Archive for May, 2008

Interregionalism and the globalization of higher education: new Euro-Asia initiatives

May 14, 2008

Kris Olds
Professor of Geography
University of Wisconsin-Madison

One of the interesting aspects of change in higher education systems is how they are being denationalized; reshaped, as it were, by forces and actors that are thinking at, and operating at, scales other than the national. In social science terms (e.g., see the work of Neil Brenner) this is often deemed the “relativization of scale”; the process whereby actors operating at the global scale, the inter-regional (e.g., Europe-Asia) scale, the supranational regional (e.g., European, Asian) scale, the national scale (e.g., Germany), the subnational regional (e.g., Silicon Valley) scale, and the urban scale, all come to play increasingly important roles in shaping a “multiscalar” development process. See, for example, these two recent reports by the European University Association (EUA) and the OECD on higher education for regional development in a globalizing era:

euacover.jpg

oecdcover.jpg

In this case we have a regional stakeholder organization (the EUA), and a multilateral organization (the OECD), both framing development processes simultaneously at the urban, regional, and global scales, with the national scale present, though clearly not dominant. Don’t forget, as well, that the OECD is a creation of member states, and its global thinking is therefore animated by, and mediated by, the nation-state. This is a point Saskia Sassen has insightfully driven home, most recently in Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press, 2006).

On the higher education and research policy front one emerging phenomenon worth taking note of is interregional dialogue. For example there is a now a decade long series of formal Transatlantic Dialogues, anchored by the American Council on Education (ACE), the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC), and the European University Association (EUA). These meetings are always framed by ‘global’ thinking, but focus on achieving interregional objectives and enhanced understandings of what is going on on both sides of the Atlantic.

In this context the EUA announced, on 21 February, that it is partnering with the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Netherlands Organisation for International Cooperation in Higher Education (Nuffic), to “establish an EU-Asia Higher Education Platform for European and Asian academics and policy makers”. This initiative is being facilitated by the European Commission’s Asia Link programme. As the EUA puts it, the purpose of the two-year project is to:

  • Provide a means for enhancing information exchange, dialogue, and cooperation in higher education and research between the two regions;
  • Develop best practices for institutional development and cooperation, and foster mobility of students and academics between the two regions;
  • Draw attention to the role and situation of universities in developing countries.

Throughout the course of 2008-9, a series of workshops and round tables in Asia and Europe will be organised, targeting institutional development and cooperation issues. Amongst the themes that are expected to be covered will be higher education governance and management, decentralisation, cooperation in graduate education, and interregional and inter-institutional cooperation in quality assurance.

While this is a complement to other forms of engagement also underway, and it is only targeted at parts of Asia, it is a noteworthy one.

First, and most importantly, there is much to learn in Asia about European developments over the last ten years given that Europe is grappling with the ‘modernization’ of its higher education system at a regional scale, though in a manner that blurs scales of action and intent, and takes into account national sensitivities and differential capacities for statecraft.

Second, it differs from the nature of North America-Asia and Australasia-Asia engagement, both of which tend to be relatively more person to person (e.g., the Australian Scholarships, the Fulbright awards) or event-oriented (e.g., student recruitment fairs, the US University Presidents’ Delegation to Southeast Asia).

In contrast, the EU-Asia Higher Education Platform is a truly post-national/interregional initiative, of a programmatic nature, and with an associated development agenda that focuses on systemic change.

In addition, and tying back to the start of this entry, note the presence of the nation-state in enabling EU-Asia relations to be forged, both directly and indirectly. This initiative is one that will also inevitably be forced to grapple with huge national variations in Asian higher education systems, and the lack of institutional capacity to operate at a regional scale in Asia, with respect to higher education. Yet while nation-states in Asia have not (yet) prioritized the construction of a regional higher education imaginary, it is only a matter of time given the structural forces that are reshaping Asian societies and economies. The complexion of the changes that will eventually emerge, and the nature of the intra-Asia and Asia-Other dialogue(s) facilitating them, have really yet to be determined.

global-e volume 2 issue 1 may 2008

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Knowledge sharing through collaboration: How community contributed content improves global studies research and teaching

May 14, 2008

Richard Lalleman
MSc Information and Knowledge Management student
London Metropolitan University

Michel Wesseling
Manager Library and IT Services
Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, Netherlands

For several years the implementation and implication of social networking tools, also referred to as Web 2.0 tools, have been included in discussions about ways to support interdisciplinary research in areas such as global studies. Although these discussions derive from different fields of interest, ranging from regional to national and including international institutions from the northern as well as the southern hemisphere, they all assert that Web 2.0 will improve the creation and sharing of knowledge.

But what does this mean for the area of global studies research and teaching? These areas are already creating new knowledge through research, publication, and instruction. Why then should global studies research and teaching be concerned with using Web 2.0 tools? The main argument for Web 2.0 tools is their potential for filling some of the voids created by accessing literature and data in an interdisciplinary environment. This article describes how social bookmarking can actually contribute to the improvement of knowledge creation and sharing for global studies research and teaching.

Web 2.0 is increasingly becoming a buzz-word as a solution for knowledge management. Nonetheless, the term Web 2.0 was coined to highlight the differences with the traditional Web 1.0. According to Miller (2005), “Web 2.0 enhances the discovery and manipulation of information … by building virtual applications … in which users participate”. Social bookmarking, a web-based service to save and share electronic resources, is an example of such a virtual application.

In the period of Web 1.0, Internet users used to save their favorite websites locally on their computers. As a consequence, these lists of websites could only be accessed from that same computer. While on a business trip, attending a conference, or just working from home, these sites can be difficult to access. Additionally, by saving useful collections of websites on only one computer, the collections are only available to and accessible by one person. Contrarily, social bookmark platforms such as del.icio.us and citeulike.org let Internet users save lists of websites on the Internet. This is a major improvement for researchers who are increasingly using resources accessible on Internet while the number of digital libraries and sources of information increases daily. Consequently, Internet users can retrieve their favorite websites on every computer as long it has an Internet connection and share their favorite websites with others.

Specifically this means that researchers and teachers in the field of global studies can maintain their own virtual filing cabinets, also known as a social bookmark account, which builds into the creation of a knowledge network. Let’s illustrate this with an example. Victor, a researcher in Kenya, uses the Internet to find information about the analysis of agricultural projects. While surfing on the Internet Victor finds useful information in databases of journals; information he normally does not find through generic search engines. To make sure he can retrieve the found page next week or next month, he uses del.icio.us to save his favorite website. With one click of the mouse he adds the website to his social bookmark account. Additionally, del.icio.us asks Victor whether he wants to label his favorite website with a keyword to improve accessibility. He labels the website with keywords and it is listed in his social bookmark account. Additionally, Victor’s social bookmark account also shows how many people have saved the same website and, consequently, Victor is now able to browse through the social bookmark accounts of those people with the same interests and find new electronic sources about the same topic. Through this process Victor builds a knowledge network through people who he never would have known without using social bookmarking.

Not only on an individual level are people participating in social bookmarking. First, communities of practice (CoP) increasingly emerge within social bookmark platforms. For instance, a CoP in the field of international development co-operation has agreed to save electronic sources about knowledge management for development with the keyword NPK4DEV. Consequently, you can monitor everyone’s contributions by subscribing to the RSS feed offered by the social bookmark platform. Second, institutions start their own social bookmark accounts in which staff members save their favorite websites. Third, and finally, initiatives emerge in which the efforts of both the individuals and institutions are combined. Focuss.Info, a content specific search engine in the field of global studies and international development cooperation, indexes the favorite websites of individuals – who have subscribed themselves as social bookmarkers in the same field – and partner organizations – who have been requested to start implementing an institutional social bookmark account. As a result, Focuss.Info generates lists of hand-picked websites as opposed to the results given by generic search engines such as Google and Microsoft Live.

As indicated in previous examples, individuals, groups, and institutions/organizations can create content-rich communities by simply using social bookmarking. It is not proposed that social bookmarking is the total-solution for knowledge management. Polanyi (1958), one of the first persons to introduced knowledge management within a business-context, argued that we only know what we know, when we need to know it. Hence, we will only know what has been social bookmarked by our peers. Thus, the more people who are social bookmarking in the field of global studies, the better electronic resources will be mapped. Eventually, the shared knowledge of interesting resources in the field of global studies results in knowledge creation among peers. In other words, social bookmarking is a tool that improves resource discovery among researchers, teachers, and many more interested in a particular topic.

References:
Miller, P. (2005) Web 2.0: Building the new library, Ariadne 45, Available at: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/miller/intro.html

Polanyi, M. (1958) Personal Knowledge, Chicago: Chicago University Press

global-e volume 2 issue 1 may 2008

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Imperial Neutrality: Clashes of the Future in India’s Call Centers

May 2, 2008

A. Aneesh
Assistant Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

In the winter of 2005, while investigating India’s call centers, my research assistant, a sharp and unreserved Indian graduate student, in New Delhi made a suggestion: “Why don’t you try to get a job at a call center. You still don’t look your age, and you speak with a slight American accent. Any company would give you the job.” While not a particularly pleasing comment, I did end up following the suggestion. I had conducted quite a few interviews with workers and executives by this time, and thought I had fair knowledge of this nocturnal world, but I had no feel for the floor, the immediate experience of connecting live with customers across the globe.

I started by applying for the position of Voice and Accent Trainer at a major call center in Gurgaon, a city bursting at the seams with economic exuberance. While my credentials – having lived in the United States for over a decade – were impressive, I was not offered the position after three interviews. A snippet from the third interview may explain why:

“Could you stop using that American accent?” my interviewer, Payal, a senior trainer in her 30s, asked me.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I mean, can you stop rolling your R’s as Americans do, and start using a neutral accent, instead,” she said brusquely.

“But there is no such thing as a neutral accent,” I failed to control my intellectual righteousness, even though this was not the occasion for academic debate.

“Well, there is. Do you hear how I’m speaking? Plain and neutral English,” she said.

“You mean plain, Indian English,” I said.

“Yes, Indian English is global English. It is neither American nor British,” she proudly claimed.

The interview continued to deteriorate for an hour without any of us giving up our respective stand. I tried to convince her that all speech was accented, and the native speakers of American English would clearly detect an accent in her English, but she continued to claim that she spoke “global English,” which was based on the neutralization of regional accents. She was obviously not a linguist and it was easy to fault her stance. But she did bring to light an important aspect of call centers: the creation of a neutralized space for communication across cultures. Neutrality, I would soon discover, was the crux of understanding not only call centers but also key transformations of the global age.

Soon I focused on obtaining, not the trainer’s job, but that of an ordinary agent. Within a month I found myself working for GoCom, a middle-of-the-road company in size and revenue, a reseller of mortgages and mobile phone connections, employing about one thousand agents targeting American and British consumers. During my training and work as an agent I discovered that neutrality was not just about accent; it was also about the general transformation of life in a form that could fit emerging global systems, a discovery that revealed life as a means to systemic ends. This reversal of the means-end relationship between life and techno-economic systems forms the basis of the epithet Imperial Neutrality. While allegories of “the tail wagging the dog” or life plugged into the machine have become common, it is time to wring fiction and cynicism out of the discussion to reveal profound social consequences.

During training I was part of a group of 8 men and 5 women, all young, spirited, and fresh out of college. The training period was both cheerful and agonizing. This was the time when the group developed solidarity against their common opponent, the trainer, and took longer than permitted breaks between sessions. These breaks included tea, coffee, smoking, and even singing. This was a highly social and lively group, quite typical of India’s college students. Yet, the painful part was the training session itself when one could notice the trainees’ anguish of trying to suppress their previous accent and speech learnt through primary socialization. Attempts at stifling the effects of their first language on English were at once comical and sad. Still sadder was the attempt at changing their style of speech, which was heavily influenced by their first language. The transition from their First Life to Second Life, to borrow the language of the virtual world, was not easy. English is not just another language on the continent, every Indian would testify: It is a measure of success, status and class, and thus remains very much an imperial language. If I try to correct someone’s Hindi, my effort may be rewarded with respect. To correct their English would most likely cause them humiliation. Despite the trainer’s warning, the trainees kept using “sir” in every sentence to address the mock customer. The use of “sir” in India has connotations of hierarchy that appear off-key in the American frame of ideological equality. A few trainees lacked fluency in English, which made the task even harder. You could argue that this identity shift must occur in every new job situation where one tries to master new organizational languages, new rules and regulations, and new work processes. Yet, it was different in the case of my co-workers at GoCom, and indeed, every call center in India. Their identity shift required them to rub out marks of primary socialization, knowledge of their culture, and styles of speech. Contortions of identity shift were instructive. Their intimacy with the immediate social and geographical world became irrelevant in the new work situation; infantilized and embarrassed, they learned the ways of their new world. The break from their immediate horizon was alarming, something I attempt to explain in terms of a split between social and system identity.

While working in the call center, it soon became clear that the shift from a social to system identity did not affect only Indian calling agents who needed to change accents, acquire pseudonyms, work hard to know a place they would never visit, learn work skills not portable to any other industry, and work at night when the city outside their building was asleep. Their American customers were also turned into their system profiles. Indeed, a call center agent was not the one who dialed the number. It was a software program called the “Dialer,” which targeted specific American profiles, according to credit history, age, gender, region, education, and buying patterns. This global conversation was not between persons but profiles; it was not a social conversation but postsocial communication.

Just as eating emerges as a program under nutritionism, which neutralizes and subordinates our relationship with food to the higher authority of scientific knowledge; identities and places, too, have begun their journey to higher grounds. It is interesting to see this change in the lives of call center agents working in Gurgaon, and illuminate the still hazy interstices from which the present age is gradually emerging. It is a story of cultural encounter, a study at the point of contact where cultures are forced to make sense of each other. Gurgaon, “a fashionable address of the new India,” to borrow a phrase from the New York Times, bears the marks of the global age in all its complexity. Operating in American, British, or Australian time zones, Gurgaon’s call centers are unique, previously unavailable, sites of examining global transformations.

The names of individuals and corporations have been changed to protect identity.

global-e volume 2 issue 1 may 2008

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Information, Globalization and Democracy: The Utopian Moment?

May 2, 2008
Michael A. Peters
Professor Educational Policy Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The diffusion of information and the arraignment of all abuses at the bar of public reason, I deem [one of] the essential principles of our government, and consequently [one of] those which ought to shape its administration. Thomas Jefferson: 1st Inaugural Address, 1801. ME 3:322

The time has come for information democracy as a utopian moment. The term is currently used by Bill Gates (2006) to signal the public world of information available globally to ordinary citizens through their PCs. Gates says: ‘While information wants to be free, knowledge is much “stickier”—harder to communicate, more subjective, less easy to define.’ He indicates that as software gets smarter it will help people synthesize and manage knowledge with the help of technologies that promote consilience and just-in-time information. Gates’ argument is another demonstration of a kind of technological determinism, yet the general point he raises—the changing relationship between democracy and information—has a venerable past in democratic theory. In some quarters the term has come to mean no more than information sharing with attention directed towards different models—dictatorship, anarchy, democracy, embassies—that might be employed in businesses to enhance productivity.

At the 2007 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the participants—among them, Gordon Brown and Rupert Murdoch—acknowledged that the ground rules for democracy have been permanently altered by an ‘explosion of self expression’ (Murdoch) and a changed economy of information (Brown) that favors individual consumer-citizens who use the Internet to by-pass much of the media mainstream. This is a constant streaming torrent of opinion with millions of ‘information transactions’ that breaks stories, circulates endless commentaries and ’gets the facts out there’ (Murdoch) via a kind of public scrutiny that acts as a source of constant feedback. No government, no state, now is immune to information; no state or government can adequately police or control information borders. The ‘information state’ is thus the first politically porous state that with all its contradictions, mutations and imperfections looks the most likely model for a world public space.

Information has always been central to accounts of democracy from its early modern formulations where the emphasis was placed on the necessity of an informed citizenry through to more recent movements like that of open government which began in the 1960s. Open government opposed reason of state, state secrecy and national security, often popularized as ‘big brother’ and ‘faceless bureaucracy’, with a system of public accountability based on principles of freedom of information tied to Article 19 of the Declaration of Human Rights.

Even before the movement for open government democratic theory held a special place for the free press and assumed a benign relationship between the media, democracy and citizenship. On some accounts processes of media globalization have diminished the public sphere as the centralization of media control and the intensification of ownership and commercialization has led to the growth of the media transnational conglomerates. Media outputs are trivialized through ‘edutainment’ and also commodified thus serving market rather than citizenship needs.

A new paradigm of communication, however, has emerged that seems to facilitate individual interactivity and enhance democracy, autonomy and justice. Yochai Benkler (2003, 2006), the New York law professor, has been at the forefront of a movement that argues the political economy of the sphere of liberal communication has now changed with the radical decentralization of information production. The new paradigm of social production in the networked global information economy has diminished the significance of the corporate and transnational media conglomerates to create meaning, to influence the public agenda, and to control the format (sound-bites) of news discussions.

This argument places strong emphasis on the logic of decentralization such that no individual actor (person or corporation) can exercise control over the totality and allows individuals to ‘build their own window on the world.’ In Benkler’s terms the individual access and user (inter)activity alleviates the ‘autonomy deficit by an exclusively proprietary communications system’.

Finally, Benkler (2003) identifies a third leg of his argument concerning ‘justice’ where he states that commons in communications and information provide a sustainable way to provide equal access to information resources while providing a means to ameliorate inequalities. Benkler and Nissenbaum (2006) go a step further to aruge that commons-based peer production provides an atmosphere that supports virtuous behaviour (Flanagan, Howe & Nissenbaum, 2005), challenging the traditional basis of hierarchical economic management and neoliberal theories based on assumptions of rationality, individuality and self-interest.

A range of initiatives and movements including Free and Open Source Software, Open Access and Wikipedia, now tend to throw into question neoliberal assumptions within the global network information economy. The empirical fact is that self-interest is an inadequate explanation for the active engagement of millions of users worldwide who contribute without monetary reward in these projects and many thousands of smaller ones.

From the early reflections of Thomas Jefferson and the architects of the U.S. Constitution on the role of information in a democracy to the work of Stallman, Benkler, Lessig, James Boyle and others in the realm of international law on copyright and the emergence of the intellectual commons based on peer production, a central place for information has emerged. Information, within large and complex, representative democracies has been accorded a special place and one of growing importance as the most advanced economies move from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and eventually Web 3.0 platforms that purportedly will enable not only an active and creative users in a world increasingly comprised of millions of users but also eventually a new set of public information spaces that overlap and nest within one another, built on the ability of the individual and autonomous user to develop their own info-infrastructures and programs.

Then we might plausibly talk of three senses of information freedom—the freedom of expression at the level of content; the freedom of code; and, one day in the not too distant future of global satellite communications, the freedom of infrastructure—that among them define the global information commons.

Yet despite this genuinely utopian moment it is also important to understand that the information paradigm developed as a radical re-interpretation of the importance of language during the course of the twentieth century implying: an underlying transaction (information flow between sender and receiver that grows with application); a code system (transfer in terms of systems of arbitrary signs); and a mathematical measurement of the information content of the message (Adriaans, 2006).

It is also important to recognize that ‘information’ emerged from the combination of the development of modern military intelligence (breaking codes, deciphering messages, encoding information, resolving conflict of sources etc.) and the development of new communication technologies, often related to the military context and the cooperation between the military and business sector (think of the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) developed in response to Sputnik, the contribution of RAND to packet switching through its research on the control of missiles and the ARPANET constructed in 1969 linking the University of California at Los Angeles, SRI at Stanford, University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah). This historical point reminds me of the French Philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard’s (1984) analysis in attempting to describe and chart the transition in Western advanced societies to the knowledge paradigm. He argues that the leading sciences and technologies—cybernetics, telematics, informatics and the growth of computer languages—are all significantly language-based, and he indicates that knowledge in the form of an informational commodity will become indispensable to productive power, where it becomes conceivable that the nation-state will one day fight for control of information as they fought previously for control over territory.

In this new information environment we must still inquire whether all problems of democracy are informational problems of access, distribution and source. We must also face the prospect of greater state and corporate surveillance, a new open-system panopticum that tracks, monitors and defines the digital self, as well as acknowledging that the information economy is also structured according to the logics of disinformation and misinformation creating a public ‘structured ignorance’ even with increasing flows of information. Finally, information democracy—its concept, theory and practice—needs to theorize and account for the rise of the information utility and dangers of monopoly in a networked global economy.

Acknowledgement: This is a short version of a larger paper that appears as ‘The Political Economy Of Informational Democracy’ in Cushla Kapitzke & Michael A. Peters (Eds.) Global Knowledge Cultures. Rotterdam, Sense Publishers, 2007.

References
Adraans, P. (2006) Philosophy of Information: Concepts and History, http://www.illc.uva.nl/HPI/Draft_History_of_Ideas.pdf. In Benthem, J.van, Adriaans. P. (Eds) Handbook on the Philosophy of Information, http://www.illc.uva.nl/HPI/, Elsevier Science publishers to be published in Handbook in the Philosophy of Science series.

Benkler, Y & Nissenbaum, H. (2006) ‘Commons-based Peer Production and Virtue’, The Journal of Political Philosophy 14 (4): 394–419.

Benkler, Y. (2003) ‘Freedom in the Commons: Towards a Political Economy of Information’ at http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?52+Duke+L.+J.+1245.

Flanagan, H. & Nissenbaum, H. (2005) ‘Embodying Values in Technology: Theory and Practice’, http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/Nissenbaum-VID.4-25.pdf.

Gates, B. (2006) ‘The Road Ahead’. Newsweek, Jan. 25, 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11020787/.

Lyotard, J-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge, trans. G, Bennington & B. Massumi, Manchester, Manchester University Press.

global-e volume 2 issue 1 May 2008

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