The Rise of Mono-disciplinarity: Learning, Economics and the Production of Non-knowledge

Michael Gibbons, Helga Nowotny and their colleagues saw the transition from Mode 1 to Mode 2 as a process of transcending disciplinary boundaries and structures. They suggested that Mode 1 knowledge production was happening predominantly in academic silos—university departments, schools or research councils. On the contrary, Mode 2 was seen as a mode of knowledge production that would bring different disciplines together in the search of answers to complex social problems; this was the advent of multidisciplinary, or even interdisciplinary, knowledge-making. Policy problems were seen as inherently interdisciplinary—hence the production of knowledge to understand and manage them had to span disciplinary boundaries in order to be useful. This chapter analyses the ways that the production of data for education over the last three decades, despite the complexity and interdependency of policy problems in education, has not been inter- but mono-disciplinary: it has primarily been dependent on the discipline of economics and the ensuing economisation of education policy as the preferred mode of producing knowledge for governing.