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‘Promises Promises’: The OECD, Promissory Legitimacy and its Strategic Re-Negotiation of Education Futures – Nov 22nd, Manchester

Wednesday 22nd November 2023, 4pm to 5:30pm. Room C5.1 in the Ellen Wilkinson Building. Feel free to get in touch if you need advice about finding the place.

Promising lines of scholarship have emerged on how International Organisations deploy anticipatory techniques aimed at colonising the future as a means of governing in the absence of sovereignty. It follows that securing hegemony over a vision of the future is important strategic work for IOs. Legitimacy can thus be derived from being seen to be authoritative about the nature of future challenges and solutions. Beckert (2020) calls this ‘promissory legitimacy’. Yet what happens when this promised future arrives and is problematic? How does an IO creatively strategise this shortfall? In this lecture I identified and explore five strategies deployed by the OECD in its Future of Education and Skills 2030 programme aimed to re-negotiate a failed present and anticipate a new future present.  I also reflect on the ideational underpinnings the OECDs new futures programme, and argue it is being mobilised to, on the one hand, get beyond the limitations of data governance, and on the other to help selectively shape a new cognitariat subjectivity engaged with immaterial labour in the emerging post-industrial capitalism.

Susan L. Robertson is Professor of Sociology of Education, University of Cambridge, UK, Fellow Wolfson College, and Distinguished Professor at Aarhus University. She has written extensively on transformations of the state and education policy, globalisation and global governance, and multilateralism. Susan is founding and current co-editor of the journal Globalisation, Societies and Education.

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