53For a critical analysis of such a fascinating panorama, this chapter takes the bull
by the horns to break down the present book’s theme (Higher Education Research
as a Field of Study in Asia) into the following sub-themes in a question format:
- Is higher education research a champ à la Bourdieu?
- Could there be a research methodology that is authentically Asian?
- Should the main concern of Asian knowledge production be a neoliberal hege-
mony in the region? - Does Asian knowledge production address the equally Asian needs and
problems? - What is the fate of knowledge already produced and what does it bring home?
Perhaps a disclaimer here would be helpful. Asian academics today live in a sea of
bureaucratized and bureaucratizing HE institutions as diagnosed by Weber. Since
the fish is the last to see the water, most of us Asian academics seldom counterpoise
Asia as a critical outlook in order to examine HE as a Western social institution. It is
the Asian HE knowledge production I am up to problematize in this chapter by
looking at its positioning as a field, method, and goals. A second disclaimer is more
obvious: I cannot even remotely represent the entire Asian HE research community.
Hence, I do not pretend to offer here a World Bank kind of report. All that is argued
hereafter is based on my personal exposure to Asian higher education as well as
other education systems I have been fortunate to experience.
Knowledge Production as a Field in Asia
The main question related to HE-based research addressed in this section is whether
an “Asian higher education research” is a field of study, that is, an academic disci-
pline of its own standing. By required characteristics, a field should possess a three-
fold principle of (1) an inner coherence of the substantive subject matter with
identifiable boundaries; (2) Bourdieu’s principle of champ, namely, the interplay of
structures and human agency; and (3) members’ subject-specific utterances or dis-
course (Ref. Manzon 2011 ).^2 Although readers might find the suggestion rather
mechanistic and essentialist, it is of great value if we are to understand the core of
the matter without illusory attempts of accommodating all the nuances of a field.
The validity of the threefold justification of what constitutes a field could be
better understood with a thought experiment. Suppose that there is an area of research
A with reasonably distinct boundaries, a substantive body of content and logical
(^2) For this threefold principle, I have profited from Maria Manzon’s theorization and apology of
comparative education as a field (2011) albeit our few disagreements. For example, for the term
discourse, instead of power relation-based one suggested by Foucault, I take a more positive
stance: “ways of combining and integrating language, actions, interactions, ways of thinking,
believing, valuing, and using various symbols, tools, and objects to enact a particular sort of
socially recognizable identity”(Gee 2011 , p. 29).
4 Higher Education Knowledge Production in Postcolonial-Neoliberal Asia