Plan S, promoted by cOAlition S, is a significant attempt to hegemonize a specific form of Open Access (OA) as the future of academic publishing on a global level. It mandates that the results from Coalition-funded research must be published in fora compliant with its criteria. This article questions the Plan's supposed radicalness from a political economy perspective with the help of post-foundational discourse theory. Specific attention will be paid to its implications for property rights as the contingent foundation of knowledge production. The Plan and OA will be examined within the context of globally unequal structures of scientific knowledge production and attempts to transform them into a more equal system. The analyzed data consist of the archive from the following sequence: (i) the publication of draft guidance on the implementation of the Plan, released by the Coalition in November 2018, (ii) a collection of feedback statements on the draft by the Coalition from November 2018 to February 2019, and (iii) release of the updated guidance adopted and published by the Coalition in May 2019. The primary object of analysis is the antagonism articulated towards the Plan within what is here termed the conservativepropertarian discursive formation.
Post-foundational Discourse Theory (PFDT), initially developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, provides a systematic discursive perspective on political phenomena, the economy included. However, ever since Laclau and Mouffe rejected economism in their Hegemony and Social Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (HSS), the economy as an object of study has failed to receive the attention it deserves within this strand of ideology and discourse theory. Different approaches to political economy could also benefit from an explicit engagement with PFDT. I begin by outlining Laclau and Mouffe's postfoundational perspective to the economy. I will then return to their discussion of economism in HSS and argue against its rejection in PFDT as an object of study. Finally, I will critically examine Mark Devenney's attempt to reinstate property as an object of importance for political theory and analysis.
The theory of academic capitalism (ac) is a prominent attempt to grasp the multifaceted organizational and functional transformations of universities and higher education (he) in contemporary times. However, this has rarely provided an in-depth examination of the meaning of capitalism in the context of he and has largely ignored the Global South. Focusing on the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, this paper begins by examining the political economy of this country’s little-studied he system. It explores its entanglements with the broader Jordanian political economy by focusing on for-profit private universities and the implications of capitalist (foreign) ownership for their functioning and governance. The article draws, in part, on novel interview data gathered by the author in Jordan from 2015–17 to elaborate Jordanian he elite’s understanding of this system. The Jordanian case is juxtaposed with ac to appraise the applicability of the theory to contexts distinct from advanced capitalist economies.
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