Session Information
23 SES 04 C, Globalization, Europeanization and Higher Education Reforms
Paper Session
Contribution
Since 2009 Greece has been experiencing a tremendous fiscal crisis. As a response to it, a strict package of austerity policy measures and structural reforms has been adopted by successive Greek governments, ultimately focusing on fiscal consolidation and gains in economic competitiveness. Within this political and financial context, a series of reforms in Higher Education (HE) were proposed and made legal, with a view to address some of the deficiencies and challenges in the sector. These have set the Greek HE agenda one step closer to the European Union (EU) directives and the Bologna process, which have largely influenced and informed Greek HE politics over the last 15 years; most of the influence has been a discursive one and has promoted particular concepts, including those of ‘knowledge society’, ‘internationalisation’, ‘quality assurance and accountability’ (Gouvias 2012).
Nevertheless, due to their embeddedness into this new socio-political context of the acute financial crisis in Greece, these reforms have largely collided with the deteriorating economic climate in Greece; this has dealt a severe blow not only to the basic, daily operations of Greek HE institutions, but even their survival in itself. This paper, takes a view of crisis as a critical juncture moment, i.e. a moment of instability and uncertainty where crucial decisions have to be made (Panizza 2013); ‘crisis’ is considered therefore to be a key historical moment that incites value contentions and political/ideological struggles. In the case of Greece, the financial crisis has led to a radical political and socio-economic change, and even challenged the country’s long and historical belonging to ‘Europe’.
As were to be expected, these developments have given rise to a variety of new competing ideas and discourses about the character of higher education reform and its social and economic implications. Thus, this paper aims at critically exploring the role and function of the competing discourses between the various political and public actors (politicians, academics, students etc.) in the construction of the recent Greek HE reforms in the light of the current financial crisis. The period investigated spans from 2011 until 2014. Such an analysis will shed light on the various ideas and ideologies that underlie the recent Greek HE policyscape. In particular, the study is guided by the following questions:
• How has the political and public debate regarding the recent HE reforms in Greece been developed in the light of the current crisis?
• What implications does it have to the construction and dissemination of the recent HE policies?
Theoretically, the paper is rooted in an analysis of policy discourses as intertwined with social and institutional structures, bound with and conditioned by socio-political and economic ideologies, concerns and interests.
More specifically, this paper follows a constructivist approach in terms of conceptualizing policy as a social practice/ process which is dialectically shaped by discourses but also shapes them (Fairclough & Wodak 1998, Fairclough 2010). In this sense, the discourses that frame the relevant HE policies constitute the medium through which particular political/social/economic ideas, definitions of problems and solutions are formulated and elaborated during the policy-making process. Thus discourses are viewed here as constitutive of the policies to which they pertain. The paper will discuss how discursive practices are largely contingent on the institutional structures and historical, cultural and socio-political context that surrounds them.
Finally, this paper forms a part of a larger study and will offer a preliminary analysis of the interview data that will be collected for the purposes of the research.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Diamantopoulou, A. (2011). ‘We Change Education, We Change Greece’, Public Lecture given at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences, London. Fairclough, N. (2010). Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language, London, Longman. Fairclough, N., & Wodak, R. (1997). Critical Discourse Analysis. In T. A. van Dijk (Eds.) Discourse as Social Interaction (Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction. Vol. 2) (pp. 258-284). London, Sage. Gouvias, D. (2012c). A New “Configuration” of the “Field” of Higher Education in Latest Reforms in Greece. Journal of the World Universities Forum 5(2), pp. 59-71. Jessop, B. (2010). Critical Discourse Analysis, Cultural Political Economy, and Economic Crisis (co-authored with N. Sum). In R. de Cillia, H. Gruber, M. Kryzanowski, & F. Menz (Eds.), Discourse-Politics-Identity (pp. 95-103).Tübingen, Stauffenburg. Panizza, F. (2013). Introduction. In F. Panizza & George Phillip (Eds.) Moments of Truth: The Politics of Financial Crises in Comparative Perspective. Routledge, pp. 1-10. Sotiropoulos, D. (2012). The Politics of education reform in Greece. In O. Anastasakis, & D. Singh (Eds.), Reforming Greece: Sisyphean task or Herculean challenge? (pp. 71-75). University of Oxford, SEESOX. Stamelos, G., & Kavasakalis, A. (2011). The public debate on a quality assurance system for Greek universities, Quality in Higher Education 17(3), pp. 353-368.
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