Research Managers and Administrators (RMAs) face various challenges caused by conflicting and contradictory organizational subcultures in knowledge-intensive organizations (KIOs), but their human capital, such as skills and personality traits, helps RMAs to maintain job and organizational engagement and professional growth. Focusing on…

The newly coined policy of social investment is an economic argument for targeting state investment to the most needy. I use Foucault's notion of biopolitics in a discursive analysis of recent New Zealand policy documents pertaining to a discrete group of 'vulnerable children'. I further argue that the Foucauldian metaphor of state institutions as…

Purpose: This paper explores the economic and social effects of human capital investment in the 20th century. As well as drawing on census data and statistical yearbooks in Australia and Aoteoroa/New Zealand, the paper develops its argument by an intersection of scholarly work in sociology, economics and the history of education to consider the…

This article examines the long-run effect of higher education, measured in average years of tertiary schooling, on the level and growth rate of national per capita income. It uses an improved dataset on educational attainments which not only reduces measurement error but also overcomes data comparability issues and allows us to estimate the…

This paper studies the contribution of parental influence in accounting for cross-country gaps in human capital achievements. We argue that the cross-country variation in unobserved parental characteristics is at least as important as the one in commonly used observable proxies of parental socio-economic background. We infer this through an…

In the course of a study on the impacts of changing early childhood policy in Aotearoa New Zealand since 1989, the illustrations accompanying three major government reports and policies stood out as encapsulating the changes in underlying discourses. This enabled the illustrations from these three policy reports to be used for a historical…

In this article, Nesta Devine responds to Jonathan Boston's article "Child Poverty in New Zealand: Why It Matters and How It Can Be Reduced" ("Educational Philosophy and Theory," v46 n9 p995-999, 2014). Devine wishes to consider Boston's position from two angles: one is to rehearse the point that these statistics are an…

Skeptics of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trend for International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) argue that while US elementary and high school students are behind their peers in other nations, the US workforce is still excellent because of the high quality post-secondary educational institutions in the US. However, the…

This paper takes a post-structural approach, examining what and how issues are framed in the parenting policy, "Incredible Years," through Foucault's (1977, 1980, 1991, 2003, 2004) notion of "governmentality and discursive normalisation." By unpacking discourses of parenting produced by Incredible Years as an accepted parenting…

Following Ben-Porath [1967. "The Production of Human Capital and the Life-Cycle of Earnings." "Journal of Political Economy" 75 (3): 352-365], the influence of life expectancy on education and on human capital has attracted much attention among growth theorists. Whereas existing growth models rely on an education decision made…

There is a growing recognition that parents play an important role in the academic achievement of their children. This role includes both the interactions they have with their children and the management of resources that can contribute to their children's achievement. To better understand parents' roles, it is important to understand their…

This article argues that a focus on human capability and its development can be used to rethink the high skills policy visions favoured over recent decades. The article briefly summarises the increasing concerns with government policy formulas which have adopted a narrow focus such that skill and its accreditation is regarded as the outcome rather…

Ample evidence indicates that a person's human capital is important for success on the labor market in terms of both wages and employment prospects. However, unlike the efforts to identify the impact of school attainment on labor-market outcomes, the literature on returns to cognitive skills has not yet provided convincing evidence that the…

New Zealand has received world-wide accolades for its Early Childhood Education (ECE) curriculum, Te Whariki. This paper explores the tension between economic imperialism, and a curriculum acknowledged as visionary. The foundational ideas of Te Whariki emanate from sociocultural and anti-racist pedagogies. However, its implementation is hampered…

Neoliberal policy objectives perpetuate an audit culture at both school and system levels. The associated focus on performativity and accountability can result in reductive and procedural interpretations of classroom assessment for learning (AfL) practices. Set in a New Zealand AfL professional development context, this research takes an…