A Warm Embrace? New Zealand, Universities and the “Knowledge‐based Economy”

This article deploys a cultural political economy framework to explore New Zealand's “embrace” of globally‐sourced knowledge economy discourse. It argues that the diffusion of such knowledge in this locale has been mediated by electoral shifts and rising economic prosperity but in one of the few fields where some level of institutionalization has occurred––higher education––it has been used to increase state control of a highly marketized tertiary sector. The article then discusses the implications of this investigation for researchers in non‐metropolitan locales.