Travelling technocrats, embodied knowledges: Globalising privatisation in telecoms and water

Larner, Wendy; Laurie, Nina

doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.11.005

Cited by 244 publications

(218 citation statements)

References 50 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

216

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…As in Larner and Laurie's (2010) work on engineers and privatization, this account indicates the "centrality of multiple and shifting forms of expertise in the reconfiguring of political-economic institutions, ideas and techniques" (Larner & Laurie, 2010, p 224). These "transfer agents" (Stone, 2004) "are sociologically complex actors, located in (shifting) organizational and political fields, whose identities and professional trajectories are often bound up with the policy positions and fixes they espouse" (Peck & Theodore, 2010, p. 170).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Laboring to Relate: Neoliberalism, Embodied Policy, and Network Dynamics

Ball¹

2017

Peabody Journal of Education

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Laboring to Relate: Neoliberalism, Embodied Policy, and Network Dynamics

Ball¹

2017

Peabody Journal of Education

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…From this perspective, consultants are viewed as "agents of global knowledge diffusion" and as central to the transmission of global best practices and benchmarks (Greer, 1994;Kipping and Wright, 2012;Saint-Martin, 2000). A number of studies have recently noted the influence of professional service firms such as KPMG as intermediaries, who act as "brokers between diverse fields of action" (Savage and Williams, 2008:3; see also Larner, 2015;Larner and Laurie, 2010;Prince, 2010;Allen, 2010;Allen and Cochrane, 2010;Moss et al, 2011). Consultants, it is argued, are able to position themselves as powerful actors through their capacity to bridge what were previously separate and unconnected sites, to bring them into alignment, drawing upon organizational resources to negotiate and persuade other actors to pursue certain goals.…”

Section: Urban Intermediaries: Inside and Outmentioning

confidence: 99%

(Dis)Assembling policy pipelines: unpacking the work of management consultants at public meetings

Hurl

2017

Geogr. Helv.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. Confronting growing fiscal deficits in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, local governments around the world have often commissioned outside experts -such as policy gurus, management consultants, and transnational professional service firms -to undertake services delivery reviews as a means of making "tough" decisions, identifying the areas of government spending that are most expendable and setting priorities for cutbacks. This paper draws from the recent literature on trans-urban policy pipelines in studying the role of service delivery reviews in thickening relations of knowledge production between city regions (McCann and Ward, 2011, 2013;Prince, 2012). Taking the encounter with Toronto's 2011 Core Service Review as a starting place, it sets out to examine the textually mediated practices through which policy knowledge is generated. Drawing from Allen and Cochrane's (2010) topological approach, it highlights how management consultants make use of evaluative texts, lifting out and folding in knowledge and ideas from other places to make their presence felt. However, while these texts are presented as a "pure lens of cost savings", the work of rendering the city of Toronto commensurate with other distant places is often based on fragile and tenuous connections. Hence, against assumptions that these texts facilitate the foreclosure of possible utterances that can be made, I also explore the public meeting as a site for investigating alternative ways of knowing the city, providing a window onto the way in which oppositional registers of the city are themselves generated through translocal practices.

show abstract

“…Although many of those making presentations to the CEC were from the Columbus area, the report's key assertions, like the one above, were presented and justified through reference to national "policy peddlers and gurus" (Peck & Theodore, 2010, p. 170) representing corporations, online universities, charter school networks, think tanks, venture capital firms, and technology-linked foundations (cf. Cook & Ward, 2012, p. 140;Prince, 2013, Larner & Laurie, 2010Peck & Theodore, 2012, p. 22). The basic sections of the report are corresponding divided into subsections with the headings "What the Community Said," and "What the Research and the Experts Tell Us."…”

Section: Future Imaginaries In Urban School Reform Discoursementioning

confidence: 99%

Future imaginaries of urban school reform

Nespor

2016

EPAA

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Drawing on analytic heuristics from critical discourse analysis and cultural political economy (Jessop, 2010;Wodak, 2002), this article examines the temporal premises and "futures" embedded in a report and reform proposal created in a mid-sized, American city, Columbus, Ohio, in 2013. The product of a city-wide commission appointed in response to a school 'cheating' scandal, the report is both a condensation of key premises and claims circulating through national education policy discourses, and an effort to fit those ideas to a particular urban locale. This fitting involves aligning the city with a particular neoliberal representation or "imaginary" of the future that pervades current education policy discourse and planning. The article unpacks the temporal premises associated with this imaginary and shows their influence on the city's planning. Among other things, the discourse individuates scholastic time and subordinates the present to a distant future that is represented as an already-known or predictable state of affairs. It positions practices such as standardized testing as temporal technologies for predicting the child's position in the imagined future, and reframes racially-and class-based inequalities as differences in the kinds of futures towards which groups are oriented. The effect is to overwrite political questions of what kind of future we might want to create with technical questions of how best to prepare for an inevitable future we can't avoid.

show abstract

Travelling technocrats, embodied knowledges: Globalising privatisation in telecoms and water

Cited by 244 publications

References 50 publications

Laboring to Relate: Neoliberalism, Embodied Policy, and Network Dynamics

Laboring to Relate: Neoliberalism, Embodied Policy, and Network Dynamics

(Dis)Assembling policy pipelines: unpacking the work of management consultants at public meetings

Future imaginaries of urban school reform

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About