Mark Olssen is a political theorist who specialises in education and political sociology with an accent on the theory of social democracy. He is also an internationally acknowledged expert on Foucault whose philosophical ideas inform his work on neoliberalism. His work critiques neoliberalism both as a mode of governmentality, as well as an alternative social democratic conception of politics and education for the 21st century. His recent work utilises Foucault and complexity as the basis of a new ontology in order to escape deterministic views of history and society, associated with Marx and Hegel. Together, these elements ground a new conception of social democracy where public education, and the social basis of citizenship, will once again play a major role.
Actually, I based this description on an official statement that Mark Olssen uses to succinctly summarise the value of his intellectual labours for the New Zealand performance-based assessment framework (Performance Based Research Fund, PBRF) that monitors and determines institutional and research rankings. It tells us precisely where he locates himself in relation to Foucault and Marx and what he is working towardâa social democratic theoretical account of public education as the basis of social citizenship. It also tells us how he regards Foucault and what use he wants to make of his work. These essays organised into six partsâ(1) Michel Foucault, (2) Foucault, Marx, Hegel, (3) Social Democracy in the 21st Century, (4) Neoliberal Governmentality, (5) Complexity, Democracy, Ethics, and (6) Political Theory in the 21st Centuryâshow us the trajectory and progression of Olssenâs work. Without doubt he is one of the leading theorists working in this area and his work is widely cited and justly so.
I invited Mark to contribute to my book series because I thought it would be useful to have a comprehensive approach to his papers organised into a coherent whole that guides the reader through the theoretical debates and issues that he has engaged over many years. I have known Mark Olssen for over 20 years from when he was at Otago University in New Zealand in the 1980s, where he was a voice in the wilderness. He had stronger ties and shared theoretical interests with Jim Marshall and me at Auckland University during the 1990s, and with a small group of scholars interested in the work of Michel Foucault that Marshall Olssen and I helped introduce to New Zealand scholars, especially in educational studies. The reception of critical sociology in New
Mark, well read in the work of the Frankfurt School, I imagine, would have sided with Habermas and the Frankfurt School that collectively held that critical sociology could not been cut off from its base in metaphysics with the consequence that all empirical questions are in some sense anchored in philosophical issues. I think Mark would also hold on to this proposition. And I suspect also that he, like Foucault, does not see any deep contradiction between the Frankfurt School and Foucault.
At the University of Otago in New Zealand philosophy was dominated by Alan Musgrave, who edited with Imre Lakatos the wonderful book Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970). He became Head of the Philosophy Department at Otago in 1970 and only retired in 2005. The atmosphere was not very receptive to Foucault. James Flynn in the Department of Politics, where Olssen studied as a student, managed to combine moral and political philosophy with psychology to write about issues of race, class and IQ, as well as issues of social and political concern. I know that Olssen and Flynn were on good terms.
The problem was really an Education Department committed to empiricism and psychology that did not try to make room for other approaches, and like education more broadly in New Zealand, in the main drew up firm disciplinary borders between educational psychology and sociology. And yet at the same time the reception of Foucault in educational studies was a major influence on his reception in New Zealand. The downside is that now there are a large group of PhD students who want to use discourse analysis and theory who have never read âThe Order of Discourseâ, Foucaultâs inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1970. Mark Olssen certainly changed the intellectual landscape in sociology of education and in relation the concept of social democracy, always with a policy orientation. He also worked closely with his colleagues at Massey University, including John Codd and Anne-Marie OâNeill in 2001
He left Otago for the Politics Department at the University of Surrey, where he focused on his project of developing approach to Foucaultâs ethics and elaborating
I have had the good fortune to work and collaborate with Mark and I count him as a friend and colleague, so it is with great pleasure that I am able to offer this collection to his readers and to the academic community at large.