EXPRESS: Academic labour as professional service work? A psychosocial analysis of emotion in lecturer-student relations under marketization

The marketization of higher education entails a radical reshaping of the educational relationship as one in which the lecturer is recast as a professional service worker, implicitly or explicitly tasked with ensuring the satisfaction of fee-paying students as sovereign consumers. What does an organizational discourse of high customer satisfaction mean for the emotional experiences of lecturers on the frontline? In this article, we conduct a psychosocial analysis of academics’ experiences of interacting with students in a marketized higher education context. We illustrate how institutional imperatives readily align with lecturers’ internalised professional duty of care for students who are discursively constructed as highly anxious and vulnerable. At the same time, changing power differentials wrought by marketization heighten the likelihood of emotional responses in the relationship that are intense, spontaneous, and sometimes involuntary – and thus appear replete with unconscious meanings. Informed by Freudian psychoanalysis, we illustrate how academics enact various defence mechanisms in response to unconscious feelings of dependence, subordination, vulnerability and resentment of the student as an authority figure. We conclude that organisational imperatives to ‘corporately care’ for students have the unintended consequence of generating acute ambivalence that drastically intensifies the psychological demands on teaching staff.

Marketization of Higher Education: A European Perspective

This paper introduces the research and understanding of European higher education experts on the newly raised higher education marketization. Their point of view is that higher education marketization is by introducing market mechanism and making operation with market characteristics of higher education. Higher education market is a "quasi market". higher education institutions under the condition of marketization is "a hybrid institution", in which students are the biggest consumers. Colleges and universities are encouraged to introduce accounting systems of enterprises in marketization competition, etc.

Becoming Archaeologist

Throughout this volume are a series of semi-fictional assemblages of learning as a means to illustrate the nuances of the arguments made. These merge the experiences of authors, students, and others who have shared their many learning and life assemblages with us. In turn, the semi-fictional accounts both structure debate and illuminate the learning assemblages that pervade archaeological practice. In Chapter 3, Student X is introduced. Their experience highlights the financial and social pressures of completing a degree, and introduces the challenges they face in their multiple environments, partly as a consequence of the marketization of higher education and broader neoliberal agendas. Chapter 3 also begins to introduce the diversity of student identities through accounts of their daily experiences.

Teacher’s Identity, Marketization of Higher Education, and Curriculum

For a long time, education has been praised as a morality in itself. Great philosophers have proudly called themselves “teachers”, and education was considered a special gift given to young gifted people. But in today’s world, in which everything, including even human feelings, have changed and become commodified, education has not been an exception. There have been many changes in education such as internationalization, increased competition and cooperation, neoliberalism, marketization, privatization, and new teaching methods. The idea that education is simply another market commodity has become pervasive in different discourses. Marketization which is one of the consequences of neoliberalism policies is an attempt that appraises everything related to higher education based on a market, where demand and supply and all the educational activities are determined and evaluated based on the price mechanism (Brown, 2014). This trend has fundamental effects on different aspects of the higher education including teacher’s identity and curriculum design. In this article, the researcher defines the concept of identity and then describes the type of teacher’s identity that is promoted by the marketization of higher education. Also, characteristics and some of the consequences of marketization of higher education and the effects of such trend on curriculum design are discussed.

National Philology, Imperial Hierarchies, and the ‘Defective’ Book of Sir John Mandeville

This article examines when and how the ‘Defective’ version of the Book of Sir John Mandeville came to be called ‘defective’. It describes the use of this name by Sir George F. Warner in an edition produced in 1889 for the elite bibliographic society the Roxburghe Club. Drawing on recent work in disability studies, it argues that the philological use of ‘defective’ be read in conjunction with its broader use in the elaboration of hierarchies of class, race, and gender. Far from a neutral descriptor, ‘defective’ provides a compelling example of the imbrication of medieval studies, imperialism, and Social Darwinist principles in the late nineteenth century. The article closes with the call not only to rename the ‘Defective’ version the ‘Common’ version, but also for a broader reappraisal of this apparently discrete version of Mandeville’s Book. However, it also argues that amid the increasing marketization of higher education and the concomitant insecurity of academic labour, digital editing does not provide a straightforward answer to the question of how best to map and display the complex textual history of Mandeville’s Book.

Troublesome Access: Non-Admission Experiences in the Competitive Finnish Higher Education

In this study, I address policy aims to reconcile equality of opportunity and marketization by examining difficulties in access to Finnish higher education. Finnish higher education is largely funded by the state and has no tuition fees. However, new demands have arisen that align with market-driven policy. At the same time, the Finnish system is one of the most competitive systems in the Organization for Cooperation and Development (OECD), and around 70% of applicants do not gain admittance. The purpose of this study is to examine how prospective degree students who have applied without being allowed to start studying toward a degree respond to the loss of opportunity and position themselves in the higher education marketplace. The analysis is based on 50 online narratives. The results are elaborated into three exploratory story models: (1) ‘Never give up on your dreams’; (2) ‘Need to figure out a new plan’; and (3) ‘You can’t get everything you want in life’. The stories show that marketization of higher education affects the experiences and expectations of prospective students. Moreover, marketization offers opportunities differently for those who already have plenty of resources to compete for access to higher education and those who do not.

Counting the uncounted: contestations over casualisation data in Australian universities

Recently, insecure work in universities in many countries has grown exponentially, alongside the rapid marketization of higher education. Reflecting the neoliberal ideal of a flexible workforce, research and teaching at universities is routinely carried out by precariously-employed academics. In Australia, for instance, the bulk of university teaching is now carried out by hourly-paid employees. This structural dependence on precarious academics poses a reputational problem for universities, and universities respond by obfuscating the statistical evidence. We present a case study of tracking down the level of this phenomenon in Australian higher education. The academics’ trade union and allies have used the university-level figures to challenge the advance of academic job insecurity, and are now highlighting the incidence of precarious academic employment nationally. Our own work has highlighted the multiple and conflicting figures being reported by universities, and the systematic underestimation of the actual rate of insecure jobs reported by government departments. We question these unreliable estimates, examples of neoliberalism’s ‘funny numbers’, and develop alternative data and arguments Thereby, we aim to reveal the impact of casualisation and enable critical evaluation of trends in the higher education sector, so as to restore industrial justice.