Janja Komljenovic and Susan Robertson publish paper in Journal of Education Policy
PhD fellow Janja Komljenovic and Susan Robertson have their paper "The dynamics of ‘market-making’ in higher education" published in the prestigious Journal of Education Policy.
UNIKE PhD candidate Janja Komljenovic and Susan Robertson, who is Janja's supervisor and a partner in UNIKE, have just had a paper accepted for the Journal of Education Policy, by Taylor & Francis.
The paper is titled "The dynamics of ‘market-making’ in higher education" and 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.
"One of the things we haven’t gotten to go around is actually that competition isn’t UK anymore, it is global, and how do we position ourselves to attract talent from overseas. Because there is no point for the UK economy taking staff from each other ... you will not grow the national talent pool; all you do is push the cost of the labour market up within the UK. So we need to be looking overseas. And part of my job is to identify talent around the word."
The paper sets out with this citation from a senior leader. Through a case study of Newton University, where the authors reveal a rapid proliferation of market exchanges involving the administrative division of the university with the wider world, the article examines processes of 'marketization' in higher education.
The account of this process of ‘market making’ is developed in two (dialectically related) moves. First, the authors identify a range of market exchanges that have emerged in the context of wider ideological and political changes in the governance of higher education to make it a more globally competitive producer of knowledge, and a services sector. Second, the paper explores the ways in which making markets involve a considerable amount of microwork, such as the deployment of a range of framings, and socio-technical tools. Taken together, these market-making processes are recalibrating and remaking the structures, social relations and subjectivities, within and beyond the university and in turn reconstituting the university and the higher education.