an identity crisis brought on by the corporatisation of internal systemsand cultures within public education providers;
� a crisis of global strategy: how does public education providers maketheir way, on-shore and offshore, in a globalising environment?(Marginson, 1998, p. 4)
These policy shifts have provided the backdrop to education reform inVictoria through the 1990s, but it is in vocational education and training,and particularly in public Institutes of TAFE, that their impact has beenmost acute.
Neo-liberal Reform in Vocational Education and Training
TAFE was institutionalised as a coordinated sector of public educationalprovision following the Kangan Report in 1974. This systematised a rangeof State-based adult education, abolished fees, and increased publicfunding to create a State-orchestrated system of technical and furthereducation. TAFE provided life-long education, and training for youngpeople and adults after the compulsory years of schooling. It had a longand proud tradition in apprenticeships, middle level skill development andsecond-chance education. It also had strong commitments to communityservice that were underpinned by close links with industry and with localcommunities.
In 1990, Australian State and Commonwealth governments agreed toreform the public TAFE sector into a national training market (Anderson,1997). This policy strategy served to harness private education andtraining provision, and also to reconstitute TAFE. TAFE was no longer seento be a sector of educational provision, but a publicly funded provideralongside and in competition with private providers.
Further reforms coalesced into a package popularly know as the‘National Training Reform Agenda’ (Lundberg, 1994). Its elements servedto rework the public-private relationship in vocational education andtraining, its funding base, and the organisation of curriculum andassessment (Marginson, 1997, pp. 211–212). A common framework forpublic and private provision was created by the development of a nationalrecognition and qualifications framework. This permitted recognition oftraining providers other than TAFE Institutes, and the portability ofcredentials between States and Territories. This was supplemented by thedevelopment of statistical collections that encompassed both public andprivate education and training activities.
Fees were re-introduced. TAFE was then encouraged to pursuefee-for-service activities, including the expansion of industry-basededucation and training, and international educational provision inAustralia and offshore. This encouragement entailed carrots and sticks:TAFE Institutes were allowed to retain commercial income without loosing
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their recurrent funding; recurrent funding declined; corporatemanagement strategies were introduced; competitive tendering and userchoice developed; and there was a relentless affirmation of markets andtheir benefits. Alongside this reform of TAFE, government leveredincreased industry commitment to fund training. This briefly took the formof a training levy, which required larger enterprises to provide 1% of theirpayroll (in 1990–1991) to formal training of their own workforce. If they didnot meet this requirement they had to donate the money to designatedtraining organisations or to the government. In 1993, the level offee-for-service training was considered sufficient and the levy waswithdrawn.
The provision of training was systematised by the introduction ofcompetency-based standards, curriculum and assessment. Thesestandards were articulated with industrial awards, and with nationalcompetency and qualifications frameworks that related standards acrossindustries and to different educational credentials. Early efforts to aligntraining with career progression and wages levels quickly diffused, leavingthe competency framework as an increasingly stand-alone technology oftraining.
In Victoria, the State Training Authority formalised its commitment tomarket reform in its statement of strategic directions published in 1994,stating that reform would be guided by five principles. These were:
From TAFE to VET – the maturing of the vocational education andtraining system, made up of a diverse range of providers whichcombine competitiveness with co-operative action in meeting thedemands of their clients.
From Supply to Demand Driven – emphasis on the needs of our clientsand the greater orientation of the system to a more client-focussedculture based on the relationships between providers and their clients.Improved responsiveness in the supply of vocational education andtraining will be driven by industry, enterprise and student demandrather than past patterns of supply.
From Activity to Outcome – focus on performance, both in terms ofefficiency and effectiveness. Best practice will be the goal for all partsof the system and will largely direct where resources flow in years tocome.
From Quantity to Quality – our products and processes, in particularcurriculum, the skills of teaching staff, and accreditation and regulationare critical to the ongoing relevance of the system. Continualimprovement of these is integral to the system’s success.
From Control to Devolved System – the strength of our system rests onthe responsiveness of providers to their clients. The relationshipbetween individual providers and enterprises and students will be a
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central focus of the system. This can best be achieved throughindependent and accountable providers. The management relations ofthe system must facilitate this, not hinder it. (State Training Board,1994)
The impact of reforms driven within these guiding principles has resultedin substantial decentralisation of vocational education and training, theassertion of consumer choice through the development of educationalmarkets and continuing centralised regulation through provider-–purchaser agreements. There has been a substantial commercialisation ofpublic sector TAFE Institutes, which now generate up to 50% of theirincome from non-recurrent sources. TAFE Directors fiercely defend theautonomy of their enterprises and energetically pursue commercialopportunities. Public service commitments persist in the Institutes, but inan increasingly ambiguous position.
The impact of these reforms on teachers and managers in TAFEInstitutes has been significant. Commercialisation has increased the rangeof fee-for-service workplace delivery and expanded offshore trainingprovision. Competency-based curriculum and assessment has createdsome changes in the way teachers have worked. Funding cuts, staff lossesand new work practices arising from corporatisation and qualityassurance have diversified and intensified the work of TAFE teachers.Changes in industrial relationships, the Institute’s power to hire and firestaff, and new skill requirements have increased dependence on sessionalstaff. So how have staff at Streeton responded to change?
Remaking TAFE: the case of Streeton Institute of TAFE
Times have been tough in Victoria’s TAFE Institutes. At Streeton Instituteof TAFE (the case study site), the director, Barry Klein, is uncompromisingabout the need to respond to new pressures (Angus, 1997). As Barry says,‘TAFE’s business is business’ and what comes first is his enterprise,Streeton. Barry sees his role as doing deals, competing for marketadvantage and re-organising Streeton to win in the competitiveenvironment. He sees Streeton as being ahead of the pack.
The changes in TAFE funding have required an aggressivelyentrepreneurial approach. As Barry notes:
The government at the moment (1996) ... takes off 1.5% productivitygain every year. Now in this place that’s about $700,000 per year comesout of your budget. So you have got to adjust the way of doingbusiness. An average staff is $50,000. There is 12 staff out the doortomorrow.
To some extent, Barry had foreseen the trend to reduced governmentfunding and had put in place strategies to offset the effect when he firsttook up the director’s position at Streeton in the late 1980s:
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The trigger really was survival because in the past we have beencentrally funded, centrally controlled agencies ... the government wasjust going to pump money in no matter how it was spent but now weare actually accountable for it. I saw when I first came here, that thisplace was doing nothing at all in terms of business activity. So I usedshock tactics. We’ve done pretty well. In 1989 we were bankrupt. Lastyear our profitability was over $4 million.
However, there are still uncertainties that make it hard to do propercostings and to feel safely buffered from market forces. The Institutescommunity service commitment is one of those uncertainties. As Barrynotes:
Anybody on a health card doesn’t have to pay student fees – or aminimum they pay is forty bucks instead of say five hundred for afull-time student. Now everybody can get a Health Card and so what itmeans is that this organisation must absorb – I think last year it wasabout eight hundred and sixty thousand dollars loss.
For some staff at Streeton, these changes have been a disaster. They viewthem as a complete retreat from education. The dollar rules andeverything is judged in terms of the financial bottom line. Geoff Inghammakes the point:
As I said to Barry Klein on several occasions, we’re not here becausewe want to be salespeople. We’re here because many of us want to beTeachers. Now you’re asking us to become commercial, to look at thecost-benefits and all that sort of thing – to balance the sheets, andthat’s not what we’re here for, that’s not where our mentality lies.(Original emphasis)
Other staff are far more enthusiastic. They are excited by the newchallenges and opportunities they encounter. These differences of opinioncreate some tensions in the workplace. The enthusiasts frequentlydescribe critics of the reform as ‘dinosaurs’, but the critics sometimeswear this label with pride. They see themselves defending educationalvalues that are under threat. In the course of our data collection, one ofthe so-called dinosaurs put a label on his door – ‘Jurassic Park’. Anenthusiast in a nearby office counter-moved. His door sign read ‘SiliconValley’ (Angus & Seddon, 1998a).
Between the dinosaurs and the ‘cowboys’ at Streeton, there are staffacross the Institute who are working out ways to reconcile the newdemands for commercialisation with their old commitments to education.In some areas, staff live with these contradictory trends in uncomfortableways, wrestling with new dilemmas in teaching, work organisation andinstitutional practices. In other areas, staff have found ways ofrationalising their participation in entrepreneurial activities in educationalterms. This has not been a cynical development, but a genuine process of‘renorming’ educational practice. It has involved reworking values andnormative orientations to create new imaginary, willed-for and worked-for
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scenarios, which not only enable individual and institutional survival, butalso provide a guide to practical action directed towards preferred yetfeasible futures. We called this kind of forward-looking, renormingeducational practices capacity-building (Seddon et al, 1998a).
Capacity-building Practices at Streeton
The data indicates that commercialisation at Streeton rarely producedinveterate dinosaurs or cowboys. Rather, many staff seemed to be seekingsome kind of educational practice that enabled them to survive –sometimes prosper – in the new environment, but without simply givingaway their educational ideals. Even the entrepreneurial Director, BarryKlein, acknowledged that educational practice was important. There is arisk to the organisation’s reputation if it were otherwise:
Anybody who’s an Australian or international student has got to beable to walk out of this place and say “We come from Streeton. Thisqualification means something”. Now, I can’t afford to dilute that in anyshape or form.
Staff at Streeton appeared to be pursuing educational practice for ‘newtimes’ by, first, reworking day-to-day strategies for practical action in waysthat put educational practices at the core of their work. They also creatednew narratives of education, which justified their work by reconstructingthe relationship between educational and entrepreneurial activity assynergistic, rather than antagonistic. This renorming of educationalpractice meant that individuals could justify their work and live withthemselves. It also created new imagined scenarios that guided practicalaction.
Capacity-builders attended to student’s learning needs by focusingtheir educational work towards enhancing student’s capacities for socialpractice. This meant more than educating students for work or for simpleachievement on competency assessments. Rather, they sought to developthe student’s capacities to act in complex environments, in workplacesand beyond.
Lisa Gordon, in hairdressing, for example, was excited about thereform of vocational education and training. The head of department inhairdressing had positioned the department in the vanguard of change,overcoming initial resistance by staff and ultimately cutting staff numbersfrom eleven to six. Lisa was brought in to develop competency-basedmaterials. These were reviewed and edited by staff, and presented in acomputer-managed form allowing students to have access to the wholecourse, including assessment tasks, on day 1 of their course. Along withthis, traditional classes were abandoned and classrooms renovated toform a model salon. A senior member of the Department described thechange:
We knocked a wall down, and we have a huge multi-activity classroomin there which the teachers love to hate, and it’s like being in a frantic
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salon, but that’s what industry is about. We want it to be like industry.We don’t want this insular little classroom where you have twelve littlestudents all doing twelve little things all at the same time. That’s notwhat they’re doing on a salon floor. This classroom is as close to asalon as we can humanly get. It’s got the noise. It’s got the activity. It’sgot the multi-activity as far as different services going on.
Lisa was an unqualified advocate of the new directions in training and washighly critical of those who expressed misgivings. She labelled opponentsof competency-based training (CBT) ‘academics’, and discounted theirobjections on the grounds that they were threatened by the openness ofthe approach and lacked experience in CBT. In her view, CBT provided apedagogy that empowered students. It let them work flexibly in aself-paced way, rather than being subject to the didactic methods andgatekeeping characteristic of secondary school teaching.
We get a lot of flack about CBT – minimum standards, minimum this,reductionist that, puts people into boxes, all this sort of stuff. I’veheard it all. When you see a student that has been labelled anon-achiever for their entire schooling get into a system where, all of asudden, “I’m allowed to achieve – there’s no time frames on you”, I getreally excited about it. I just think fantastic, because this student is notstupid. This student is not a hopeless case. It’s the fact that teachingstaff in their primary and secondary school didn’t identify theirlearning needs, and how they could best learn, and I think it’s fantastic!
This commitment to preparing students for authentic work contexts wasassociated with the recognition that students needed to be prepared toparticipate in wider communities. The teacher’s task was not just toeducate students, but to develop their capacities to act with effect indistinctive collectivities. Teachers acknowledged, implicitly or explicitly,that their educational work with individuals contributed to collectivecapacities for action. As one of the older trade teachers commented:
... as long as I’ve been teaching there’s been periods of educationalchange. I think one thing you could say – one consistent thing would beeach time there’s been a change it’s been under-resourced ... it’s beenheld to have great possibilities and great hopes, and then it hasn’t livedup to its promise. People have gravitated back to a basic sort of modeland I think the basic sort of model is probably just a characteristic ofhuman beings. We’re creatures that learn by somebody talking andshowing and that’s really always gravitated back to something that’snot much different to a tribal elder, sitting on a log talking to theyounger members of the tribe.
Staff who were able to clarify who they educated their students for –who their “tribe” was – appeared to be able to reconcile thecontradictions between entrepreneurial and educational activitiesmore readily than those who were uncertain. This created particular
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problems for staff who were charged with teaching offshore or tointernational students in Australia. (Brown, 1997)
Internationalisation had been pursued at Streeton because it was alucrative source of funds. As Barry notes:
International student recruitment is probably the most profitablebusiness in Australia ... At Streeton TAFE a full-time student – theprofitability is fifty four percent, so for every student who pays usseventy six hundred dollars there is about four thousand dollars profitout of it. And that’s a lot of money.
However, internationalisation also challenged the traditional nationalhorizons of public education, the idea that public education contributed tobuilding the nation by inducting its citizens into a national culture. Itproblematised the content to be taught because international students willnot become Australians, nor will they be cosmopolitan globalised workers.Rather, they will remain nationals of another country. This shift in culturalframes of reference also problematised the context in which judgementsabout student performance were made. This created real uncertainties forteachers:
I’ve had this dilemma two or three times where I’m teaching threeclasses of advanced certificate. One of them is all Asians ’cause theysort of think “give them a bit of comfort”. I’ve had to go to the head ofthe department and say “If I pass my Asian students (and only oneshould pass – that’s out of fourteen) – If I have to pass them then I haveto pass my non-Asian groups – my Australian groups, but some of themhave not attended very much. They’ve done fuck all work, but they’vestill got more nous with their language and so on to be able to scratchtogether a thirty out of a hundred, and that thirty out of a hundred isbetter than our Asian students who have attended faithfully but cannotunderstand the lectures and they’re getting twelve out of a hundred”.Its bad economics to fail our Asians so we pass them, and I’m saying“then we have to be fucking consistent and pass our non-attempting, orwhatever Australians –‘Oh I wouldn’t want to make that decision’” –and no-one wants to face this, and it’s happening, I’m told, throughout.
Staff in the animal care department did not face such extreme shifts inhorizons. While reform had increased off-campus workplace-basededucation, they still recognised that they were preparing their students towork in animal care occupations. This meant that their educational workwas focused firmly on the vocation of animal care. It involved educatingstudents to develop knowledge, skilled capacities to think and act, and themoral commitments that sustain the occupational community of animalcarers. With reduced resources, this commitment had driven majorinnovations in the organisation of their educational work (Seddon &Brown, 1997).
Funding cuts had reduced staff in the animal care department. Therewere only three permanent teachers left. Most of the teaching was done by
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sessional staff, who worked in the animal care industry and taughtsessionally. Generally, these sessional teachers had little experience ofpedagogy, but they brought up-to-date industry experience in to thedepartment. As Jim Stevens, the assistant head of department, noted youcould see the funding cuts and other reforms coming and this meant thatsomething had to be done:
Like it was going to be done, and I was really concerned about the wayin which it was going to be done, so I put a submission in to do itbecause I felt ... I say this in a fairly humble (way). I thought I hadsomething to contribute to it and I thought if it was going to be done itshould be done by an educator. It shouldn’t be done by an externalstatistician, but it should be done in a caring, democratic way, wherethe information produced would be owned by the group. (Originalemphasis)
Jim worked with other staff to accommodate decreased funding by findingways of reducing the time spent on teaching preparation. First, theyshared teaching resources and then computerised them so they could beeasily updated. This encouraged them to differentiate their pedagogy,using computer-assisted learning in association with face-to-face teachingactivities. The discussion of the shared materials, the responsibility formaking the materials accurate and the changes in teaching providedopportunities for discussions of pedagogy. Permanent teachers who werepedagogy-rich were able to induct sessional teachers who werepedagogy-poor into the work of educating students. Conversely, thesessional teachers were able to up-date permanent teachers in currentindustry practice, and this helped to build links between the departmentand employers. These links were extended by a further innovation aimedat differentiating the process of assessing students. Three assessmentpractices were developed. There was a computerised bank of test itemsand students were free to use this item bank to self-assess their work.These results were recorded, but staff placed little weight on them. Staffplaced more emphasis on their own judgements of student workundertaken in the course of short assessment tasks: the production of areport, question and answer dialogue, or performance of a task. Inaddition to these assessment practices, the department institutedindustry-based assessment. As Jim commented:
Where that came from was industry saying ... some industry saying “Wedon’t believe that the people that you are graduating are able to dowhat it is that you say they can do”. So we said, “Well, why don’t youtake control of a verification process? So you verify their skills in anindependent nature”.
The upshot of these innovations was that animal care developedcurriculum materials that could be sold or used offshore, generatingincome for the department. Their success in income generation andinnovation was acknowledged in the Institute and this buffered them fromresource constraints. They extended industry links, which helped to
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buttress their political position in the Institute and they resolved thedestabilisation of their traditional educational practices by affirming theircommitment to educating students for the vocation of animal care. Thisentailed a double commitment: to educate their students as individuals,and to sustain and develop their occupational community, its knowledge,skills, ethos and social practices.
As the case of animal care suggests, capacity-builders recognisedthemselves as members of communities into which they inducted theirstudents. Capacity-building for students therefore depended oncapacity-building for staff. To some extent, staff could deal with the newdemands at work by drawing on their accumulated resources and thewisdom of experience, but rapid change taxed these. They had to reworktheir cultural resources and those of their collectives, reassert identitiesand actively create collective contexts for capacity building. In animalcare, this took the form of pedagogical discussions and the reassertion ofcommitments to their occupational community. In hairdressing, incomegenerated through entrepreneurial activity was used to support staffdevelopment, including overseas study tours.
What underpinned these views of capacity-building for students andstaff was the acknowledgement that opportunities for learning werediverse and, whatever form they took, these opportunities enhancedcapacities for action. This meant that capacity-building was seen indevelopmental terms, unleashing an unfolding process through whichindividuals and collectives learned to learn. The outcome was not finite,simple commodities that could be bought and sold without effort. Rather,these capacities were processual, things which individuals and collectiveshad to work for. Once capacities for social practice were developed, theireffects could not be restricted because the capacities influencedindividuals’ entire way of being in the world and their contributions tosocial life. These relationships of learning established complex networksof social obligation, not just simple transactions based on commodityexchange.
Amongst those teachers and managers that could be characterisedas ‘capacity-builders’, there was a clear recognition that market reform,commercialisation and the shift to institute self-management had changedthe context in which they worked. However, they continued to affirm thetransformative character of educational work and operationalised theireducational values in ways that not only accommodated the imperativesand demands associated with marketised self-management, but alsoexploited the new structures to extend educational opportunities. As anassociate director in another TAFE Institute commented, we ‘do businesswith an educator’s heart’ (Taylor, 1998).
The development of capacity-building strategies at Streetonappeared to depend upon staff recognising change and having thecapacity to reconsider their work in changing contexts, to question bothold and new orthodoxies, to think against the grain of institutionalpractices and to draw on new cultural resources to facilitate the remaking
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of institutional narratives. Such critical and inventive thinking, when linkedto practical action, resulted in a kind of institutional pragmatism. AtStreeton, it seemed that such sophisticated remaking of educational workrequired staff, individually or collectively, to exercise:� contextual awareness, the capacity to read and respond inventively to
changing circumstances;� values of a democratic, collective and caring style;� commitment to community organised and identified as local social
networks with distinctive collective cultural property – theseidentified networks existed in many different geographic and culturalforms;
� recognition of the need to sustain and develop their communitiescultural resources (their knowledge, skills, attitudes and capacities toact) if communities were to survive;
� an organisational orientation that sees organisation as a way of buildingcollegiality and collectivity, establishing a context to sustainindividuals in relationships with one another, and in the struggle toresolve new and difficult dilemmas;
� a recognition of different publics and a commitment to publicisingachievements to be accountable, build support and to press theemerging benefits into wider communities;
� pedagogical commitments which pursue the centrality of learning asthe means of enhancing individual’s and group’s capacities to act forthe benefit of all;
� political nous that analyses opportunities for action in a hard-headedand unsentimental way, and knows how to smooth the path of change;and
� a lightness of spirit or ‘optimism of the will’ that is not unduly dimmedby the burden of uncertainty, by rancor or irrational pessimism.
The outcome was a kind of ethical entrepreneurialism, which integratednew educational practices and new narratives of education, whichprovided a normative framework for reconciling educational andentrepreneurial imperatives. As one of the teachers in animal carecommented, the department:
has become a business. I mean, I think to survive you have to seeyourself as a business that is providing education to the client who,from a policy point of view, is industry, but from the educator’s point ofview is the people that come in here on a daily basis. I think it’swrestling with that – trying to keep industry happy but making surethat we treat our customers not as customers or as clients, but ... in abroad sort of educational perspective. I mean, we really do see them aspeople and, sure, we have to justify our existence under policy, butthey are still people with problems, people with issues, and, from andeducational perspective, that’s just as important as meeting thedemands of industry. (Original emphasis)
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Imagining the Capacity-builder
In this analysis of Streeton, the capacity-builder emerges as the hero whoreasserts and modernises educational practice within the constraints ofneo-liberal reform. S/he is the midwife of the new problematik ineducation. However, who is the capacity-builder?
In this article, the term ‘capacity-building’ was derived from BobConnell’s (1995) analysis of education as a distinctive kind of‘transformative work’ that is orientated to the ‘development of capacitiesfor social practice’ (p. 97).
This notion is rooted in the view that, like other blue and white-collarworkers, teachers are involved in a particular kind of work. It haspurposes and objectives that are realised through particular social andtechnological organisation in which teachers are shaped in particularways to do particular things. This work is negotiated, as in otherworkplaces, between employees and employers in the context of broadersocial and economic pressures and constraints.
However, teaching differs from other work because the core businessof teaching is not to produce fixed products – so many facts absorbed, somany competencies achieved. Rather, its object is learning. Its primaryoutcome is to develop in students an expansive capacity to learn and tocontinue learning through life.
As Connell argues, the organisation of teachers’ work has alwaysbeen subject to renegotiation as a result of practical politics at both thelocal workplace and wider social level. What has been fought over is thecontested core of education: the establishment of a learning labourprocess that organises productive cooperation between student andteacher. Through processes of co-production by teacher and student,learning outcomes are generated that take the form of increased capacitiesfor social practice. These capacities contribute to individual developmentand also the development of collective capacities for action. They areproperty of the individual and the collective
In this conceptualisation of capacity-building, the teacher committedto bottom-up cooperative and democratic learning is the hero.
Yet the concept of ‘capacity-building’ exists in another lexicon. Thisderives from the convergence of development studies (Edralin, 1996–97)and critiques of neo-classical economics that have stressed theinstitutional framing of markets (Goodin, 1996) and the social embeddnessof market relationships (Swedberg, 1997). It has been appropriated by theWorld Bank to advance structural adjustment now that the costs of freemarket neo-liberalism are becoming impossible to ignore in Russia,various ‘Asian Tigers’, Indonesia and, increasingly, Latin America. With therecognition that fixing up ‘economic fundamentals’ may not be sufficient tooptimise the globalising economy, and its social and politicalinfrastructure, attention has turned to the way markets are embedded insociety and culture. The new economic challenge is to orchestrate state
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regulation, social institutions and community activities to create a mediumof trust and reciprocity that makes market relations possible (Fukuyama,1995).
In this lexicon, the concept of ‘social capital’ is critical but highlyambiguous (Wall & Ferrazzi, 1998; Woolcock, 1998; Fine, 1999). ‘Socialcapital’ has been affirmed as a means of reconsolidating more egalitarianneo-social democratic organisation of society – a ‘third way’ beyond stateand market (Cox, 1995; Latham, 1998; Giddens, 1999). It has also beenappropriated into economic discourse, where it refers to ‘features ofsocial organisation such as networks, norms and trust that facilitatecoordination and cooperation for mutual benefit’ (Falk & Harrison, 1998, p.613) that can be managed for economic development through shaping themicrodecisions of individual investors (Fine, 1999). ‘Capacity building’refers to this microeconomic activity:
A form of investment within the local population to upgrade localphysical and human resources ... The capacity of a community is saidto be the combined influence of a community’s commitment, resourcesand the skills that can be deployed to build on community strengthsand address community problems and opportunities. (Falk & Harrison,1998, p. 612)
Here, economic management of the social, in terms of the aggregatebehaviour of abstract individuals and representative agents, is grounded.The hero is the soft-skill manager who strategically invests resources togrow the company or the community.
Clearly, the capacity-builder and capacity-building practices arecontested: claimed as the agent of the new softer neo-liberalism workingon behalf of globalising informational capitalism and claimed as the agentof subaltern social forces reasserting human values over profitability.
Conclusion and Beginnings
This article has provided some evidence of a new problematik ineducation, illustrated with reference to the changing activities andjustifying narratives evident within a Victorian Institute of TAFE. I suggestthat the ‘capacity-building’ strategies described represent a contestedre-organisation and renorming of educational practice within the dynamicsof neo-liberalism and globalised informational capitalism. Their emergenceunderscores the problematic question today: who do educators educatefor? Within the nation-building project, education was for the nation. Nowthe national imagined community is fractured into confusing localised andglobalised communities. The character of capacity-building strategies alsosuggest that the erosion of national education is accompanied by anerosion of curriculum as bodies of knowledge associated with elite definednational culture. In their place, curriculum appears as an emergentpedagogic organisation of knowledge in practice.
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Exploring the image of the capacity builder reveals sharply differingconceptualisations of capacity-building, which articulate with differentmeta-theoretical frameworks. This conceptual conflict indicates that theimage of the capacity-builder is contested. It also problematises theconcept of ‘teacher’. Within the new problematik the capacity-buildercombines the work of pedagogue who nurtures, disciplines and teaches(Hamilton, 1999, p. 136), with the work of soft-skill manager andorganisational developer, managing economic, social and culturalresources, and creating conducive contexts that enable individual andcollective development.
This emergent practice of capacity-building might be described asethical entrepreurship, but such a description and the implicit question ofwhat’s ethical, highlights the difficulties of talking about the images andpractices of the capacity-builder in the absence of conceptual clarification.Exposing the conceptual and practical consequences of thinking about‘capacity-building’ within different meta-theoretical frames is an importantacademic task. Its extension to rethinking education, curriculum and theteacher in ‘new times’ also has practical political significance. Clarifyingthis new problematik means retheorising education within the currentsocial context in order to properly understand the significance of thepractical and normative shifts that are occurring in education within theframes of neo-liberalism and globalisation. And it means building on thesereconceptualisations to determine willed-for and worked-for scenarios thatwill reposition and re-articulate education, curriculum and teachers withwider social struggles.
In the space that remains, I can do little more than flag one line ofinquiry. Reconceptualising educational work and educational workers asteacher/managers (intellectual workers), who enable capacities for socialpractice in and beyond formal education and training, provides a basis forconsidering capacity-building in the development, not of social capital, butof ‘social labour’. It enables an investigation of the capacities for the actionof social labour within contemporary capitalism – an era in whichknowledge products or ‘immaterial labour’ (Lazzarato, 1996) are becomingprivileged over industrial production in wealth creation.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Marx pointed out thatindustrialisation released the productive power of labour throughcooperation within the labour process, but this power became identifiedas a beneficial feature of capital rather than labour:
The socially productive power of labour develops as a free gift tocapital whenever the workers are placed under certain conditions, andit is capital that places them under these conditions. Because thispower costs capital nothing, while it is not developed by the workeruntil his labour itself belongs to capital, it appears as a power whichcapital possesses by its nature – a productive power inherent incapital. (Marx, 1976, p. 451)
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In the late twentieth century, Negri (1996; also Witheford, 1994) suggests,social cooperation is not produced, but is presupposed in all theoperations of informational capitalism. This presupposition shifts thefracture line of industrial politics from the organisation of the labourprocess and the length of the working day to the antagonism betweensocial cooperation and profit-orientated command. It is this crucialantagonism that capacity-builders (as both teachers and soft-skillmanagers) mediate and it is this social location that makes their identity,practices and affiliations central to contemporary politics.
Acknowledgements
I acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council in fundingthis research and the contributions of my colleagues to the preparation ofthis article. I extend special thanks to David Hamilton, for provocative andvery helpful feedback on this article.
Correspondence
Terri Seddon, Faculty of Education, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria3168, Australia ([email protected]).
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