Rethinking the impact of globalization on higher education in the Asia-Pacific

• In Event: Globalization and reimagining higher education in Asia and Australia

Proposal

Over the past three decades, many scholars (Mok 2006; Gopinathan 2013; Yang 2018, for example) have described how globalization has impacted educational policy and practice across the Asia-Pacific. They have shown how globalization has become a core concept around which the requirements of educational restructuring have been articulated. The processes of globalization they have suggested, represent major shifts that are taking place within the global and regional economies, which no system of education can afford to overlook. Such shifts demand re-articulation of the purposes and governance of higher education. Accordingly, phrases such as the “global context”, the “global imperatives”, the global pressures’ and the “global competition” have been used widely across the region to drive educational reforms. In its extreme form, these demands for reform are expressed in terms of anxiety that points to the inadequacies of the current systems of higher education to prepare students for the global economic, cultural and political transformations. 

These narratives of higher education are underpinned by the idea that globalization is driven partly by major developments in new technologies and social media and partly by shifts in the global architecture of the world. These shifts are transforming the nature of societies since we are now able to access diverse sources of knowledge, values and lifestyles, and communicate and forge networks across national and cultural borders. Globalization has thus opened up new opportunities for the mobility of people, capital and ideas. Within the context of these changes, the demand for higher education has increased rapidly. As higher education has become “massified” (Trow 1972), it has resulted in a much more diverse body of students on campuses, the needs of whom, it is believed, cannot be adequately met by the existing approaches to the provision of higher education.  

While this account of globalization and its impact on higher education policy and practice has become commonplace across the Asia-Pacific, we want to argue that there is something misleading about the ways in which it is framed. The use of the term “impact” risks universalizing the logic of globalization. Globalization is treated as a naturalized phenomenon, external to the contexts in which it is interpreted and normatively deployed. It is portrayed as an irresistible force that policymakers need to understand in order to craft their response in line with its imperatives, articulated invariably in terms of a particular neoliberal social imaginary (Rizvi and Lingard 2010). In this paper, we maintain that this way of theorizing globalization sidesteps the fact that the political dynamics of globalization are experienced in a range of complex and different ways, and that to describe globalization in such reified terms is to fail to recognize how its hegemony is constructed. In contrast, we propose that just as the anthropologist Aihwa Ong (2007) has shown neoliberalism to be exception, so it is possible also to view globalization and its purported impact on higher education as exceptional in particular contexts. Using case studies of how globalization has been understood and approached differently in three city-states in Asia, namely Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore, we argue that the specific form that globalization takes is shaped by local interventions of different kinds, linked to their distinctive histories and political systems. As we enter into a multipolar world (Pieterse 2018), such an analysis of globalization acquires additional significance. 

Authors

• Jie Zheng, East China Normal University

• Yeow-Tong Chia, University of Sydney

• Fazal Rizvi, University of Melbourne