Abstract
Welcome from the new editorial board that has just assumed charge. At the outset, we express our deepest condolence to the sad demise of Roger Y. Tsien who was in the International Advisory Board of our journal. We crave readership’s indulgence for shortcomings of the issue. Several factors, especially the time constraint, account for them. A major problem was dearth of quality manuscripts with potential to exceed the minimum threshold of citations. We can improve the overall quality of the journal only by publishing articles, raising fundamental questions and offering at least a tenuous answer that can be subsequently revisited and improved upon.
It is curiosity, a natural property of mind, which prompts us to ask basic questions and methodologically go in search of explanatory answers that we turn into articles. Nevertheless, many of our articles seem to pursue questions of others under enforced environment that alienates research and leads to answers without the author’s voice. We raise no new question necessitating a shift from beaten tracks and grope in terra incognita, an adventure that often leads to discovery of principles amenable to theorization. Seldom do we find a genuine article of discovery, which opens the gate to a new world of ignorance. Serious preoccupation with analytical and explanatory methodology resorting to social theoretical correlation between global economic processes and local educational changes is rarely seen in articles. Some of us are empirically rich but either least analytical or full of reductionism. A few of us obsessed with numerical indicators try and indulge in mathematical formalism for the rigour of it. Of course, it helps us resolve problems but with no resource in itself to confirm their fundamental nature. Why waste time and energy for bringing in mathematical accuracy about answering wrongly formulated questions? Most articles tend to present a statistical survey of the state of affairs, which would have yielded findings of intellectual depth, if the information thereof were subjected to reflexive exercise using an appropriate theoretical framework.
The relevance of a central theoretical framework of comprehension is what we emphasize. Whether or not it should be a framework that insists upon ascertaining the economy’s role in determining the nature of the higher education sector depends on the author’s methodological preference. In fact, there exists no choice between being theoretical or otherwise about the exposition of one’s research findings today. Research being an explanatory project and theoretical representation its challenging outcome, we cannot treat it optional. Nevertheless, we are constrained to be choosy about whether we should hold on to the methodological foundation of science of certainty or to that of the new science of uncertainty, in theorizing. It is essential to be aware of the role of science’s certainty, finality, authenticity and logocentrism in the making of the foundation of modern methodology on the one side and on the other side of the role of the new science’s uncertainty, complexity, tentativeness and anti-logocentrism in the making of the postmodern. Postmodern research expositions contain the researcher’s reflexive self-awareness about the tentativeness of knowledge and the linguistic complexity about its communication. The control of the language and the text over the construction of reality and cultural identity is a matter of serious concern for them. They reject totalizing theories due to the partial and culture-specific nature of the truth about knowledge. In short, we are expected to be clear about whether our epistemological positioning is modern or postmodern. Indeed, the position can be neither as well, but inevitably arrived through a posteriori reasoning, probably rendering our epistemological position identifiable as critical modern.
We cannot remain unaffected by this epistemological turn also due to the contrasts between the modern and postmodern ways of understanding the language. We are implicated by the new semantics generated through contextual shifts in the use of old words for conveying non-conventional concepts. For instance, many of us use the word discourse, not in its lexical context today, but without knowing what Michel Foucault (1926–1984), a French theorist of knowledge, construed. In the implicated state, we cut a sorry figure by being away from the widely shared semantics and the newly generated concept. Foucault’s discourse is power–knowledge combine acting on the individual consciousness and body through subjectification, wherein power means not the state power, but the discursively engendered power in the field where the subjects coexist and interact. Subjects are individuals inserted into discourses through the demonstration of knowledge that turns them into subjects. It is unobtrusive control of social behaviour through the power–knowledge combine, which Foucault means by discourse. The pity is that our indifference towards the technical semantics not only puts our texts in shambles but also deprives the word of its contingent meaning in our communication. This is true of the free use of conceptual tropes coined by constructivists who view reality as inherently subjective for its being a construct of human mind. A research article based on logical positivism using constructivist expressions may end up as a self-contradictory exposition, for such expressions do not match the concept of reality, which the researcher seeks to sustain. Technical terms signifying knowledge as self-evident are unsuitable for an article that aims at conveying information of statistical features, such as averages and frequencies, by mustering empirical data.
It is our choice now whether we should try and sustain a totalizing theory as the central framework of comprehension or go by multiple theories that apply to locally specific phenomena. It is possible to combine the two as well. For instance, one can use several social theories for supplementing a totalizing framework of comprehension, for they explain the niceties and nuances of auxiliary questions that appear either irrelevant or not articulated otherwise. A macro-theoretical study in regional education encountering questions against the presumed correlation between economy and educational processes requires social theories for answering them. For example, a concept, such as habitus, enunciated by Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002 CE), which refers to the structuring principle of social practices, predisposed to function as the structuring structure, may be of use for a researcher using critical political economy as the central framework. Several such concepts of social theorists might be relevant to the context, but it is inevitable to be wary of the trap of self-contradiction lurking in the attempt, for they mutually nullify and run counter to the hermeneutic thrust of the article. On the contrary, Foucault’s concept of discourse, though helps explain the actual mechanism of subjection, may be of no use for an article that applies Marx’s concept of ideology.
Some of us as educationists rely on convergence of multiple methodological perspectives, such as empiricism, historicism, political economy and phenomenology, for understanding educational process as means of academic communication or as strategic transmission of knowledge or methodical nurturing of determinate learning outcomes or regular building up of competencies or facilitation of systematic unlearning. It is not natural that all of us tend to focus on the material milieu and social context as an essential aspect of understanding the process. Following Bruno Latour (born in 1947 CE), a French philosopher and social theoretician of knowledge, we would argue that the social context and technical content of education are inseparable. Similarly, drawing insights from Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (born in 1946 CE), a German philosopher, we would maintain that there exists sociopolitical bearing on education in the form of epistemic control of knowledge, instrumentation of its transmission and structuring of the institutional arrangement. An array of social theorists like Wiebe Bijker, Sergio Sismondo and others today argue that transactions of knowledge can be understood only by discovering their social context. At the same time, it is quite important to still retain the methodological advantages as well as disadvantages of phenomenology, a prominent component of philosophy, which postulates in-depth analysis of the essence of the lifeworld of an individual as Edmund Husserl (1859–1938 CE) or Martin Heidegger (1889–1976 CE) conceived, or the consciousness of an individual as conceived by Jean Hyppolite (1907–1968 CE) or Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961 CE). One should know the social dimension as perceived by Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005 CE), whose hermeneutics follows phenomenological description.
Quality of article is what every Journal insists today. Leaving the question, who decides its universal meanings and criteria if any, we insist upon the primacy of embodying new knowledge for an article to be ranked as a quality piece. Our Journal expects the article to be developed into a proper exposition based on a problem clearly defined against its discipline/cognate disciplines, situated in the scholarly context, distinguished from that of existing studies and justified in terms of fresh research questions as well as methodological preoccupation. A narrative that just does the ordering of the empirically given will not do for us to flag it as an article.
Before I wind up, let me call upon the attention of our readership that consists of specialists as well as generalists, to the Editorial Board’s decision to launch the Journal’s forthcoming Number as a Special Issue dedicated to the study of India’s National Education Policy 2016. Articles analyzing the content, context, problems and implications in the theoretical perspective are welcome.