‘Creative destruction’: knowledge economy policy and the future of the arts and humanities in the academy1

The Role of Universities in the Regional Creative Economies of the UK: Hidden Protagonists and the Challenge of Knowledge Transfer

“…Our findings suggest that universities have long interacted with their regional creative economies and, at least until very recently, have continued to expand their engagement. However, rather than the dialectically recursive and reflexive institutional adaptation advanced by the Triple Helix model, what we find is that academic engagement with the creative economy is heavily mediated by three sets of qualifying phenomena: the structural expectations of the higher education system (Benner and Sandström 2000;Lawton Smith 2007), persistent institutional realities (of historic mission, academic organisation and academic culture) and by the norms and values of discipline and academic professional practice (Bullen, Robb et al 2004). The paper principally aims to stimulate further debate by arguing for the need for a better understanding of the complex, sometimes explicit, often implicit, roles that institutions of higher education play in shaping their regional and urban creative economies.…”

“…If we read across from the regional development functions of universities to the CCIs, we quickly see that the human capital dimension has been the main focus of the recent literature, especially influenced by the work of Florida Florida 2003). While in other disciplinary areas, universities are considered central to the regional economy because they engage actively in research exploitation through such activities as technology transfer, patenting and spinoffs, there is an inherent and not always welcome challenge for the arts and humanities researchbase (Bullen, Robb et al 2004). This is complicated by the very nature of the CCIs as an industrial sector -consisting of micro businesses and with little capacity to finance or support external R&D -and which has implications for the knowledge and infra-structural roles ascribed in dominant innovation discourse to universities.…”

Neo-Liberalism and Marketisation: The Implications for Higher Education

“…With the rise of the new-right, neo-liberal agenda, there is an attempt to offload the cost of education, and indeed other public services such as housing, transport, care services etc., on to the individual. There is an increasing attempt to privatise public services, including higher education, so that citizens will have to buy them at market value rather than have them provided by the State (Angus, 2004;Bullen et al, 2004;Dill, 2003;Steier, 2003;Stevenson, 1999). The move to marketwise and privatise manifests itself in different ways in higher education.…”

Beyond the campus: higher education, cultural policy and the creative economy

“…Whilst this new pressure for knowledge transfer has been met by resistance to the imposition of a 'techno-economic' paradigm on arts and humanities in academia (Bullen et al 2004), most HEIs have embraced this new perspective, seeing it as an opportunity to add value to their core mission (Powell 2007, Lindberg 2008. The knowledge connections which universities develop with CIs are becoming measures of impact and engagement, increasingly embedded within research assessment exercises and, although the evidence gathered is still currently mostly anecdotal, in the UK and elsewhere, there is an increasing pressure on higher education institutions and funding bodies to show the importance of these dynamics (Bakhshi et al 2008, Hughes et al 2011.…”