Mark Olssen
Biographic Data
| ID | 315931 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mark Olssen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mark |
| FAMILY NAME | Olssen |
| SIGNATURE | OLSSEN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Surrey |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 477 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
The effects of neoliberalism: Teachers’ experiences and ethical dilemmas to policy initiatives within vocational education and training in Australia
Neoliberal policy reforms have had a marked influence on nearly every aspect of education, including the enrolment practices employed by institutions, teaching and assessment practices, and even the outcomes for students and society. There is a widespread expectation that teachers should contribute to quality outcomes for students along with their moral/ethical development and character formation while at the same time behaving ethically in the c…
Collective obituary for James D. Marshall (1937–2021)
Eulogy for Jim Marshall (read at the funeral)Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal UniversityMy deepest condolences to Pepe, Dom and Marcus and to Jim’s grandchildren. Tina and I spent a lot of time at t
Foucault’s New Materialism: An Extended Review Essay of Thomas Lemke’s The Government of Things
This article constitutes an extended review essay of Thomas Lemke’s book Foucault and the Government of Things: Foucault and the New Materialisms published by New York University Press in 2021. A shorter version of this article was published as a book review in Social Forces (http://doi.org/10.1093/soac037, 22nd April 2022). This longer extended version is being published here with the permission of Oxford University Press, who publish Social For…
A Normative Foucauldian: Selected Papers of Mark Olssen
Inspired by the writings of Michel Foucault, Olssen's writings traverse philosophy, politics, education, and epistemology. This book comprises a selection of his papers published in academic journals and books over twenty-five years. Taken as a whole, the papers represent a redirection of the core axioms and directions of western ontology and philosophy in relation to how history, the subject, and education are theorised within the western philos…
Constructing Foucault’s ethics: A poststructuralist moral theory for the twenty-first century
To understand how subjects are constructed socially and historically in terms of power, and how they act through power on others and on themselves, but not to see this as a purely random process or activity where 'anything goes', or conversely, portray ethical actions in terms of fixed universal rules or specified teleological ends, constitutes the objective of this book. What a normative Foucault can offer us, I claim, is a critical ethics of th…
Wittgenstein and Foucault: The Limits and Possibilities of Constructivism
Michel Foucault: Materialism and Education
"Olssen ! brings Foucault to life and sheds new light on understanding his work...Educationalists and scholars across the disciplines will welcome this interpretation of Foucault." Michael A. Peters, University of Glasgow "Olssen distills in brilliant and succinct language the core of Foucault's most important insights. This is a book that every student should read in order to understand how to link theory to practice, and educational thought to …
Neoliberal competition in higher education today: Research, accountability and impact
Drawing on Foucault’s elaboration of neoliberalism as a positive form of state power, the ascendancy of neoliberalism in higher education in Britain is examined in terms of the displacement of public good models of governance, and their replacement with individualised incentives and performance targets, heralding new and more stringent conceptions of accountability and monitoring across the higher education sector. After surveying the defeat of t…
Excellence’ and Exclusion: The Individual Costs of Institutional Competitiveness
A performance-based funding system like the United Kingdom's 'Research Excellence Framework' (REF) symbolizes the re-rationalization of higher education according to neoliberal ideology and New Public Management technologies. The REF is also significant for disclosing the kinds of behaviour that characterize universities' response to government demands for research auditability. In this paper, we consider the casualties of what Henry Giroux (2014…
Toward a Global Thin Community: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Cosmopolitan Commitment
Discourse, Complexity, Normativity: Tracing the elaboration of Foucault's materialist concept of discourse
In this article, I want to suggest that it is through the elaboration of the concept of discourse that the differences between Foucault and thinkers like Habermas, Hegel and Marx can best be understood. Foucault progressively develops a conception of discourse as a purely historical category that resists all reference to transcendental principles of unity—whether of substance or form—but sees the emergence of discursive frameworks as precarious a…
Foucault, power, and education
Book review of: Foucault, power, and education, by Stephen J. Ball, Abingdon, Routledge, 2013, 178 pp., £24.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-415-89537-8
Re-Reading Education Policies: A Handbook Studying the Policy Agenda of the 21st Century
Foucault and education
Social democracy, complexity and education - 1 - Sociological perspectives from welfare liberalism
Governmentality and Subjectivity: Practices of Self as Arts of Self-Government
Although the self is constituted by practices, it is always possible to make something out of what it has been made into, once it learns how to pull the strings. This is the basis of ethical work. Ethical work, says Foucault, is the work one performs in the attempt to transform oneself into an ethical subject of one's own behaviour, the means by which we change ourselves in order to become ethical subjects. Such a history of ethics is a history o…
Preliminary Material
Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Social Democracy: Thin Communitarian Perspectives on Political Philosophy and Education
The Credit Crunch of 2008 has exposed the fallacies of neoliberalism and its thesis of the self-regulating market, which has been ascendant in both economic theory and policy over the last 30 years. In moving beyond neoliberalism, social democratic arguments are once again coming to the fore; however, in the context of the 21st century, they will need to be theorized in relation to new global concerns. This book critically revisits the core these…
Referees
Governmentality Studies in Education
Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality originated in a lecture series in the late 1970s at the Collège de France and soon became the basis for a range of historical and contemporary studies across the social sciences and humanities. The concept in part rests on a simple but powerful idea that links government to the freedom of the subject in a novel understanding of liberal politics. It also provides an analytics of power based on the exami…
John Codd Obituary
(2008). John Codd Obituary. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 467-470
Foucault as Complexity Theorist: Overcoming the problems of classical philosophical analysis
This article explores the affinities and parallels between Foucault's Nietzschean view of history and models of complexity developed in the physical sciences in the twentieth century. It claims that Foucault's rejection of structuralism and Marxism can be explained as a consequence of his own approach which posits a radical ontology whereby the conception of the totality or whole is reconfigured as an always open, relatively borderless system of …
Foucault and the Imperatives of Education: Critique and Self-Creation in a Non-Foundational World
Understanding the mechanisms of neoliberal control: Lifelong Learning, Flexibility and Knowledge Capitalism
This paper argues that Foucault's conception of governmentality provides a powerful tool for understanding learning and education and links the organisation of learning to both politics and economics in developed Western societies. What is offered by Foucault's conception, I will argue, is a new version of superstructural sociology, which provides a means of understanding how educational and economic practices mutually condition and adapt to each…
Neoliberalism, higher education and the knowledge economy: From the free market to knowledge capitalism
The ascendancy of neoliberalism and the associated discourses of ‘new public management’, during the 1980s and 1990s has produced a fundamental shift in the way universities and other institutions of higher education have defined and justified their institutional existence. The traditional professional culture of open intellectual enquiry and debate has been replaced with a institutional stress on performativity, as evidenced by the emergence of …
Foucault, Educational Research and the Issue of Autonomy
This article seeks to demonstrate a particular application of Foucault's philosophical approach to a particular issue in education: that of personal autonomy. The paper surveys and extends the approach taken by James Marshall in his book Michel Foucault: Personal autonomy and education. After surveying Marshall's writing on the issue I extend Marshall's approach, critically analysing the work of Rob Reich and Meira Levinson, two contemporary phil…
Neoliberalism, higher education and the knowledge economy: From the free market to knowledge capitalism
The ascendancy of neoliberalism and the associated discourses of ‘new public management’, during the 1980s and 1990s has produced a fundamental shift in the way universities and other institutions of higher education have defined and justified their institutional existence. The traditional professional culture of open intellectual enquiry and debate has been replaced with a institutional stress on performativity, as evidenced by the emergence of …
Understanding the mechanisms of neoliberal control: Lifelong Learning, Flexibility and Knowledge Capitalism
This paper argues that Foucault's conception of governmentality provides a powerful tool for understanding learning and education and links the organisation of learning to both politics and economics in developed Western societies. What is offered by Foucault's conception, I will argue, is a new version of superstructural sociology, which provides a means of understanding how educational and economic practices mutually condition and adapt to each…
Governmentality Studies in Education
Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality originated in a lecture series in the late 1970s at the Collège de France and soon became the basis for a range of historical and contemporary studies across the social sciences and humanities. The concept in part rests on a simple but powerful idea that links government to the freedom of the subject in a novel understanding of liberal politics. It also provides an analytics of power based on the exami…
Neoliberal competition in higher education today: Research, accountability and impact
Drawing on Foucault’s elaboration of neoliberalism as a positive form of state power, the ascendancy of neoliberalism in higher education in Britain is examined in terms of the displacement of public good models of governance, and their replacement with individualised incentives and performance targets, heralding new and more stringent conceptions of accountability and monitoring across the higher education sector. After surveying the defeat of t…
In defence of the welfare state and publicly provided education: A New Zealand perspective
This paper critically examines the crisis of welfare liberalism with specific reference to New Zealand education in order to speculatively reappraise the central principles upon which a revived welfare state could be constructed and in terms of which publicly provided education can be justified. Specifically it will seek to achieve these goals through a number of interrelated tasks. Firstly, it will examine the claims of neo‐liberal theory and ar…
Excellence’ and Exclusion: The Individual Costs of Institutional Competitiveness
A performance-based funding system like the United Kingdom's 'Research Excellence Framework' (REF) symbolizes the re-rationalization of higher education according to neoliberal ideology and New Public Management technologies. The REF is also significant for disclosing the kinds of behaviour that characterize universities' response to government demands for research auditability. In this paper, we consider the casualties of what Henry Giroux (2014…
Neoliberalism, globalisation, democracy: Challenges for education
This article examines the role of the state and of education in relation to globalisation and argues that it is not a question of globalisation or the nation‐state, but of globalisation and the nation‐state. In order to understand how globalisation might be represented as having both positive and negative effects on states, two forms of globalisation are distinguished, one which attests to the growing interconnectedness of states, and another whi…
Structuralism, post-structuralism, neo-liberalism: Assessing Foucault's legacy
This article traces Foucault's distinctive commitment to 'post-structuralism' through tracing the affinities and departures from structuralism. It is argued that under the infuence of Nietzsche, Foucault's approach marks a distinct break with structuralism in several crucial respects. What results is a materialist post-structuralism which is also distinctively different from the post-structuralism of writers such as Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrilli…
Foucault, Educational Research and the Issue of Autonomy
This article seeks to demonstrate a particular application of Foucault's philosophical approach to a particular issue in education: that of personal autonomy. The paper surveys and extends the approach taken by James Marshall in his book Michel Foucault: Personal autonomy and education. After surveying Marshall's writing on the issue I extend Marshall's approach, critically analysing the work of Rob Reich and Meira Levinson, two contemporary phil…
From the Crick Report to the Parekh Report: Multiculturalism, cultural difference, and democracy—the re‐visioning of citizenship education1
This paper attempts to develop a more sophisticated notion of multiculturalism in Britain. It starts by examining the philosophical basis of the Crick Report on citizenship education to resolve the theoretical tension between liberal and multicultural approaches to the subject. To achieve this resolution, it compares the Crick Report to the Parekh Report on the Future of Multi Ethnic Britain, published on 11th October 2000. The Parekh report is t…
Foucault as Complexity Theorist: Overcoming the problems of classical philosophical analysis
This article explores the affinities and parallels between Foucault's Nietzschean view of history and models of complexity developed in the physical sciences in the twentieth century. It claims that Foucault's rejection of structuralism and Marxism can be explained as a consequence of his own approach which posits a radical ontology whereby the conception of the totality or whole is reconfigured as an always open, relatively borderless system of …
Michel Foucault as 'Thin' Communitarian: Difference, Community, Democracy
Rather than advocating a variant of ethical dandyism revolving around individualistic withdrawal and the aesthetic intensification of sexual pleasures, this article argues that Foucault's ethical and political ouvre can best be represented as a form of nonmonistic communitariamsm termed "thin" communitarianism. In this model, difference and unity are paired or balanced. Although difference is given greater scope than in traditional enlightenment …
Foucault and the Imperatives of Education: Critique and Self-Creation in a Non-Foundational World
Ethical liberalism, education and the ‘New Right’
This paper examines the philosophical tradition of ‘ethical liberalism’ from its emergence as a coherent response to classical liberal individualism in the 19th century, through to contemporary formulations of the thesis. It seeks to assess its relevance for understanding neo-liberal policy restructuring in education today. The first section of the paper provides an historical background to the rise of an ‘ethical’ qualification to liberalism, as…
Radical constructivism and its failings: Anti‐realism and individualism
Radical constructivism has had a major influence on present‐day education, especially in the teaching of science and mathematics. The article provides an epistemological profile of constructivism and considers its strengths and weaknesses from the standpoint of its educational implications. It is argued that there are two central problems with constructivism: anti‐realism and individualism which, in turn, lead to difficulties associated with idea…
In defence of the welfare state and publicly provided education: A New Zealand perspective
This paper critically examines the crisis of welfare liberalism with specific reference to New Zealand education in order to speculatively reappraise the central principles upon which a revived welfare state could be constructed and in terms of which publicly provided education can be justified. Specifically it will seek to achieve these goals through a number of interrelated tasks. Firstly, it will examine the claims of neo‐liberal theory and ar…
Radical Constructivism and Its Failings: Anti-Realism and Individualism
Radical constructivism has had a major influence on present‐day education, especially in the teaching of science and mathematics. The article provides an epistemological profile of constructivism and considers its strengths and weaknesses from the standpoint of its educational implications. It is argued that there are two central problems with constructivism: anti‐realism and individualism which, in turn, lead to difficulties associated with idea…
Radical constructivism and its failings: Anti‐realism and individualism
Radical constructivism has had a major influence on present‐day education, especially in the teaching of science and mathematics. The article provides an epistemological profile of constructivism and considers its strengths and weaknesses from the standpoint of its educational implications. It is argued that there are two central problems with constructivism: anti‐realism and individualism which, in turn, lead to difficulties associated with idea…
Education policy, the cold war and the ‘liberal‐communitarian’ debate
Michel Foucault: Materialism and Education
Although Foucault departs from Marxism, his own approach constitutes a form of consistent materialism which has theoretical implications for the analysis of social and educational discursive systems. In seeking to demonstrate a correct reading of Foucault, linguistic readings of his work, such as those of Christopher Norris (1993), which represent him as part of the linguistic turn in French philosophy, where language (or representation) hencefor…
Ethical liberalism, education and the ‘New Right’
This paper examines the philosophical tradition of ‘ethical liberalism’ from its emergence as a coherent response to classical liberal individualism in the 19th century, through to contemporary formulations of the thesis. It seeks to assess its relevance for understanding neo-liberal policy restructuring in education today. The first section of the paper provides an historical background to the rise of an ‘ethical’ qualification to liberalism, as…
Citizenship and Education: From Alfred Marshall to Iris Marion Young
(2001). Citizenship and Education: from Alfred Marshall to Iris Marion Young. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 77-94
Michel Foucault as 'Thin' Communitarian: Difference, Community, Democracy
Rather than advocating a variant of ethical dandyism revolving around individualistic withdrawal and the aesthetic intensification of sexual pleasures, this article argues that Foucault's ethical and political ouvre can best be represented as a form of nonmonistic communitariamsm termed "thin" communitarianism. In this model, difference and unity are paired or balanced. Although difference is given greater scope than in traditional enlightenment …
Totalitarianism and the ‘Repressed’ Utopia of the Present: Moving beyond Hayek, Popper and Foucault
This article starts by reviewing the negative account of utopian thinking in dominant liberal western political theory, through the positing of a link between utopianism and totalitarianism, as present in the writings of liberal writers like Hayek, Popper, Berlin and others. As such, this article constitutes a critique of the liberal theories of utopianism and totalitarianism as well as positing alternative conceptions. It uses Michel Foucault's …
Structuralism, post-structuralism, neo-liberalism: Assessing Foucault's legacy
This article traces Foucault's distinctive commitment to 'post-structuralism' through tracing the affinities and departures from structuralism. It is argued that under the infuence of Nietzsche, Foucault's approach marks a distinct break with structuralism in several crucial respects. What results is a materialist post-structuralism which is also distinctively different from the post-structuralism of writers such as Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrilli…
Foucault and Marxism: Rewriting the Theory of Historical Materialism
This article explores the relationship of Foucault to Marxism. Although he was often critical of Marxism, Foucault's own approach bears striking parallels to Marxism, as a form of method, as an account of history, and as an analysis of social structure. Like Marxism, Foucault represents social practices as transitory and all knowledge and intellectual formations as linked to social relations and power. In this he asserts the historical relativity…
Education Policy: Globalization, Citizenship andDemocracy
Providing an international perspective on education policy, and of the role and function of education in the global economy this text covers the major topics of central significance in education and the sociology of education
Neoliberalism, globalisation, democracy: Challenges for education
This article examines the role of the state and of education in relation to globalisation and argues that it is not a question of globalisation or the nation‐state, but of globalisation and the nation‐state. In order to understand how globalisation might be represented as having both positive and negative effects on states, two forms of globalisation are distinguished, one which attests to the growing interconnectedness of states, and another whi…
From the Crick Report to the Parekh Report: Multiculturalism, cultural difference, and democracy—the re‐visioning of citizenship education1
This paper attempts to develop a more sophisticated notion of multiculturalism in Britain. It starts by examining the philosophical basis of the Crick Report on citizenship education to resolve the theoretical tension between liberal and multicultural approaches to the subject. To achieve this resolution, it compares the Crick Report to the Parekh Report on the Future of Multi Ethnic Britain, published on 11th October 2000. The Parekh report is t…
Neoliberalism, higher education and the knowledge economy: From the free market to knowledge capitalism
The ascendancy of neoliberalism and the associated discourses of ‘new public management’, during the 1980s and 1990s has produced a fundamental shift in the way universities and other institutions of higher education have defined and justified their institutional existence. The traditional professional culture of open intellectual enquiry and debate has been replaced with a institutional stress on performativity, as evidenced by the emergence of …
Foucault, Educational Research and the Issue of Autonomy
This article seeks to demonstrate a particular application of Foucault's philosophical approach to a particular issue in education: that of personal autonomy. The paper surveys and extends the approach taken by James Marshall in his book Michel Foucault: Personal autonomy and education. After surveying Marshall's writing on the issue I extend Marshall's approach, critically analysing the work of Rob Reich and Meira Levinson, two contemporary phil…
Foucault and the Imperatives of Education: Critique and Self-Creation in a Non-Foundational World
Understanding the mechanisms of neoliberal control: Lifelong Learning, Flexibility and Knowledge Capitalism
This paper argues that Foucault's conception of governmentality provides a powerful tool for understanding learning and education and links the organisation of learning to both politics and economics in developed Western societies. What is offered by Foucault's conception, I will argue, is a new version of superstructural sociology, which provides a means of understanding how educational and economic practices mutually condition and adapt to each…
John Codd Obituary
(2008). John Codd Obituary. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 40, No. 4, pp. 467-470
Foucault as Complexity Theorist: Overcoming the problems of classical philosophical analysis
This article explores the affinities and parallels between Foucault's Nietzschean view of history and models of complexity developed in the physical sciences in the twentieth century. It claims that Foucault's rejection of structuralism and Marxism can be explained as a consequence of his own approach which posits a radical ontology whereby the conception of the totality or whole is reconfigured as an always open, relatively borderless system of …
Re-Reading Education Policies: A Handbook Studying the Policy Agenda of the 21st Century
Foucault and education
Social democracy, complexity and education - 1 - Sociological perspectives from welfare liberalism
Governmentality and Subjectivity: Practices of Self as Arts of Self-Government
Although the self is constituted by practices, it is always possible to make something out of what it has been made into, once it learns how to pull the strings. This is the basis of ethical work. Ethical work, says Foucault, is the work one performs in the attempt to transform oneself into an ethical subject of one's own behaviour, the means by which we change ourselves in order to become ethical subjects. Such a history of ethics is a history o…
Preliminary Material
Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Social Democracy: Thin Communitarian Perspectives on Political Philosophy and Education
The Credit Crunch of 2008 has exposed the fallacies of neoliberalism and its thesis of the self-regulating market, which has been ascendant in both economic theory and policy over the last 30 years. In moving beyond neoliberalism, social democratic arguments are once again coming to the fore; however, in the context of the 21st century, they will need to be theorized in relation to new global concerns. This book critically revisits the core these…
Sociology (33 works) · Philosophy (28 works) · Political science (27 works) · Law (26 works) · Politics (25 works) · Epistemology (23 works) · Foucault, Power, and Ethics (18 works) · Law (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Higher education (11 works)