The multi-billion-dollar university rankings industry purports to offer insights into the quality of institutions, but the extent to which it does so has consistently been refuted. Critics argue that problematic proxies, composite indexing, homogenising effects, and several other issues make them both unscientific and neo-colonial. This article…

This paper discusses the influence of neoliberalism and the knowledge economy in national curricula, and in school music education in particular, in order to cope with the role school music is playing and it could play in a curriculum conceived 'to boost the knowledge economy' currently in effect in most of the countries. For this, some economy…

Marx developed a sophisticated theory of labour under capitalism's expanding reproduction but wrote little specifically on immaterial labour. This paper reflects on how to build from Marx's writings a more comprehensive theory of immaterial labour. Integral to this theorisation is bringing in young Marx's writings on alienation and human nature,…

The purpose of this paper is to criticize the "New Public Management (NPM)" in the higher education of Iran with a moral lens. Qualitative content analysis was used for this purpose and the fourth to sixth "National Development Plans" as well as the "Comprehensive Scientific Map" of Iran were investigated. The model…

In this paper I argue that the technologizing of most things in our daily lives, from work and education to finance and leisure, can be seen to promote a loss of the tangible and a rootlessness for human societies, causing a disorientation in the knowledge and beliefs acquired over millennia. Arendt's proposal that 'the earth is the very…

This paper argues that country size can play a crucial role in shaping the type of gradual change observed in collective skill formation systems. Collectively governed dual-apprenticeship training has its base in the industrial and crafts sectors of the economy and builds on the decentralised cooperation of multiple public and private…

This article examines how the value of higher education (HE) is currently being (re)framed in two European countries: England and Portugal. HE has been central to a global discourse on the future of knowledge economy, whilst also being subject to the policy framework of New Public Management. Being so, the changing value of HE is related to the…

In Britain and New Zealand the neoliberal assault on universities has shifted from new public management and funding models to the special status of the public university. The project aims to complete neoliberal business initiated 25 years ago by more fully marketising and financialising universities, starting with 'unbundling' and outsourcing and…

This article begins with a brief review of research on the development of ideas about the knowledge-based economy (analysed here as "economic imaginaries") and their influence on how social forces within and beyond the academy have attempted to reorganize higher education and research in response to real and perceived challenges and…

This article provides a critical and theoretical exploration into teacher performance dispositions (orientations towards performance). The article explores research literature on dispositions, highlighting the representation of teachers in education policy and standards documents across several nations of the OECD: Australia, the USA and the UK.…

In this paper, we problematize current conceptualizations of agency in education. We begin by considering how the construction of the hyperindividual, one that is entirely determined by its own internal capacities, has become the norm within Australian educational policy. We propose that this conceptualization produces undemocratic educational…

The combination of neo-liberalism and the massification of higher education combined with the diminished public funds for higher education contributed to the rise of academic capitalism and entrepreneurship across higher education systems and institutions across the world. With the focus on human capital development and its contribution to…

The landscapes of higher education have been changing rapidly, with enormous growths in participation rates in many countries across the world, and major developments and changes within institutions. But the languages that we need to conceptualise and understand these changes have not been keeping pace. The central argument in this book is that…

In Japan, neoliberal discourses rationalize English language proficiency as a pathway to meritocratic reward and success in the global knowledge economy. With this ideology in mind, this review engages the market orientation of English domestically and the causative implications of class-distinguished capital. Specifically, Bourdieu's theory of…

Academic capitalism is currently a widely studied topic amongst higher education scholars, especially in the United States. This paper demonstrates that the theory of academic capitalism also provides a fruitful perspective for analysing the restructuring of Finnish higher education since the 1990s, although with reservations. It will be argued…