In the second decade of the new century, America's public higher education institutions (PHEIs) face several key challenges: rising demands of accountability, a steady drop in public funding, and competition from virtual and for-profit entities. Limited research had been conducted on the applicability of social enterprise theory to these…

Since the 1980s, scholars and others have been engaged in a lively debate about the virtues and dangers of mingling commerce with university science. In this paper, we contend that the commercialization of academic science, and higher education more broadly, are best understood as pieces of a larger story. We use two cases of institutional change…

The article is a partial result of a wider research project, in which the commodification of science is interpreted, from one point of view, as a facet of the rise of neoliberalism, and from another, as a set of processes, classified according to a three-category taxonomy. Only one of the taxonomy's categories is dealt with in this article,…

Labor studies can play a unique role in today's increasingly corporatized higher education.

I am examining the state of democracy and education in current circumstances of global race of the superpowers for military and economic domination--race that creates impoverished nations, impoverished markets and dysfunctional educational systems. What Dewey foresaw and termed in the early 20th century as an annihilation of space is today's…

Language tests are increasingly being used as gatekeeping tools in a globalised world. This article examines the processes of linguistic gatekeeping by the use of language tests in the context of migration. We draw on half a dozen cases of test-takers of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) test who applied for entry into…

This volume focuses on two questions. First, how can education abroad be embedded into undergraduate education so that students experience it as an integral component of their education and something they help shape, rather than as time away from their education and as a commodity to be consumed? Second, how can colleges and universities maximize…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the voice of Chinese and Vietnamese international students through studying the similarities and differences in their learning experiences and the reasons underlying their experience. Design/methodology/approach: In total, 57 Chinese and Vietnamese international students participated in focus groups…

The purpose of this article is analysis of discursive marginalisation through education in Nordic welfare states. What knowledge do Nordic research discourses produce about marginalisation through education in Nordic welfare states? What are the Nordic contributions to research discourses on marginalisation through education? We apply a discourse…

A growing body of research examines the role of elite networks, power, and race in the advocacy for market-based reforms and their ultimate effects on students, teachers, and communities of color. Yet, less research explores how such reforms interact with gender in the workplace, especially how policies such as school choice, competition, and…

Using a dialectical mode of exposition, I offer a reflexive sociological theorisation of the paradox that characterises my academic identity: a fatalistic disenchantment concerning the colonisation of Higher Education (HE) by neoliberalism co-exists with a utopianism concerning HE's emancipatory possibilities. I begin with a discussion of Weber's…

The move towards a market-driven HE system in the UK and active policy promotion of students as consumers has generated much commentary on the ways in which students' expectations and experiences have been transformed. This article introduces and develops a conceptualization of contemporary higher students' views of their relationship to higher…

This paper brings together themes from the varied texts of Gilles Deleuze in outlining a Deleuzo-feminist ethics that speaks to contemporary debates in education. Drawing on Deleuze's (1988) engagement with Spinozan ethics, Foucault's (1987) "practice of freedom", the Nietzschean "doctrine of judgment" and "system of…

Neo-liberal capitalism is a representation of values that are detrimental to intellectual inquiry. Market deregulation and consumer choice are relentless in their erosion of academic autonomy and traditions of independent scholarship. Education as a 'positional good' may be weakened more in the post-1992 higher education sector, where…

This paper examines the main rationales for and possible implications of the policy of increasing international student numbers in higher education (HE). Drawing on critical discourse analysis, we map key themes emerging from two sets of data--university strategy documents and interviews with staff--collected at eight universities in four national…