Opinion and Perspective
Neoliberalism’s Influence and Teacher
AgencyTim Stewart
Kyoto University
In the Edo Period, the Tokugawa clan kept order through a centralized feudal
structure. The social system was a strict hierarchy of four classes commonly
known as “shi-no-ko-sho” which means “samurai-farmer-artisan-merchant”.
Merchants sat at the bottom of the hierarchy. Today, in contrast, economic values
are instilled into most aspects of social life. Values based on consumerism andmarket ideology have replaced ethics drawn from religious texts guiding peoples’
lives. What I see as constituting a value connects to social action; that is, values
guide conduct and choices. Because values are learned and schools are central
to that process, “Capturing the educational arena was judged to be of particularsignificance for neoliberal thinking, since schooling was both a green field forcorporate designs and also an important means of inculcating market values infuture generations” (Block et al., 2012, p. 7). This extends to the field of second/
foreign language teaching, which has seen a shift from educational to market
values.
This article surveys how the dominant values undergirding the wider
socioeconomic system influence the agency of English language teaching (ELT)
professionals, particularly those working at universities in Japan. This themealigns with work by scholars exploring how neoliberalism affects teachers’classroom practice, curriculum development, employment security, andprofessional development (e.g., Block et al., 2012; Duchêne & Heller, 2012;
Holborow, 2006). With the aid of several brief narrative vignettes, I examine
these issues after first defining neoliberalism and teacher agency.
125

Stewart

Neoliberalism and Teacher Agency

A widely-cited definition of neoliberalism is “a theory of political and economic
practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating
individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework
characterized by strong property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey,
2005, p. 2). This theory, according to Bourdieu (2005), became so widely
accepted that it morphed into “a moral view of the world” (p. 10) focused solely
on the rights of the individual. In other words, neoliberal ideas that percolated
out of elite halls of commerce have become the default way of organizing social
life with a peculiar internal logic. According to this ideology, the principal agent
in modern society is the market. The internal logic of the system is that nothingcan exist outside of the self-regulating market. This includes education, with theeffect that the ideology influences how teachers and learners think, and what
they do.
When deciding to do something, individuals exercise agency. Agency can be
defined as having the capacity to make informed choices in a particular situation.
The interplay between social context and agentive factors serve as filters that help
people determine actions (Priestley et al., 2015). Work environments can either
be supportive of agency or not. Able and well-intentioned teachers working inschool environments that value administrative control above collegiality are
unlikely to achieve their professional potential. Another way to frame this is that
if options are restricted by management structures, then agency is too.
Haneda and Sherman (2016) usefully employed a job-crafting perspective todescribe teacher agency. They believe that while teachers have prescribed job
descriptions, they typicallygo beyond these roles by actively construing their own purpose and meaning
for their work. … However, the extent to which they are actually able to realize
their vision depends not only on how they position themselves as agents but
also on how they are positioned by (more powerful) others. (pp. 747–748)
The powerful others in higher education administration today tend to
discount faculty input, instead relying on market ideology when making
decisions. As Giannoni (2018) discovered, there is “a set of organizational
126

Neoliberalism’s Influence and Teacher Agency, OnCUE 14(1), pages 125-135

values common to both academia and the corporate world” (p. 328) thatdelimit the systemic or structural environment of the workplace. The primaryneoliberal values that determine acceptable options for exercising agency
within academia are efficiency and accountability. Corporate values were first
accepted by university managers in the U.S. and U.K., and were later welcomedby administrators at Japanese universities. Next are some examples of how thisacceptance of corporate values has influenced teacher agency.

Testing ELT Agency

Vignette 1
Consider first, two EFL teachers pre-pandemic at universities in Japan who did
not actually teach their courses. They merely posted and accept assignments withno meaningful interaction. Their stance was they followed the rules as stipulated.
In another case from several years earlier, a teacher met with his students in theclassroom every other week until one day a student complained to the office. This led
to the discovery by administrators that he was contracted to teach at two universities
during the same periods on the same day.
What values are evident in these examples? The latter example can berationalized as an enterprising individual maximizing his income. In short,these examples appear to reflect values displayed daily by the big “winners” intoday's society: Wall Street and City of London financiers, and Silicon Valley
technocrats. While the neoliberal ideology stresses accountability for teachers,
upholding this value is downplayed for corporations and wealthy individuals.
The term “too big to fail” captures the reality of our economic system that
normalizes the privatization of gains and the offloading of risk to the public.
Simply put, heads they win, tails taxpayers lose (see “Pandora Papers,” 2021).
Considering how elites have rigged the economy and the legal system in theirfavor, it is hard to blame the teachers in Vignette 1 for their actions.
Another possible reading of this vignette is that these teachers were engaged
in a type of “bad agency” (Priestley et al., 2015, p. 146). Their focus on personal
gain very likely damaged the interests of their students, and negatively impacted
their colleagues. Many of their non-Japanese colleagues were upset by their127

Stewart

obvious lack of integrity, partly out of concern that their actions would be
projected onto all foreign teachers. In the neoliberal system, the basic integrityof doing business honestly is not revered; only consumerism, greed, and personal
gain are valued. When the powerful break the law, they are seldom held toaccount. Accountability is required only when it applies to people outside ofpowerful circles (Giridharadas, 2018).
In Japan, many full-time faculty teach part-time at other universities. For
some, this is due to the fact that teacher salaries here have remained stagnant
for 25 years. Furthermore, cuts in the number of tenured positions led to thecreation of an academic underclass. Universities now depend on the labor of lowpaid graduate students and part-time contract teachers (Bousquet, 2008; “TheTragedy,” 2021). While Japan has the third largest GDP, wealth distribution
since the 1990s has followed the neoliberal pattern of flowing to the top as
worker salaries have stagnated (OECD, 2021).
Vignette 2
One of my former colleagues managed to move from a contract position to a tenured
post at a well-known private university in Japan. This was certainly a prized post fora non-Japanese national. Several years later, his wealthy uncle passed away and left
him everything. As soon as he learned of his good fortune, he packed up his possessions
and moved back to the United States, without informing his colleagues or theadministration. He later informed the dean of his departure by email. His colleagues
in the department were left to deal with the chaos his sudden departure created.
From my former colleague’s perspective, he chose the most efficient courseof action to realize his desired end. He perceived his personal responsibility
to be to himself alone. Because he had done his job up to that point, he saw
no problem with his action. In other words, he felt no debt of gratitude
toward his colleagues. Westerners generally have a self-image of a “free agent”
independent of circumstances or personal relationships. Thus, his understandingof responsibility did not extend to a sense of responsibility for the future of his
department or institution. For Japanese colleagues in his department, agency
was understood as collective and dependent on context and relationships.
They had the expectation that a senior professor would exercise more personal
128

Neoliberalism’s Influence and Teacher Agency, OnCUE 14(1), pages 125-135

responsibility and collegiality. The institution responded by imposing a fiveyear contract on future replacements. Thus, his action caused a coveted tenured
post for non-Japanese academics to be reduced to a limited-term contract. Thisvignette is an example of the type of one-sided (win/lose) gain encouraged by
the neoliberal value of competition. Loyalty to an institution, to employees, andcollegiality are not values inherent in the neoliberal ideology. In sum, Vignette
2 illustrates the cultural gap between the Western idea of agency as personalagency and the Japanese view of collective agency.
Vignette 3
A number of years ago at a national university where I was employed, theadministration decided that the English curriculum needed radical reform.
Numerous meetings were held as faculty members across the campus with an interest
in English education voiced their ideas. The institution had a reputation for being
stodgy and unchanging. I saw evidence supporting this perspective when I firstarrived. Many syllabi were comprised of no more than a few general sentences andthis remained the status quo for years. My impression was that the administration
was fed up with obstructionism by the old guard after asking numerous times forchanges to be made. The meetings called by administration were aimed at forcing
reluctant faculty members to institute change. The reformed English curriculum was
implemented the following year.
One impetus for this change was inconsistent coverage and uneven grading
standards. First-year students taking the same English course with a different
instructor had varied content and assessment. Some professors graded very
strictly, others quite leniently. This vignette highlights the difference between
autonomy and agency. The old guard of tenured Japanese professors (many ofwhom had graduated from the institution) resisted pressure from administrators
to reform English curricula. For them, “autonomy” meant an absence ofregulation that would maintain the traditions of teaching with which they werefamiliar. However, having autonomy of action does not necessarily ensure thatagency is achieved if teachers “habitually reproduce past patterns of behaviour”(Priestley et al., 2015, p. 142). In contrast, it is possible for external policy toprovide a helpful frame for future agentive action. As it turned out, the top129

Stewart

down reform of the curriculum described in Vignette 3 inspired many English
teachers at the institution to become more innovative and collaborative.
Across the educational landscape, agency has been stripped from teachers
and usurped by administrators who value productivity, efficiency, and control.
In fact, professors are now positioned as service providers who must work tosatisfy their customers (no longer students). The disempowerment of faculty
was framed by the dominant corporate ideology as a necessary response to
the “crisis” in education. Berg and Seeber (2016) explain how the “discourseof crisis” (p. 10) has created a sense of urgency amongst faculty members that
hampers their agentive influence. Once “power is transferred from faculty to
managers, economic justifications dominate, and the familiar ‘bottom line’
eclipses pedagogical and intellectual concerns” (Berg & Seeber, p. x). Thus, thetraditional models of collegial governance and academic freedom are sidelined.
This observation was affirmed in the field of TESOL by Barnawi (2020) who
claims that corporate practices hamper the agency of TESOL university facultyby speeding up the pace of work so much that teachers now only have time foraction and reaction, not reflection. This situation has arisen because teachers
are required to perform more tasks in less time. The busyness of teachers not
only reflects the pace of the workplace and technological change, but also theincreasing demands for customer satisfaction in response to the needs of students
which are largely determined by the market (Litzenberg, 2020). In other words,
teacher agency is muted at some schools by a series of top-down regulations andscripts.
Administrators seek to create systems to monitor and control practice witha preference for standardization. In Japan, centralized control by university
presidents has been the norm at private institutions. The disempoweringof faculty at the national schools was a direct result of the government’s
absorption of neoliberal values; budgets were cut and decision-making power
was concentrated in the office of the president. The gathering of data for
decision-making accelerated together with the pace of change. The popularity of
spreadsheets and quantification serves the neoliberal agenda in higher education
which is preoccupied with measuring concrete outcomes (Bousquet, 2008).
130

Neoliberalism’s Influence and Teacher Agency, OnCUE 14(1), pages 125-135

But good teaching needs a foundation deeper than spreadsheet calculations.
The exercise of teacher agency is not simply a matter of effective and efficient
implementation of policy. Agentive educators have strong educational beliefs
and are able to question the purpose of learning.
Vignette 4
To encourage students’ study of English, new courses were added as part of thecurriculum reform outlined in Vignette 3. Inevitably, some of the elective courses
had low enrollment. The administration reacted to this situation by yet again
recommending the revision of syllabi and the creation of new courses. The result was
the same. Administrators who expected that many students would take more English
classes were perplexed.
The curriculum reform narrowed the practice options somewhat for teachers.
The introduction of common commercial textbooks used across disciplines was
welcomed by those busy part-time teachers who preferred to follow the internalsyllabus of the books. While this saves time preparing for lessons, when teachers
closely follow prescribed routines, they are opting not to exercise their agency.
That being said, there was still a wide range of options available to teachers withcreative capacity.
To graduate, Japanese university students must successfully complete many
courses. Complicating matters, the grade point average (GPA) system wasintroduced a few years ago. The mystery is that administrators seem surprised
when students exercise their agency by enrolling in less challenging courses toraise their GPA. While administrators regularly cite teacher responsibility forlow enrollments in electives, the question of administrative accountability for
program requirements is more fundamental in a system that values centralized
control.
Vignette 5
I have been on both sides of the hiring process many times over 25 years, as an applicant
and as a search committee member. My personal experience leaves no doubt in mymind that the system values publication and academic credentials above teachingexperience and pedagogical expertise. A PhD credential is now expected even forteaching positions. Furthermore, Japanese universities typically instruct candidates131Stewart

to number their publications. During search committee meetings, the groups’ focus
is inevitably drawn to the total number, rather than quality of content, clarity ofwriting, or publication venue.
Vignette 5 tells us that for ELT positions in Japan today, publication andacademic credentials have a higher value than pedagogical experience. The
corporatization of universities has accelerated this trend. “The corporate jargon
focuses on research ‘output’ above other parts of our work, such as teaching”(Berg & Seeber, 2016, p. 56). Hence, teachers are encouraged to constantly checktheir research production. The result is that faculty who dedicate themselves toteaching excellence, instead of generating published manuscripts, still find theultimate symbols of recognition and reward—tenure and promotion—elusive(Chalmers, 2011). Propelling the increased push of credentialism is the global
market for higher education and the fixation on university rankings. Because
Japanese institutions accept these so-called global standards, ELT educators inJapan are pressured to follow the trend. The potential rewards granted by thesystem to a select few of salary, status, and security, are enticing.

Final Thoughts

While readers might not identify with all of the vignettes presented here,
educators who work in Japan will appreciate Collini's (2012, p. 108) insight about
the “fallacy of accountability” as “the belief that the process of reporting on an
activity in the approved form provides some guarantee that something worthwhile
has been properly done”. After all, correctly filling in the constant flow of forms iswhat keeps us and many office staff members exceedingly busy. While this is a pet
peeve of many long-term residents of Japan, having good relations with office staff
members is important for achieving agency at Japanese universities. It necessitatessensitivity to the Japanese preference for interdependence which requires one toconform to the expectations of the community by valuing responsibility to thewhole above individual rights (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). While it is possible
to stretch the boundaries of professional roles, an individual’s agency to contest
the system has limits.
A sweeping response by the Japanese government to the globalized higher132

Neoliberalism’s Influence and Teacher Agency, OnCUE 14(1), pages 125-135

education market was to reform the national universities. In 2004, these elite
institutions became national university corporations with the aims of improving
financial accountability, teaching, and research quality. This dramatic change
in the management of the national universities is a clear indication of thetransmission of neoliberal ideology. National university faculty lost their statusas public servants, however, more non-Japanese teachers can now be hired. In
theory, the national institutions were deregulated from central state governance;
however, indirect coercion by MEXT has simply replaced direct control. In
fact, the balance of power and internal workings of the universities have beenreconfigured to favor administrative priorities over academic objectives (Shin,2012).
Even after this shift in governance, teachers with the capacity to achieveagency certainly have opportunities to actively engage in curriculum development
in Japan. However, the cultural and structural environments must nurture agency
for it to flourish (Priestley et al., 2015). Creating this supportive framework
requires distinctive and explicitly crafted policy. Adopting neoliberal ideology
for this task presents a dilemma because it only offers a bland monoculture oftechnocratic language that disregards local contexts. In practice, neoliberalism ismerely a system of centralized administrative control under the guise of personal
freedom and choice. It restricts the range of possibilities to standardized marketdriven pedagogies and, therefore, blunts imagination of alternative professional
futures. For university-based ELT faculty, achieving agency requires staying
abreast of policy and research in the field so they can “articulate concepts ... toenact practice critically in response to policy” (Priestley et al., p. 145). Surveying
the damage done to societies by 40 years of neoliberalism, it is clear that thearticulation of imaginative responses is long overdue.

References

Barnawi, O.Z. (2020). TESOL and the cult of speed in the age of neoliberalmobility. Routledge.
Berg, M., & Seeber, B.K. (2016). The slow professor: Challenging the culture of
speed in the academy. University of Toronto Press.
133

Stewart

Block, D., Gray, J., & Holborow, M. (2012). Neoliberalism and applied
linguistics. Routledge.
Bourdieu, P. (2005). The social structures of the economy. Cambridge University
Press.
Bousquet, M. (2008). How the university works: Higher education and the lowwage nation. New York University Press.
Chalmers, D. (2011). Progress and challenges to the recognition and rewardof the Scholarship of Teaching in higher education. Higher Education
Research & Development, 30(1), 25–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/0729436
0.2011.536970
Collini, S. (2012). What are universities for? Penguin.
Duchêne, A., & Heller, M. (2012). Language in late capitalism: Pride and profit.
Routledge.
Giannoni, D. S. (2018). An investigation of value claims in academic andcorporate ‘about us’ texts. Applied Linguistics, 39(3), 328-351. https://doi.
org/10.1093/applin/amw010
Giridharadas, A. (2018). Winners take all: The elite charade of changing theworld. Vintage Books.
Haneda, M., & Sherman, B. (2016). A job-crafting perspective on teacher
agentive action. TESOL Quarterly, 50(3), 745–754. https://onlinelibrary.
wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/tesq.318
Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.
Holborow, M. (2006). Ideology and language: Interconnections between neoliberalism and English. In J. Edge (Ed.), (Re)locating TESOL in an age of
empire (pp. 84–103). Palgrave Macmillan.
Litzenberg, J. (2020). “If I don’t do it, somebody else will”: Covert neoliberalpolicy discourses in the decision-making processes of an Intensive English
Program. TESOL Quarterly, 54(4), 823-845. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.
com/doi/epdf/10.1002/tesq.563
Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications forcognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98, 224–253.
OECD. (2021). Average wages (indicator). https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/134

Neoliberalism’s Influence and Teacher Agency, OnCUE 14(1), pages 125-135

average-wages.htm
Pandora papers: Biggest ever leak of offshore data exposes financial secretsof rich and powerful. (2021, October 3). The Guardian. https://www.
theguardian.com/news/2021/oct/03/pandora-papers-biggest-ever-leak-ofoffshore-data-exposes-financial-secrets-of-rich-and-powerfulPriestley, M., Biesta, G., & Robinson, S. (2015). Teacher agency: An ecologicalapproach. Bloomsbury.
Shin, J. C. (2012). Higher education governance under neoliberalism.
Higher Education Forum, 11, 37–52. https://ir.lib.hiroshima-u.
ac.jp/files/public/3/37023/20150423091124698312/
HigherEducationForum_11_37.pdf
The tragedy of the part-time lecturer: Poverty on the rise among Japan’s PhDs.
(2021, August 19). Nippon.com. https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/
d00721/

Author bio

Tim Stewart is Professor of TESOL at Kyoto University where he teaches
undergraduate EFL and graduate TESOL courses. He was an OnCUE Journal
reviewer for many years, edited Essential Teacher for two years, and was a section
editor of the reconstituted TESOL Journal from 2009 to 2015.
stewart.timothywilliam.3m@kyoto-u.ac.jp
Received: June 4, 2021
Accepted: October 13, 2021

135