Historical Materialism Conference - Université Paris Nanterre Accéder directement au contenu
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2013

Historical Materialism Conference

Résumé

We study the ongoing marketisation of higher education in Europe, using the case study of an English university as an illustration. We use the concept of fetishism to focus on the transformation of the substance of higher education through the process of commodification. First, the ongoing reforms modify the production process in the universities through governance arrangements (norms, quality certification, rating, ranking, etc.) and other forms of the new spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999). These transformations have an ideological twin: specificities of science ideology must be removed or at least subordinated to the budget logic. A central moment of these two faces of the abstraction process is an operation of quantification (Desrosières 2008a, 2008b), which renders different activities commensurate, and turns differences in nature into magnitudes (Espeland and Stevens 1998). The final step of this abstraction process is the actual selling of teaching and research through tuition fees and patents or innovation consultancy. We conclude on the subjectivity of the resulting academics, producers of the knowledge commodity.
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

hal-01146322 , version 1 (28-04-2015)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-01146322 , version 1

Citer

Elsa Boulet, Hugo Harari-Kermadec. Historical Materialism Conference. Historical Materialism Conference, Nov 2013, Londres, United Kingdom. ⟨hal-01146322⟩
114 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More