Abstract
This thesis examines the contemporary New Public Managerial (NPM) discourse being applied to New Zealand's tertiary education sector. It presents a comparative analysis of NPM with a metaphorical representation of Jeremy Bentham's eighteenth century prison design called the panopticon. I argue through a concept of Managerial Panopticism that under the current reforms New Zealand's tertiary education sector risks evolving into a society of control. Within this system New Zealand's academics exist within an institutional environment that appears to allow them a sense of personal (and academic) freedom beneath a complex and sophisticated matrix of technologies and bureaucracies that serve to monitor their activities in perpetuity beneath the ceaseless gaze of a new Tertiary Education Commission. This thesis argues that the proposed TEAC reforms could lead to academic docility as individuals focus more upon their performance (producing competitive performance-based research or maintaining high levels of participation in the courses they teach) rather than upon their research and teaching (measured by the production and dissemination of knowledge).
In 1999 a Labour/ Alliance Coalition was elected as New Zealand's Government and introduced a new 'Third Way' approach to politics and reform. This new approach, despite claiming to be informed by a centre-left ideology, served to reinforce the NPM style of administration introduced by previous neo-liberal governments during the latter part of the twentieth century. This thesis will argue that the reforms undertaken by the Labour/ Alliance Coalition (as an extension of the reform process established during the 1990s) could seriously erode the traditional culture of the university and replace it with an environment built upon superintendence and distrust.
Michel Foucault claimed that the apparent neutrality and political invisibility that existed within certain forms of governance allowed power to be exercised with maximum effect because it was hidden from view. In the case of NPM, the technologies that would be applied to regulate and control individuals within their institutions created the false impression that NPM actually served the interests and well-being of those encompassed by it.
This thesis examines the way that the docility created by Managerial Panopticism restricts New Zealand's academics' traditional role as the nation's 'critic and conscience' because of the way that the new technologies of management work to silence alternative discourses beneath an encompassing meta-narrative of neo-liberalism. Managerial Panopticism exists as a new apparatus of power that employs techniques of coercion that provide individuals with a sense of opportunism if they comply. I argue that this sense of 'opportunism' is actually an illusion used to stifle any possible resistance to the reform process.
Through this thesis I help create a space where constructive debate over the future directions of New Zealand's tertiary education reforms can occur. This debate is essential if New Zealand's universities and academics are to maintain the capacity to act as the nation's critical conscience and to exercise academic freedom.