Reconfiguring Knowledge in Higher Education by Peter Maassen Monika Nerland & Lyn Yates

Author:Peter Maassen, Monika Nerland & Lyn Yates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Concerned Groups, ‘Hot’ Situations and Shadow Organizing in Legal Education

The history of legal education is full of ‘hot situations’ and ‘orphan groups’ that have been excluded. For example, reviews of its historical development in a range of countries illustrate an ongoing ‘tug of war’ over the kind of legal education that future lawyers should receive (for an overview of the key literature, see Spencer 2012). Both professional and academic groups have always been concerned that their interests would be insufficiently considered in the development of legal education programmes. On the one hand, there were office-based apprenticeship models and on the other university-based scholastic models. The weaknesses of both approaches were recognized and various attempts to weave the two into one unit were made. However, over time, the university connections led to what historians describe as a ‘triumph for the academy’ and thus some groups were orphaned.

Globalization and changes in knowledge and ambition are externalities which have brought to the fore a range of new concerns in the legal profession that require negotiation (Boon et al. 2005; Evetts 2015; Faulconbridge and Muzio 2009; Papendorf 2010). Indeed, there is a growing literature which reveals that legal education struggles to deal with the burgeoning growth of knowledge and expectations in modern society. In relation to knowledge, the field of law is marked by an over-abundance of both information and sources. Transnational legislation plays an increasingly powerful role and serves to expand the knowledge domain as well as demarcate new areas of expertise. Another change driver relates to the growing focus on the competitiveness of global firms/legal offices. At the same time, the need for legal professionals to be involved in an increasing range of businesses and services generates pressure to prepare students more effectively for a broad variety of work. This in turn requires higher education institutions around the world to disentangle these developments and reframe education. However, there is also a need for actors in the legal field to find ways of dealing with the inevitable overflows. In this context, education again becomes a contested space and harbours a range of ‘hot’ situations, which makes it interesting from the perspective of ‘concerned groups’ and new organizational forms. As Callon (1998: 262) points out, in ‘hot situations’ “the local and the global are in constant interaction” and therefore to understand the framing process we need to examine how global trends filter through and interact with national values and traditions.

In the Norwegian HORIZON project (2012–2016), which studied four professions, we saw how transnational developments were filtered through the Nordic model for education and work. Here issues related to framing, for example, equality, trust-based relationships, and flat, non-hierarchical structures in both public and private organizations, were enhancing rather than diminishing the tensions described above. Hence, with respect to higher education, the frames seemed to be flooded by spillovers. However, while collecting data on legal education, we discovered that some students were involved in expanded trainee arrangements outside their educational programme that seemed to deal with some of these tensions and spillovers.

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