bnarchives | Building on the definition of critical education residing in the
crossroads of cultural politics and political economy, this theoretical
article offers an inquiry into the intersection between critical
education research and the central ritual of contemporary capitalism –
capitalisation. This article outlines four current approaches in
education research literature to the corporatisation of education. This
article argues that the approaches must rely implicitly on one of the
two major theories of capitalism: modern neoclassical economics or
Marxist political economy, even when the approaches are built on
cultural and sociological arguments. Without an explicit engagement with
the concept of capital and capitalisation, the approaches risk
appearing theoretically weak and reliant on moral assumptions. In this
sense, critical education literature would be strengthened by engagement
with international political economy (IPE) literature. This article
proposes to redress this lacuna in the literature by mobilising Jonathan
Nitzan's and Shimson Bichler's theory of capital as power to better
understand the corporatisation of education.
