Economic ‘revelations’ and the metaphors of the meltdown: an educational deconstruction

Abstract

This article subjects contemporary informed discourse on the Credit Crunch/Great Recession/Long Recession to educational analysis and deconstruction. Such pro-capitalist but not uncritical discourse is well represented by the UK Financial Times, whose columns between 2008 and 2012 comprise most of our data. We argue that the metaphors of the 'meltdown' are significant and performative, allowing variously moralised narratives to emerge as implicit diagnoses and remedies. In particular we identify a 'domestic' register of metaphors whose contained and homely tropes of austerity, prudence, book-balancing and so on stand in dramatic contrast to a more melodramatic register, centring on various disaster scenarios. What is of most interest is that financial journalists and commentators switch between these registers, and allow 'crossovers' between them which are powerful in their discursive effects and political persuasiveness. These metaphorical discursive resources are intimately connected to the sorts of educational registers that characterise the 'knowledge economy'. We conclude that our cultural ability to tell these sorts of stories rests as much on an underlying moral and theological storying as it does on any 'scientific' economic account (if such there can be, which we doubt). In this way we seek to educate economic discourses that are, as it were, 'economical with the truth'.

Employability and higher education: the follies of the ‘Productivity Challenge’ in the Teaching Excellence Framework

“…As other authors have remarked (e.g. Stronach et al, 2014; This issue is, coincidentally, raised in the Green and White Papers on the TEF (BIS, 2015; 2016). The Green Paper claimed that employers not only believe that graduates lack the skills they need, but have difficulty in judging the quality of applicants because of 'grade inflation'.…”

“…Here the administrator has replaced the academic as central to decisionmaking and practices (Shore, 2008), and there is less and less that takes place within universities that "legitimates itself by reason alone, by its own practice" (Kavanagh, 2009). As Stronach et al (2014) describe, "The 'educational' has quite dramatically been dispossessed of its philosophical, psychological, and historical roots. A language of proliferating 'capitals' has taken over, prefaced on notions of quantified educational outcomes, league tables, and bolstered by a 1992 Nobel Prize, no less (Gary Becker)" (320).…”

Euro crisis metaphors in the Spanish press

“…While not trying to be exhaustive, some examples of this type of study include the analysis of typical crisis metaphors -meltdown (Kelly, 2001;Stronach et al, 2013), turbulence and turmoil (White, 2004), tsunami (Pühringer & Hirte, 2013) -the use of abstract concepts to explain different economic processes -market of ideas (Sparrow & Goodin, 2001), growth (White, 2003), container (Alejo, 2010) -or the references to specific thematic fields -nautical metaphors (Gallego Hernández, 2010), health and disease (Peckham, 2013;Ubonait & Seskauskien, 2007;Williams et al, 2011), evolution and natural selection (Pessali, 2009;Watkins, 2010), and living organisms or machines (O'Mara, 2015;Silaski & Durovic, 2010;Wang et al, 2013).…”

Deconstructing the Intercultural Learning of a Doctoral Group Undertaking Qualitative Research—Or how not to do a ‘White PhD’

“…Knowing English but not well enough to feel competent at doctoral-level intellectual tasks; there is a flavour of the French/Flemish incomprehension there. Third, there is the remedy of a sort of 'radical equality': The doctoral group is, I think, the only one in the country (in education at least) where the group publishes before its members complete their doctorates (Frankham et al, 2014;Stronach et al, 2013) and which acts together as a thinking group, rather than stays in its 'doctoral silo'. Fourth, there is an attempt at breaking the hierarchies of institutionalised knowledge that Jacotot and Rancière criticised, which takes us back to the business of calling the 'Professor', 'Mark'.…”

“…There is much in contemporary educational and social research in the 'West' to suggest just such a 'last great enclosure' (Stronach, Clarke, & Frankham, 2014). In which case we need to be clear: We need more anarchy, not the chaos of more order.…”