Transformations in Research, Higher Education and the Academic Market: The Breakdown of Scientific Thought

215 Pages·2013·1.36 MB·English

by  Ylva Hasselberg

Transformations in Research, Higher Education
and the Academic Market
HIGHER EDUCATION DYNAMICS
VOLUME 39
Series Editor
Peter Maassen, University of Oslo, Norway, and University of Twente, Enschede,
The Netherlands
Johan Müller, Graduate School of Humanities, University of Cape Town,
Rondebosch, South Africa
Editorial Board
Alberto Amaral, CIPES and Universidade do Porto, Portugal
Akira Arimoto, Hiroshima University, Japan
Nico Cloete, CHET, Pretoria, South Africa
David Dill, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
Jürgen Enders, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
Patricia Gumport, Stanford University, USA
Mary Henkel, Brunel University, Uxbridge, United Kingdom
Glen Jones, University of Toronto, Canada
SCOPE OF THE SERIES
Higher Education Dynamics is a bookseries intending to study adaptation processes
and their outcomes in higher education at all relevant levels. In addition it wants to
examine the way interactions between these levels affect adaptation processes. It
aims at applying general social science concepts and theories as well as testing
theories in the fi eld of higher education research. It wants to do so in a manner that
is of relevance to all those professionally involved in higher education, be it as
ministers, policy-makers, politicians, institutional leaders or administrators, higher
education researchers, members of the academic staff of universities and colleges,
or students. It will include both mature and developing systems of higher education,
covering public as well as private institutions.
For further volumes:
http://www.springer.com/series/6037
Sharon Rider (cid:129) Ylva H asselberg
Alexandra Waluszewski
Editors
Transformations in Research,
Higher Education
and the Academic Market
The Breakdown of Scienti fi c Thought
Editors
Sharon Rider Ylva Hasselberg
Department of Philosophy Department of Economic History
Uppsala University Uppsala University
Uppsala, Sweden Uppsala, Sweden
Alexandra Waluszewski
Department of Economic History
Uppsala University
Uppsala , Sweden
ISSN 1571-0378
ISBN 978-94-007-5248-1 ISBN 978-94-007-5249-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5249-8
Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg New York London
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012955246
© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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Contents
1 Introduction ............................................................................................. 1
Ylva Hasselberg, Sharon Rider, and Alexandra Waluszewski
Part I Politics and Policy
2 Power, Knowledge, Morals: Society in the Age
of Hybrid Research ................................................................................. 21
Thorsten Nybom
3 Innovation and Control: Performative Research
Policy in Sweden ...................................................................................... 39
Sven Widmalm
4 The Scienti fi c Mission and the Freedom of Research .......................... 53
Arne Jarrick
Part II Economic Models
5 Contemporary Research and Innovation Policy:
A Double Disservice? .............................................................................. 71
Alexandra Waluszewski
6 The Foundations of Knowledge According
to the Knowledge Foundation ................................................................ 97
Mats Hyvönen
7 Science Policy in a Socially Embedded Economy ................................ 111
Magnus Eklund
v
vi Contents
Part III Research and Scholarship
8 Down the Slippery Slope: The Perils of the Academic
Research Industry ................................................................................... 125
Li Bennich-Björkman
9 In Defence of Discretion ......................................................................... 137
Ylva Hasselberg
10 Publish and Perish: A Note on a Collapsing
Academic Authorship.............................................................................. 145
Inge-Bert Täljedal
Part IV Higher Education
11 Methodomania......................................................................................... 157
Michael Gustavsson
12 Higher Heteronomy: Thinking through Modern
University Education .............................................................................. 171
Sharon Rider
13 The Academic Contract: From “Simply a Metaphor”
to Technology ........................................................................................... 187
Daniel Ankarloo and Torbjörn Friberg
14 Conclusion: On the Verge of Breakdown .............................................. 201
Ylva Hasselberg, Sharon Rider, and Alexandra Waluszewski
About the Authors ........................................................................................... 215

Index ................................................................................................................. 219
Chapter 1
Introduction
Ylva Hasselberg , Sharon Rider, and Alexandra Waluszewski
There is wide agreement that the global system of higher education and research is
undergoing a transformation during the course of the last few decades so radical that
it can reasonably be compared to the most decisive events in the history of the uni-
versity: the founding of the University of Bologna in twelfth century, the invention
of the Gutenberg press in fi f teenth century, the reinterpretation of the task of the
university associated with the name of Humboldt in the nineteenth century, the
establishment of the modern research university, and later the massi fi cation of
higher education in the twentieth century (Nybom 2 006, 2012 ) . What we are now
experiencing is a transformation of equal weight and importance.
What then is essence of this transformation and how should it be labeled?
What do we know of this transformation? Philip Mirowski and Esther-Mirjam Sent
have characterized the state of art regarding our knowledge of commercialization of
science thus:
First off, there are the motley ranks of Cassandras, who, signifi cantly enough, tend to have
a soft spot for the Good Old Virtues of the Mertonian norms and bewail the prospect of
expulsion from the prelapsarian Garden/…/By contrast, there also stand the massed pha-
lanx of neoclassical economists, science policy specialists, and their bureaucratic allies,
who by and large tend to reverse the valences but nevertheless engage in much the same
forms of discourse. For them, most scientists in the “bad old days” had been operating
without suf fi cient guidance from their ultimate patrons, the corporate pillars of the economy;
Y. Hasselberg
Department of Economic History , Uppsala University , Kyrkogårdsg. 10 , S-751 20 Uppsala , S weden
e-mail: [email protected]
S. Rider (*)
Department of Philosophy , Uppsala University , Thunbergsväg 3 H , 751 26 Uppsala , Sweden
e-mail: Sharon.Rider@ fi loso fi .uu.se
A. Waluszewski
Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Department of Economic History ,
Uppsala University , Ekonomikum, Kyrkogårdsgatan 10 , Uppsala , Sweden
e-mail: [email protected]
S. Rider et al. (eds.), Transformations in Research, Higher Education and the Academic 1
Market, Higher Education Dynamics 39, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5249-8_1,
© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
2 Y. Hasselberg et al.
but luckily, with a bit of prodding from the government, a friendly nudge from their university’s
intellectual property of fi ce, plus a few more dollars wavered in their directions, scientists
have been ushered into an era that appreciates the compelling logic of “technology transfer”
(Mirowski and Sent 2 008 , p. 635).
M irowski and Sent thus seem to argue that there is a considerable polarization
with respect to the norms guiding the interpretation of this transformation. What is
the present development about? How are we to understand what is happening? Are
these changes signs of progress or degeneration? One of the things that makes it
dif fi cult to assess the arguments on both sides is that the normative opposition is
expressed in certain rhetorical fi gures which render a comparison of the respective
arguments from a neutral position dif fi cult to say the least. Proponents of neoliberal
doctrine formulate their position in terms of an almost teleological perspective: prog-
ress is unavoidable and, therefore, resistance is futile. Conservatism is just nostalgia.
As Rosalind Williams has shown in her analysis of the reorganization of MIT, label-
ing the opponent as conservative or nostalgic is very effective (Williams 2 003 ) . The
battle between the “motley Cassandras” and the neoliberals has a tendency to become
a battle between “memory” and “future” and “history” and “modernity.”
Mirowski and Sent propose a third alternative, which the editors of the present
volume endorse. The development of the university and of science in society has to
be understood, on the system level, as a consequence of a reorganization of knowl-
edge production that opens the university sector to market mechanisms, with the
result of making universities, in effect, suppliers of knowledge within a global
knowledge economy. With a Marxian, critical-analytical approach, Mirowski and
Sent attempt to analyze academia not in terms of its b ecoming integrated into the
global economy but in terms of how this integration is achieved and what role the
universities play in the economic system over time. The institutions of late moder-
nity are coupled with an organization of the economy that outsources R&D from
industry to the university, and with this arrangement also comes a new research
policy (Elzinga 2 004 ) . Slaughter and Leslie (1 997 : 8–9) have termed the conse-
quences of this change academic capitalism , de fi ning capitalism as a system where
“allocation decisions are driven by market forces.” In practice, the penetration of the
market mechanism in the USA, Australia, and Canada, as they have shown, is inti-
mately connected to the withdrawal of state funding of both teaching and research
(Slaughter and Leslie 1 997 ) . When funding from the public sector dwindles, univer-
sities become dependent on other means and are thus more subject to the market
mechanism. But the marketization of knowledge production and knowledge distri-
bution can only occur within a speci fi c legal framework and particular judicial
arrangements. The development of patent legislation and patent policies has been
explored by a number of authors during the last two decades (Slaughter and Rhoades
1993, 2004 ; Jasanoff 1 995 ) , and it constitutes one aspect of an overall propertiza-
tion of academia that covers a wide spectrum of phenomena, from the ownership
of texts (student essays, articles, books) and course material to the ownership of
commercially viable ideas (Slaughter and Rhoades 2 004 ; Mirowski 2 011 ) .
Propertization has been a central prerequisite for the altered balance of power
between universities as organizations and university faculty and has led to a prole-
tarization of segments of the academic labor force that began in the new sector of
1 Introduction 3
internet universities (Noble 2 001 ; Johnson et al. 2003 ) . This development bears a
striking similarity to the historical transformation of artisans to workers; when
ownership of tools and the knowledge of how to handle them are lost, artisans
rapidly lose autonomy, as occurred during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries in Europe (Florén 1 987 ; Florén and Rydén 1 992 ) .
Another central aspect of the emergence of academic capitalism is of course
its dependence on the emergence what Bob Jessop (2 002 ) has termed “the
Schumpeterian workfare state,” that is the transformation of the welfare state in the
period after 1980. The Schumpeterian workfare state sees its citizens as human
capital and assesses their value according to how pliable, disciplined, and well
educated they are. Consequently, education policy is central, and citizens should be
encouraged to manage their own value on the labor market with care and ingenuity
(Jessop et al. 2008 ) . This is a revolutionary change in itself, and we cannot pretend
to describe and analyze it fully here. It is connected to the reorganization of the global
economy, which turns the welfare state into a subsidiary of global capitalism, trans-
forming the state itself into a business enterprise and tearing down the boundaries
between the private and the public sector. This revolution in the conception of the
task of government, often referred to as new public management, has instituted new
practices with the aid of new ideas and theories about management and leadership
derived from the fi eld of business studies. New modes of g overnance (g overnment
now being perceived as fundamentally old-fashioned) that emphasize quantitatively
based evaluation (audit), planning, linear organization, and standardization (Power
1997 ) , as opposed to legal regulation, have permeated every inch of the public
sector. In a number of countries, depending upon how the public-private divide was
previously construed and organized, the transformation of the public sector has also
brought with it the privatization of previously publicly owned enterprises.
In line with previous research in the fi eld of academic capitalism, we perceive the
present development not merely nor even primarily as a matter of the commercial-
ization of research results. Rather, academic capitalism is characterized by the mar-
ketization, privatization, propertization, and managementization of k nowledge , a
rei fi cation and commodi fi cation of the activities of research, scholarship, and teach-
ing within the university as an institution. But there is an implicit tension in this
process between the market, on the one hand, and organization and hierarchy (man-
agement, planning, auditing), on the other. Thus far, planning and regulation seem
to override deregulation and the logic of supply and demand and in virtually all
issues. There is, however, an exception: quality and value. The market is rapidly
becoming what Mirowski (2 011 ) calls an i nformation processor . The market thus
understood distributes not only wealth and in fl uence but also knowledge, including
a speci fi c interpretation of what kind of knowledge is useful, valuable, relevant, and
true. Aant Elzinga predicted this development over 20 years ago, for which he
coined the phrase e pistemic drift (Elzinga 1 985, 1997 ) . Epistemic drift today is
evolving new forms that are directly linked to the price mechanism. What we are
experiencing, in a word, is a supply and demand de fi nition of quality: the notions of
quality and demand merge. Some work has been done to date on the consequences
of these new forms of epistemic drift. The marketization of higher education has
contributed to the identi fi cation of the student as a consumer, and thus the university