Drawing on struggles within academe between faculty that promote critical education and advocates of New Public Management (NPM) who endorse instrumental learning, I reimagine the university as a counter-space that positions it as a counter-power to informational capitalism. Initially, I outline its twin threats: ethical, as self-entrepreneurial academics are valorised by NPM; and political, with informationalisation conflating spaces of thinking. I then detail Scott Lash’s specific account of how the info-comm society negates critique. However, his monistic understanding of informationalisation means (...) Lash’s alternative of Informationskritik risks subsumption by it. I therefore defer to Jacques Derrida’s idea of the university. To ensure the autonomy of the principle of reason in a world of info-comm flows, the university is a supplementary body to society, yet intimately linked to it by its critical reflexivity, which is on behalf of society. Because Derrida does not elaborate the requisite institutional architecture, I conclude with Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia as a quasi-illicit site that is different and other. Such an institutional design enables the university as a counter-space that is a bank of reason and an archive of its manifestation in social practices. It also upholds a space for thinking, which in the form of nominalist critical history proffers a counter-power to society as an informational homotopia. (shrink)

Recent scholarship in science, technology, and society has emphasized the neoliberal character of science today. This article draws on the history of US science and technology policy to argue against thinking of recent changes in science as fundamentally neoliberal, and for thinking of them instead as reflecting a process of “economization.” The policies that changed the organization of science in the United States included some that intervened in markets and others that expanded their reach, and were promoted by some groups (...) who were skeptical of free markets and others who embraced them. In both cases, however, new policies reflected growing political concern with “the economy” and related abstractions and a new understanding of S&T as inputs into a larger economic system that government could manipulate through policy. Understanding trends in US S&T policy as resulting from economization, not just neoliberalism, has implications for thinking about the present and likely future of science and S&T policy. (shrink)

This article deploys critical sociology to examine institutions of higher learning, worldwide, within a context of a more utopian set of possibilities. The article contests the idea of univ...

Universities in 2011 find that they must justify their existence in economic terms, not intellectual ones. To this end, mission statements locate the university in an environment of increasing competitiveness and commodification. In this paper, we take a sample of 10 mission statements from the UK research-intensive Russell Group and the business-focused University Alliance. We use appraisal analysis to explore how the evaluative language used in the statement embodies the value of the universities. In the statements examined, we find that (...) differences between the mission groups are realised most notably through appraisal markers of judgement and appreciation. We find a greater emphasis on markers of value in the University Alliance statements. We suggest that these newer universities are required to discursively echo the government's call for universities to ‘add value’ to graduates. The Russell Group, encoding greater use of markers of appreciation: reaction, is perhaps more influenced by the call to demonstrate ‘impact’. (shrink)