Learn to Consume, Teach to Account?

The UK government’s 2004 law, aiming to make universities contribute to Britain’s success in the global knowledge economy, creates an explicit market in higher education. Students are presumed to occupy the status of consumer in an economic transaction with universities. The law gives students a right to information and an audit function so that their choices as ‘intelligent consumers’ will ‘drive change’ in universities. Interviews in two contrasting universities explore students’ responses to this discourse and reveal their different aspirations and concepts of education. Yet they share doubts that regimes of audit and notions of accountability to consumers will not make their voices really ‘count’. Anthropology in Action, Volume 12, Issue 1 (2005): 64-77 © Berghahn Books and the Association for Anthropology in Action volume production to making bespoke, high-value products for individual customers. As witnessed by IBM’s recent sale of its home-computer manufacturing to a Chinese firm, producing computer hardware in the US no longer has sufficient value added; profits lie in designing software to meet a particular user’s needs. This market requires corporations to be agile, to switch direction to seize new opportunities. Corporations cannot operate with vast resources, armies of disciplined workers and predictable routines. Instead they need the flexibility of a small core and a network of short-term alliances with smaller businesses, subcontracts and joint ventures—partners who will share risks and returns. This network is global and, as described by Reich, it is peopled by horizontally organised creative teams of symbolic analysts. Some team members develop new ideas and technologies while others identify problems in customers’ operating systems to which these solutions can be applied. In all, they manipulate symbols— data, words, oral and visual representations—using analytic tools to simplify reality into abstract images that can be ‘rearranged, juggled, experimented with, communicated to other specialists, and then, eventually, transformed back into reality’ (1991: 177, 178). Forming 20 percent of US jobs in 1990 and rising (ibid: 179), these are the people who can compete in a global labour market. Reich identifies a danger that these individuals and corporations, forming what he calls a ‘global web’, threaten the very foundations of national economies and polities. Globally oriented symbolic analysts are tempted to slip the bonds of national allegiance and leave the less fortunate behind, threatening the social cohesion of nations. The economic well-being of a nation’s citizens is no longer shared, tied to a nation’s economic power, and dependent on the fate of flagship giant corporations. No longer is each national economy in a separate boat competing in a worldwide regatta (ibid: 5). The role of governments is no longer to control a national economy. Instead, Reich suggests, governments should act to increase the proportion of the population with tertiary education who have the skills of abstraction, system thinking, experimentation and collaboration required of symbolic analysts (ibid: 229). This will ensure the country can maintain its prosperity by attracting a good share of the global, highincome work. Then, he suggests, the gap between those involved in the global economy and those left behind should be bridged by the ‘quaint’ idea of progressive taxation (ibid: 245-247). Governments should use taxation to invest in the education of the ‘left behind’ in order continually to increase the proportion of the national population who can become symbolic analysts and sell their services worldwide. British Government’s Version of the Global