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Show Me the Money! Neoliberalism at Work in Education

Article  in  Forum for Promoting 3-19 Comprehensive Education · January 2012

DOI: 10.2304/forum.2012.54.1.23

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FORUM
Volume 54, Number 1, 2012
www.wwwords.co.uk/FORUM

Show Me the Money!

Neoliberalism at Work in Education

STEPHEN J. BALL

ABSTRACT Neoliberalism is often addressed by commentators and critics as a set of

ideas or a doctrine. This article considers neoliberalism as a set of financial practices and
exchanges --- as about money and profit --- and goes on to suggest that as practitioners,
researchers, activists we need to understand and engage with that logic and its
mechanisms. Examples are given of the role of money in all aspects of education policy
and education reform.

The unstated and usually unexamined subtext of neoliberalism is not doctrine

but money, particularly and crucially in the form of profit. Of course, states are
also about money. Policies cost money, and that money must come from
somewhere, and one of the responses of states around the world to the 2008
financial crisis has been to make ‘cuts’ in public spending and to look for ways
of doing policy cheaper --- marketisation and privatisation are taken to be one
way of doing policy cheaper, as well as more effectively. ‘The expansion of
market relations allows, in theory, a lower level of public spending, and
therefore a lower level of taxation’ (Connell et al, 2009, p. 332). However, in
most education policy research money is rarely mentioned and is overwritten by
a focus on ideas and practices. Even when subjected to the arcane mercies of the
economics of education, issues of funding are dealt with as abstractions.
However, in the interface between education policy and neoliberalism money is
everywhere. Policy itself is now bought and sold, it is a commodity and a profit
opportunity, and there is a growing global market in policy ideas. Policy work
is also increasingly being out-sourced to profit-making organisations, which
bring their skills, discourses and sensibilities to the policy table, for an hourly
rate or on contract to the state.

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Stephen J. Ball
Alongside this, bits of policy, bits of the state, bits of statework, are now
owned by the private sector --- these bits are also traded. Private equity and
global education businesses are interested in profitable education enterprises.
State schools and hospitals built through Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and
Public---Private Partnership (PPP) schemes are owned and run by banks, builders
and management service companies and leased back to the state --- and are again
often very profitable and again are traded. There is also a lively market in
private educational organisations --- schools and universities --- which are being
bought and sold, bundled together, merged --- Apollo, the largest private higher
education provider in the USA, recently bought UK company BPP Holdings for
just over $600 million in anticipation of the award to BPP of degree-awarding
powers. In 2011 Apollo wrote off a loss of $170 million against the BPP
acquisition. In all of this education is a service commodity, or is real estate
(buildings and infrastructure), or a brand, alongside any other commodity or
capital asset and is treated accordingly, subject to the same business strategies,
the same generic management techniques, and the same systems of value (in
both senses of the word). This of course brings into play new kinds of decision-
making, new ‘bottom lines’, new interests. In the world of business
shareholders, investors and stock market value, profitability is what counts in
the final analysis.
Nonetheless, the argument is now being made that the disciplines of profit
are what is needed to reform and re-energise the public sector; either in the
form of ‘social capitalism’ or ‘social enterprise’. That is, enterprise can succeed
where the state has failed. As Bill Gates argued at the 2008 World Economic
Forum:
The Challenge here is to design a system where market incentives,
including profits and recognition, drive those principles to do more
for the poor.
I like to call this idea creative capitalism, an approach where
governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the
reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or
gain recognition, doing work that eases the world’s inequities.
Here, then, profit becomes a force for good, at exactly the same time as it
brought the western financial system to the brink of collapse.
The discipline of profit, through enterprise and entrepreneurism is being
used to neoliberalise public sector education from within and without ---
endogenously and exogenously. In the former, it does this by devolving budgets
and encouraging educational institutions to be entrepreneurial, and thus to
generate increasing amounts of their budget from non-state sources, as well as
to seek ways of cutting their costs. This is interrelated with and partly
dependent upon policies of labour force deregulation and flexibilisation and
tends to produce ‘a growing workforce of part-time and casual contract labour
at the bottom of organisations’ (Connell et al, 2009, p. 332) --- the deployment
of Learning Support Assistants in English schools is a case in point.

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 SHOW ME THE MONEY!

The critical point of interface between market and state is that of

regulation, as represented in neoliberal discourse in the concept of ‘limited
government’. Increasingly within contemporary politics the issue is not whether
there should be public service markets or not, market logics have become
‘naturalised’ (Tickell & Peck, 2003, p. 17), but how much and how
loosely/tightly regulated. Indeed, the state is increasingly involved in
facilitating, extending and managing markets. This includes replacing state
organisations with voluntary, social-purpose or profit organisations, the
contracting out of services or by making more private education provision
available both in the form of private universities, high-cost international
schools, private school chains, low-cost, storefront schools for the poor, and
various forms of virtual and online learning.
Money, as profit, is significant, and needs to be researched in another
sense --- that is when it is ‘given’ --- the increasingly significant role of
philanthropy in education. The ‘new’ philanthropists like Gates, Omidyar
(eBay), Dell, Walton, Broad, etc. want to ‘give back’ that which they generated
in the form of profit from their businesses. However, they want to use their
donations in a businesslike way as ‘investments’ with good returns. Here money
is power in a number of ways: the power to get things done --- build schools,
start up programmes, pay for bursaries and the power to ‘partner’ with
governments in solving social problems and the power to speak and enact
policy, sometimes over and against the wishes of governments, in local and
transnational arenas. As a result, policy is being done in different places now ---
there is a respatialisation of policy. Indeed, new policy initiatives, like low-cost
schools for the poor, attract financial ‘investment’ from both business and
business philanthropy --- venture capital and venture philanthropists --- and are
producing new sorts of organisations and organisational relationships that blur
traditional distinctions between public, voluntary, philanthropic and for-profit.
There are then, perhaps, different sorts of money involved here. There is big
money and small money; both multinational businesses and local entrepreneurs;
multimillion dollar investments and micro-loans. The microfinance business is
enterprise as a solution to social and economic problems writ small (Stewart et
al, 2011). In India, microfinance is now indeed a business, and some
multinational banks are also getting interested in generating profit through such
micro-loans. This is moving a long way from the original principles of
Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank. More research is needed on the
evolving microfinance sector although a recent systematic review of micro-
credit research concluded that:
some people are made poorer, and not richer, by microfinance,
particularly micro-credit clients. This seems to be because: they
consume more instead of investing in their futures; their businesses
fail to produce enough profit to pay high interest rates; their
investment in other longer-term aspects of their futures is not
sufficient to give a return on their investment; and because the

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Stephen J. Ball
context in which microfinance clients live is by definition fragile.
(Stewart et al, 2011, p. 6)
Money is also important in getting neoliberalism, as a doctrine and as a set of
policy ideas, into the public and political imagination. That is, funding for
advocacy, ‘research’ and ‘influence’ activities in making neoliberalism thinkable,
possible, obvious and necessary as ‘a new dominant social ideology’ (Connell et
al, 2009, p. 333). This is part of what Tickell and Peck refer to as the ‘deep
process’ of neoliberalisation, and they argue that ‘one of the more far-reaching
effects of this deep process of neoliberalisation has been the attempt to sequester
key economic policy issues beyond the reach of explicit politicisation’ (Tickell
& Peck, 2003, p. 16). This is done, in part, within various forms of policy
advocacy; money and ideas work to join up advocacy activities to policy
proposals and to programmes of reform. This is another form of the investment
of profits for future returns. In this case capital, through philanthropic
foundations, invests in the work of think tanks and advocacy networks and
policy entrepreneurs with the intention and hope of exacting extensions to the
commodification of the social, the creation of new markets and the deregulation
of existing ones. As Connell et al (2009, p. 333) put it: ‘Neoliberals continue to
attack public enterprise, bureaucrats, red tape, regulatory agencies, unions,
cooperatives, welfare dependency, and other hangovers from what they see as a
discredited past’. In relation to this, neoliberalism is well organised and very
practical. Networks like Atlas, IPN, Stockholm and Mont Pelerin enable the
movement of ideas, the legitimatisation of policy, the bringing of influence to
bear, the process of attrition in relation to the ‘discredited past’ as a
‘sociocultural logic’ (Connell et al, 2009 p. 333). All of this goes some way
towards demonstrating that neoliberalism is neither natural nor inevitable
(Tickell & Peck, 2003) in how it is being done and planned and enacted.
There are intimate but often unapparent relationships between critique,
advocacy, philanthropy, social enterprise, business (of various kinds), academia
and politics. Key individuals join up these social, political and economic fields ---
as carriers of the discourse and practice of neoliberalism. This connectivity is the
tissue, the substance of neoliberal attrition and advance --- roll back and roll out.
It is evident in links between US charter schools, private equity companies,
venture philanthropies, organisations critical of public education, think tanks,
and freelance educational consultants. It is evident in links between pro-market
foundations, policy entrepreneurs, government departments, the World Bank,
NGOs and commercial reading schemes (see Ball, 2012). It is evident in links
between the funding of educational conferences, the publication of pro-market
research and edu-businesses. It is evident in relations between multinational
banks, their Foundations, not-for-profit educational providers in late-developing
countries and new business opportunities. It is evident in a new generation of
hybrid policy entrepreneurs who operate across advocacy, politics, philanthropy
and business --- whom Dezalay and Garth (2002 p. 30) call neoliberal technopols
and who are ‘strongly embedded in an international market of expertise

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 SHOW ME THE MONEY!

modeled on the United States’ and whom Peck identifies as the ‘principle
agents’ of roll-out neoliberalism. These technopols play a key role in what
Dezalay and Garth call the ‘dollarization’ of post-Keynesian statecraft, which
takes place through a set of complex, dense and intersecting networks which
link together business schools, economic courses, treasuries and finance
ministries, policy agencies, think tanks and multilateral agencies. James Tooley
is one such technopol and policy entrepreneur (see Nambissan & Ball, 2010),
and his activities focus specifically on education and education policy. He is
prominent, indeed ubiquitous is the global education policy field, and his
modus operandi exemplifies the work of policy mobility and roll-out
neoliberalism. He operates on a number of levels, to give legitimacy to
neoliberal solutions through research, to persuade and co-opt governments and
philanthropists, to construct and animate infrastructures of financial and
discursive relations, and to put ideas into practice through start-up enterprises.
Education policy, education reform are no longer simply a battleground of
ideas, they are a financial sector, increasingly infused by and driven by the logic
of profit. As practitioners, researchers, activists we need to understand and
engage with that logic and its mechanisms. We need to read the business pages,
company reports and public service contracts. We need to understand the stock
market, business strategy and company accounts --- we need to follow the
money.

References
Ball, S.J. (2012) Global Ed. Inc.: new policy networks and the neoliberal imaginary. London:
Routledge.
Connell, R., Fawcett, B. & Meagher, G. (2009) Neoliberalism, New Public Management
and the Human Service Professions. Introduction to the Special Issue. Journal of
Sociology, 45(4), 331-338. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1440783309346472
Dezalay, Y. & Garth, B.G. (2002) The Internationalization of Palace Wars: lawyers,
economists and the contest to transform Latin-American states. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Nambissan, G.B. & Ball, S.J. (2010) Advocacy Networks, Choice and Private Schooling
of the Poor in India, Global Networks, 10(3), 1-20.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1471-
0374.2010.00291.x/abstract
Stewart R., van Rooyen, C., Majoro, M. & Wet, T. (2011) What is the Impact of
Microfinance on Poor People? A Systematic Review of Evidence from Sub-Saharan
Africa. London: EPPI-Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education.
http://www.mendeley.com/research/impact-microfinance-poor-people-
systematic-review-evidence-subsaharan-africa/
Tickell, A. & Peck, J. (2002) Neoliberalizing Space, Antipode, 34(3), 380-404.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8330.00247

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 Stephen J. Ball

STEPHEN J. BALL is Karl Mannheim Professor of the Sociology of Education

at the Institute of Education, University of London and Editor of the Journal of
Education Policy. His work is in ‘policy sociology’ and he has conducted a series
of ESRC funded studies which focus on issues of social class and policy. Recent
books include: Global Education Inc. (Routledge, 2012); How Schools do Policy
(with Meg Maguire & Annette Braun) (Routledge, 2012); The Education Debate
(Policy Press, 2008); Education Plc (Routledge, 2007); and with Carol Vincent
Childcare Choice and Class Practices (Routledge, 2005). He has an honorary
doctorate from Turku University, is visiting professor at the University of San
Andres and is a Fellow of the British Academy. Correspondence: [email protected]

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