© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018 51
J. Jung et al. (eds.), Researching Higher Education in Asia, Higher Education in
Asia: Quality, Excellence and Governance, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4989-7_4
Chapter 4
Higher Education Knowledge Production
in Postcolonial-Neoliberal Asia
Jae Park
Abstract Against a descriptive analysis or even eulogies on the neoliberal impact
on Asian higher education such as “brain gain/drain,” managerialism, marketiza-
tion, and globalization, this theoretical chapter takes a rather critical position regard-
ing the ongoing neoliberalization of higher education as a field of study in Asia. It
examines the discourse of Confucian heritage culture and its methodological issues
in knowledge production, followed by some recent counterarguments against the
universalism of research methodology by exploring the possibility of Asia as a
higher education research methodology.
Introduction
In a century that is called after her, Asia is yet to come to terms with her past under
colonialism and Cold-War “peripheriality” amid fresh nationalistic struggles and
territorial/maritime disputes from within. Knowledge production was at the core of
such an “imposed peripheriality,” and it still remains the most looked up and debated
upon among the commonly recognized threefold mission of higher education (HE),
namely, instruction, research, and social projection.
This chapter suggests an alternative theoretical imagination on contemporary
Asian HE and its knowledge production in social sciences and humanities in the
context of her unfinished modernity, from a colonial past to an inextricably neoliberal
J. Park (*)
The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
e-mail: [email protected]
Universities...are dominated and influenced by the need for the
kind of education that produces a system of special
examinations and the trained expertness that is increasingly
indispensable for modern bureaucracy- Max Weber