Energizing and Constraining Advocacy

This chapter explores a series of essays written between 2009 and 2011, all of them seeking to develop and expand our understanding of the credit crunch and its implications for the knowledge economy. Indeed, recent higher education reforms in the United Kingdom inaugurate a quasi-market world, in which the market, vocationally defined, and the customer achieve the nirvana of the industry-ready graduate whose World of Work skills (WOW, of course) maximize employability. Thus are the young and unemployed insulated by the career service from knowledge of the jobless recovery. So conclude that the knowledge economy is not some inevitable functional relation between education and the global economy: It is a fragile and somewhat demented extension of an economic model that in itself crashed in 2007 and led to the worst economic crisis of at least sixty years. Education cannot go on mimicking a failure-prone capitalism by way of whatever knowledge economy.