Beyond their educational function, schools are frequently a focal point for community life. We argue that this latter role was compromised in New Zealand by a decade of neoliberal realignments within education policy. During the 1990s the abolition of school zones, the commodification of education, and the drive for efficiency in the allocation of educational resources undermined the place of school in community life. In this paper we explore the impacts of a school closure on an urban neighbourhood in Invercargill, New Zealand. We present and interpret narratives gathered during an interview-based study of the closure of Surrey Park Primary School. Our analysis highlights parents' perspectives on the role of the educational bureaucracy in the closure debate, the ambiguous role assigned to ‘community’ within the restructured system, the impact of the closure for low-income families, and the place of schools in contributing to the neighbourhood social cohesion. Our analysis concurs with international research suggesting that breaking links between schools and communities has potentially significant educational impacts on children.

Export education in New Zealand has grown rapidly since 1990, earning significant foreign exchange and underwriting the finance of domestic education. As principal owner of education institutions, the national state is the primary investor. Previous governments treated the ‘industry’ as both windfall and cash‐cow as they advanced the neo‐liberal project of disentangling state from economy and making education providers self‐regulating. The current ‘Third Way’ inspired government has adopted a more prominent management interest in the making of this globalising industry. A new Code of Practice enacts multiple technologies of control from quality control to standard setting, benchmarking, certification and audit. Legitimated by a discourse of concern for the pastoral care of school‐aged students, it requires institutions to provide detailed information. The Code makes ‘the industry’ visible, makes a market, controls brand NZ education, regulates through consumer assurance, and imposes direct disciplinary controls on institutions. The Code of Practice makes apparent the ambitions and governmental technologies of the ‘augmented’ neo‐liberal state, and is a pivotal structure in the constitution of the industry and of the globalising processes that define it. The paper uses governmentality analysis to uncover these technologies of control and to consider their part in the constitution of both industry and globalisation.

This paper uses the New Zealand designer fashion industry as an analytical lens through which to examine the co‐constitution of political projects in what we label ‘after‐neoliberalism’. The paper begins by tracing the making of New Zealand designer fashion as an industry, and relates this process to four political projects in which designer fashion is understood to have different possibilities – globalisation, the knowledge economy, creative cities and social development. We examine two key sites of the constitution of the industry – the scoping reports that created it, and New Zealand Fashion Week, when designer fashion can be seen to mobilise the different political projects and to be harnessed to them. We show how ‘the designer fashion industry’ is expected to articulate diverse state aspirations. Our emphasis on the co‐constitution of political projects highlights a new style of post‐structural political economic analysis, as does our concern with industry as a space in which political projects become mobilised.