The education sector is fast digitalising all of its operations. A large part is driven by proprietary digital products and services developed and offered by for-profit companies that form the education technology industry. This article aims to introduce a theoretical focus of rentiership and assetization into the study of the political economy of…

This collection of short essays presents and examines six vignettes of organisational change in British, New Zealand and European universities. Drawing on the social studies of economisation literature, formal research projects and auto-ethnographic insights, the authors detail profound changes in how knowledge is produced in universities. They…

This article examines the growth of the higher education industry and specifically the expansion of private companies in the higher education sector. The higher education industry consists of diverse, multiple and variegated markets. Much of the literature concentrates on markets in which universities are increasingly sellers of products and…

Universities around the world are increasingly digitalising all of their operations, with the current COVID-19 pandemic speeding up otherwise steady developments. This article focuses on the political economy of higher education (HE) digitalisation and suggests a new research programme. I foreground three principal arguments, which are…

This paper focuses on how universities are increasingly made responsible for the employment of their students . Drawing on Governmentality Studies, we suggest framing this pressure as an employability dispositif. We join critical studies which link the employability imperative to a neo-liberal transformation of the higher education landscape.…

This paper focuses on market-making in the higher education sector and particularly on the role of the market ordering processes. The entry point to examine relations between market ordering and market-making is a private company called ICEF GmbH from Germany. ICEF is engaged in selling particular kinds of education services, delivered by…

This paper examines the growth of global non-state and multilateral actors in the "global south" and the creation of frontier markets in the higher education sector. These developments are part of market-making changes in higher education as the sector is opened to new actors, logics, and innovative services, aimed at "the global…

This paper examines what to some is a well-worked furrow; the processes and outcomes involved in what is typically referred to as "marketization" in the higher education sector. We do this through a case study of Newton University, where we reveal a rapid proliferation of market exchanges involving the administrative division of the…