Individualism and Community: Education and Social Policy in the Postmodern Condition

by Michael Peters and James Marshall
The Falmer Press, London and Washington DC

Christine Cheyne
Department of Social Policy and Social Work
Massey University

I first saw this book on the shelves of a university book store in July of this year and I suspect that in the ensuing months not too many readers of this journal will have had the opportunity or the inclination to read Peters and Marshall's text. Why do I have this suspicion? (If I am wrong, tant mieux.) Possibly the references in the title to "social policy in the postmodern condition" will suggest something of very little or remote consequence to the day-to-day activities and preoccupations of the policy analysts and policy researchers among the readership of the Social Policy Journal of New Zealand.

For those who are sufficiently intrigued or attracted to delve in, what do they find? This is a collection of mostly previously published essays, the focus of which is the recent and contemporary changes in education and social policy. The authors are academics at the University of Auckland who have written widely in the area of the philosophy of education as well as conducting a range of evaluation studies of education policy. Drawing on both this empirical work and their training in philosophy, their specific intention is to understand and to analyse the changes in political philosophy that have occurred in western liberal-capitalist states and the policy effects of these changes particularly in the interrelated areas of education and social policy.

They pursue this through a study of the introduction of a neo-liberal policy regime in New Zealand which they see as offering a "paradigm example" of the neo-liberal shift in political philosophy and policy development. In the Introduction, Peters and Marshall briefly outline the background to the alleged crisis of the welfare state and provide a synopsis of what they term the failure of social policy in the decade 1984-94. This failure they see as directly influenced by the institutionalisation of the Treasury's framework set out in the post-election Briefing Papers, Economic Management. In this document, Marshall and Peters asserts, social policy was reduced to economic principles and subsumed under economic policy.

The book is in four parts. Each section has a short introduction to the chapters within it, drawing out connections and highlighting unifying themes found in the chapters which are the previously published journal articles and other work.

Section One is concerned with communitarian responses to the crisis of the welfare state. The "move to community" in which human beings are transformed into "community subjects" is outlined in Chapter 1. Peters and Marshall argue that although this emphasis on community is a feature of the policy sciences in the post-World-War-2 era, the notion of community is, however, not adequately delineated. This is a useful discussion of the origins of community development and the uses and abuses of the discursive term "community", particularly in neo-liberal usage. The impoverishment of the neo-liberal conception of community is the subject of Chapter 2. In contrast to this understanding of community, the authors aim to formulate a community-based social policy but, far from providing a practical set of guidelines, there are copious "motherhood and apple pie" statements. Some emphasis is given to the importance of devolved decision-making and better public participation and representation; it is even suggested that there is a need for "structures at the precinct level which almost require people to participate in their own concerns" (p.47, italics added). This element of compulsion hardly seems consistent with an emancipatory approach which is the hallmark and goal of a critical social policy. Education is viewed as a key instrument for fostering public participation but there is not much acknowledgement that, even with such education, political activity may be neither feasible nor viewed as desirable by citizens who may choose to use their available leisure time in quite different pursuits from that of politics.

Notwithstanding this skepticism about public participation, there are some important challenges relating to the democratisation of local government along with proposals for expanding local government's role in the development and implementation of social policy goals. These are areas which remain ripe for further exploration and innovation.

The focus shifts in Chapter 3 to a brief survey of neo-liberal individualism – the philosophy which in the 1990s in New Zealand has promoted a shift in the reconceptualisation of the welfare state as a safety net. This is essentially a bridging chapter between Section 1 and Section II which further examines the impact of neo-liberalism. Chapter 4 surveys the education reforms of the fourth Labour Government and the new curriculum framework introduced by the Bolger National Government in 1993. Public choice theory is discussed and critiqued in Chapter 5. Specifically, Peters and Marshall debunk the notion of an autonomous choosing subject. This subject is created as the result of the "busnocratic rationality" which has permeated education policy, replacing the Enlightenment ideal of personal autonomy. Busnocratic rationality is a product of the enterprise culture in which individuals are seen as economic consumers; the economy becomes a metaphor for society so that business values come to shape all other values. Education and knowledge are displaced by an emphasis on training and fulfilling the requirements of a reified economy.

A further philosophical critique of the individualism associated with neo-liberalism – the culture of narcissism – follows in Chapter 6. In Section Three, Peters and Marshall move from philosophical considerations to what they view as the requisite methodological responses to the "crisis" attendant upon these neo-liberal policy reforms while in Section Four they seek to provide a strategy for transcending the individualism/community dichotomy. In doing so they draw primarily on concepts and methodologies from their own discipline of education (for example, the concept of the ideal learning community). In doing so, they seek to demonstrate the utility of such concepts for the policy sciences. These are fruitful connections and could be drawn on more directly in the formulation of a critical social policy which is the subject of the final chapter.

This is a hard cover book and my review copy did not advise the price. I suspect it will appeal mainly to an academic audience. As part of that academic audience I was, however, disappointed to find only minimal updating of the earlier published work that forms the core of this text. In the arena of education policy – and social policy more broadly – the rapid changes that have characterised the period 1984-1996 mean that events in the late 1980s, or even in the early 1990s, may already be out of date and superceded by new policies. While the source of the essays (their original publication date and context) is given in the Preface, in the absence of a clear statement at the beginning of each essay/chapter of the period in which it was written, it is very confusing to read references such as that to "the present labour administration" (p.35). Ka Awatea published in 1991 is described as a "recent report". Likewise there is a considerable number of anachronistic phenomena such as the references to district schemes (which were replaced by district plans under the Resource Management Act 1991), Hospital Boards, and Education Boards. The statistics on page 56 are out of date. There is a reference on page 85 to the "proposed Picot reforms". Other small inaccuracies abound which careful editing should have eliminated.

A number of other minor irritations detract from the important arguments that are contained in this book. The referencing system is quite idiosyncratic in parts. For example, in the index the Royal Commission on Social Policy is indexed under T (The Royal Commission on Social Policy) where as the Royal Commission on Social Security is index under R (Royal…). The Sexton Report is entered by its title rather than author. In addition, there are numerous misspellings.

These are, as I said, minor irritations. I hope they will not divert the (prospective) reader from appreciating the fundamental value of this contribution which is to challenge policy makers and policy analysts to engage in a more critical activity oriented towards the development of strong democracy. In making this challenge, Peters and Marshall turn to the recent attempt to link interpretive social science and policy analysis. In particular, they seek to harness developments in postmodernist theorising to the characteristically pragmatic tasks of policy advice and analysis.

Peters and Marshall clearly share a normative orientation that is profoundly critical of the marketisation of the welfare state. This marketisation, they argue, is founded on a theory which sees sovereign individuals or families as rational, self-interested utility maximisers. They regard the debates about social policy as:

A struggle between two forms of welfare or social policy discourse based on opposing and highly charged ideological metaphors of "individualism" and "community". The one form posits the sovereign individual or family emphasizing the primacy over community and State; the other, what might be called a rejuvenated social democratic model, inverts the hierarchy of value to emphasize community or "the social" over the individual.

Social policy and the welfare state, moreover, are located in a new historical phase in which totalising theory is comprehensively repudiated and there is a vigorous assertion of plurality. In Chapter 9 an overview of the confrontation between modernity and postmodernity in social theory is provided.

The outcome of this confrontation (specifically, the need to avoid totalising theories, representations, and practices, accompanied by an impetus for recognising diversity and plurality) is a challenge to social policy and the philosophical foundations of the welfare state. In contrast to traditional social policy it is argued that a critical (that is, emancipatory) social policy involves articulating a new philosophy to inform the activities of policy and planning in liberal democracies. In the final essay, Peters and Marshall stress that this is a project which is far more complex than is acknowledged in efforts to date. They provide a critique of preceding contributions to the development of a critical social policy and list some further possible ways of addressing the same task. Clearly what is required is a theoretical orientation which distinguishes between the progressive and regressive aspects of both postmodernist and modernist theories. In particular, simple dichotomies such as market versus state, universalism (=good) versus selectivism (=bad) must be replaced by more nuanced investigations of the redistributive effect of specific policies. (Equally, recognising diversity and advocating pluralism and equality in difference should not result in a relativisation of all group claims).

I find the discussion in the final chapter enfuriatingly truncated, not to mention rather indecisive and vacillating. While not wanting to deny the dilemmatic character of the tension between defining liberatory strategies and avoiding totalising discourses, a more reconstructive critique would have assisted the project to which Peters and Marshall are committed. To this end I would strongly recommend the need for interdisciplinary work (in which those within the philosophy of education join forces with other social theorists and their colleagues in applied fields such as policy analysis and planning) to develop more comprehensive and sophisticated programmes of intervention and evaluation. In addition, closer engagement with diverse constructive responses such as that of Dryzek (1990), Healey (1992), Cohen and Rogers (1992), Fischer (1996) and Hoggett and Thompson (1996) would ensure that academic analyses will shape and sharpen "front line"/coal face policy analysis and advance the project of the development of an emancipatory and democratic social policy.

References

Cohen, Joshua and Joel Rogers (1995) Associations and Democracy, Verso, London.

Dryzek, John (1990) Discursive Democracy. Politics, Policy and Political Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Fischer, Frank (1996) Evaluating Public Policy, Nelson-Hall Publishers, Chicago.

Healey, Patsy (1992) "Planning through debate" Town Planning Review 63(2) 143-162.

Thompson, Simon and Paul Hoggett (1996) "Universalism, selectivism and particularism. Towards a postmodern social policy" Critical Social Policy 16:21-43.