Much research has been done on students' role and position within higher education systems and institutions. Different concepts have been developed and employed to offer a thorough account of students' (shifting) ontological status. While they contribute to our understanding of the complexity of the students' experience, existing concepts might…

Utilizing the concepts of time and academic capitalism in the neoliberal university, this qualitative study examined 12 tenured faculty members' sensemaking of productivity from their sabbatical leaves from one research university in the United States. The commodification of time and outputs from the sabbatical in remunerative terms as well as…

In the 21st century, knowledge has become the driving force behind societal progress, emphasising the need for higher education to produce contextually relevant knowledge that addresses the multifaceted challenges faced by local communities. It is in this respect that knowledge needs to be generated through one's position of epistemic location in…

Increasingly, competing discourses shape tensions between the role of the contemporary university and the global markets in which universities must exist. This paper draws on the examination of interviews with nine education academics in Australia to illuminate the construction of 'global' in the production of the global graduate (GG). Discourse…

This article aims to investigate whether national differences in the institutionalization of the binary divide between universities and Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS) lead to different outcomes in performing Academics' Societal Engagement (ASE). Two institutional theory-based core differences of European binary higher education (HE)…

This dissertation studies how institutions of higher education occupy a unique space that can add to the discourse of business studies by relating how consumers can simultaneously function as products. This is substantiated by defining the word "student" beyond the traditional meaning of a student as learner when considering the higher…

A growing body of literature is encouraging academics to slow down their academic work as a way of managing the acceleration of university life. Little attention, however, has been paid to the important differences in temporalities among different sorts of higher education institutions, and the effect this is likely to have upon the sense of…

A government report criticised Australian universities for low proficiency in commercialising epistemic production (research and knowledge). A critical omission was a comparable measure of academic productivity to substantiate whether underperformance correlated with the commercialisation value of research output or whether academic productivity…

In this article, we argue that sick leave and its management within the university involves exchanges of moral capital. The circulation of moral capital supports a moral economy, in turn underpinning the political economy of the corporate university. The forms of moral capital are diverse, sometimes easily recognized as such, more often hidden in…

Although, as a result of the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework, the principle of teaching excellence is receiving renewed attention in English higher education, the idea has been left largely undefined. The cynic might argue, in agreement with Bill Readings, that this lack of a precise definition is deliberate, since teaching…

In this conceptual paper, I contend that the soul of academic labour is becoming lost in performativity. Performativity, I explain, is a form of regulation and control that deploys technical rationality and judgements to incentivize and punish academics. Indeed, performativity is central to the culture of measurement within contemporary…

The task of creating a public will is daunting in any political system, but a democracy dedicated to the principles of participation and public deliberation faces specific challenges, including overcoming organized opposition that may not accept democratic tenets. In the sphere of education (and social reproduction more generally),…

Before the 2000s and the buzz surrounding global rankings, many countries witnessed the emergence and development, starting in the 1970s, of academic media rankings produced primarily by press organisations. This domestic, media-based production, despite the relative lack of attention paid by the social sciences, has been progressively integrated…

This article extends the ongoing critique of neoliberalism's encroachment upon public education by highlighting how neoliberal ideas such individualism, accountability, governmentality, and the marketization of public life are recasting teachers today primarily as competitive economic beings. I contend that teachers are increasingly compelled to…

With an increasing proliferation of consumer practices within the United States university system, one crucial question often neglected is how spaces of consumption are produced. French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, Henri Lefebvre, provided a nuanced and innovative approach to examining the phenomenon of spatial production in his landmark…