Market subjectivity and neoliberal governmentality in higher education

“Part of the University Lexicon”: Marketing and Ontario Universities, 1990-2013

“…University-based marketing, with its "customer-oriented" managerial rationality, mirrors broader changes in public discourse that have brought to the forefront designations such as "customer" and "consumer" and downgraded ones such as "citizen" or "student" (Morgan, 2003, p. 115). In Foucauldian terms, it has resulted in the production of new forms of systematized information and corresponding knowledge (ezRecruit, brand consulting, strategic marketing); brought new cadres of postsecondary experts (marketing and advertising professionals); and re-invented subjectivities for key participants (student-as-consumer-sovereign) (Varman et al, 2011) . Marketing the academy represents, it would seem, the initial stages of an epistemic change concerning the university as both object of study and vehicle for social mobility and social critique.…”

“…Most notably, we draw on Skålén, Fellesson, and Fougère (2008), who marshal critical theory and Foucault's works on discourse and knowledge/power to demonstrate how marketing functions as a form of disciplinary power. Their study forms part of a nascent body of works emerging since the mid2000s that draws on Foucauldian theory to analyze marketing practices, knowledge, and institutions (Fougère & Skålén, 2013;Leitch & Motion, 2007;Tadajewski, 2011;Varman, Saha, & Skålén, 2011).…”

Her majesty the student: marketised higher education and the narcissistic (dis)satisfactions of the student-consumer

“…He goes on to suggest this dominant mode of relating to the university generates external forms of responsibility that neglect a subjective and personal responsibility as learner to a broader moral and critical awareness of one's impact on the world. The scant empirical research with students, mainly from business schools and other vocational disciplines, appears to confirm these concerns about the impact of market subjectivities on pedagogy, such as the dominance of a conservative and instrumental rationality to learning, a lack of critical perspective, the subordination of socio-economic inequities to individual monetised returns, and anti-scholarly sentiment (Haywood et al 2011;Nixon et al 2011;Varman et al 2011). In a different field vein, sociologists Phipps and Young (2015) have recently pointed to the neoliberal basis of an individualistic, consumerist and adversarial culture among young people in UK HE that has increased the brutality of sexism and the harshness of competition.…”

Affordances and negotiations of the digital reputation society: a case study of RateMyProfessors.com

“…The rating subjects on RMP are seemingly autonomous individuals who can participate in rating and reviewing practices without interruption by the university administration, which typically manages conventional teaching evaluation. However, the RMP reviewers are entitled to perform a form of market-oriented or neoliberal subjectivity through which instrumental rationality pervades and pedagogic practices are calculated according to the exchange value of acquired grades and degrees (Turnage 2007;Varman, Biswatosh, and Skålén 2011). In the present sample, professors and courses are constantly compared with each other and evaluated in terms of their cost-effectiveness.…”