Academic capitalism (AC) has become one of the most influential lines of research into markets in higher education (HE). However, researchers often use AC only as an umbrella term while key concepts remain superficially explored and intertwined topics treated disjointed. By means of a systematic literature review, our main contribution is the…

National internationalization strategies are produced by governments to frame and drive their internationalization agendas. They are relatively new, but growing in number. This paper contributes to an emerging strand of international education research: that of discursive policy analysis. We analyse the Australian Strategy for International…

This timely volume sets out the author's novel concept of the Organic model of internationalisation, developed using participants' perceptions, lived experiences, and recommendations for a better sustainable future of HE, and explores its broader application in the context of higher education. Using the qualitative IPA (Interpretative…

Purpose: Students are an essential part of university innovation. Through their training, research and energy, students acquire and transfer knowledge to industry, and they help establish new businesses and start-up companies. This paper investigates how universities might capture the entrepreneurial energies of students toward the goal of…

We provide a framework for integrating sociological and political-historical approaches to the worldwide expansion of higher education in the twentieth century. Doing so enables scholars and policymakers to better identify variation across place and time in how the provision of higher education has been rendered culturally meaningful and…

In this article I investigate how corporate Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) providers negotiate their position by contributing to a national ECEC policy development process. I discuss how their political engagement connects to changes in the institutional arrangements of the ECEC sector. The ECEC provider corporations' written responses…

This article begins with an examination of phenomena such as the market, homo economicus and entrepreneurialism, which have become salient in discussions of neoliberalism in recent years and which are central to the contributions to this special issue. In the second half of the article, the focus shifts to the author's personal take on these…

This paper deals with the relationship between neoliberalism and communicative language teaching in language-in-education policy. Neoliberalism, or the deregulation of state based on meritocracy, or equal competition, gives rise to paradoxical discourses. On the one hand, sociolinguistic superdiversity shows us the unprecedented mixing and…

Drawing on an integrative review of the literature on the privatization of education and an empirical case study of technology corporations in education, this article examines the corporate within the political economy of education. It argues that by analytically conceiving of corporations under the banner of the private sphere and,…

Higher education is increasingly acknowledged by national governments and international agencies as a key driver of development, and systems are expanding rapidly in response to rising demand. Moreover, universities have been attributed a central role in the post-2015 development agenda and the achievement of the sustainable development goals. Yet…

The outsourcing of education services has been widely adopted across international contexts as a 'tested solution' or panacea to meet various educational problems including school management, curriculum design, teaching and student discipline. Contracting third-party providers, it is argued, enhances organisational goals such as efficiency,…

This paper outlines clear signs of market-led instrumentalisation for HE cultures in Britain, before critiquing the "ontological turn" in HE theory and its intrinsic political abdication from those signs. It focuses on a paper by Ronald Barnett to both diagnose the problem, which is a "precarité" that is ghosted in his work,…

This paper tries to accomplish two tasks. First, it uses a critical review of the concept of differentiation to shed light on the expansion of the Mozambican higher education system, a consequence of the global neoliberal dynamics of higher education. Second, the neoliberal framework is applied to account for the development of multi-campus…

We examine how discourses of leadership and responsibilisation are used in contemporary universities to deepen neoliberal administration and further the corporate university's business plan by restructuring and redescribing academic work. Strategically, responsibilisation discourse, promoted as "distributed leadership", is a technology…

Student-centered learning has been conceived as a Western export to the East and the developing world in the last few decades. Philosophers of education often associate student-centered learning with frameworks related to meeting the needs of individual pupils: from Deweyan experiential learning, to the "pedagogy of the oppressed" and…