UK higher education, neoliberal meritocracy, and the culture of the new capitalism: A computational‐linguistics analysis

Abstract

Drawing on empirical data this paper explores how a new articulation of meritocracy has emerged over time in UK Higher Education. To this end, we analyze the five major HE reports produced in the UK over the past 2 decades (1997–2010). The proposed analytical design combines semantic mapping, natural language processing (NLP), and critical discourse analysis to identify the key actors in the sector, the nature of their agency, and changing roles. Despite more rosy accounts of social mobility and democracy in the UK offered by commentators such as Mandler (2020), we argue that higher educational policies in the UK have progressively shifted towards a neoliberal meritocratic paradigm established through: (a) the construction of a conceptual level playing field in the domain of education; and (b) its mobilization as a legitimizing basis of neoliberal meritocracy that selects “effort” as a discriminating variable. Accordingly, we argue that by assuming ontological equality between actors as a hegemonic truth, neoliberal meritocracy both constitutes and legitimates the culture of the new capitalism, and the role of higher education policies in the UK in this.

Authorial Power, Authoritarianism, and Exiled Intellectuals: Syria and Turkey

“…Indeed, the accounts of the exilic scholars we interviewed tell us that the modern higher education institutions that they find themselves within are losing their capacity to deliberate over their own limitations and reducing the university to the spectacle of 'provider' or to an institutionalised space of patriotism and populist interventions (Martini & Robertson, 2022;Bose et al, under review). Taken together, these findings suggest that the university is struggling to represent a 'holding environment' (Honig, 2009) necessary for the successful incubation of human politics, making intellectuals' legacy of commitment to the task of critique increasingly untenable -most saliently for not-yet-re-established intellectuals trying to pick up their lives and careers in exile.…”

“…Whilst our empirical work does in many ways capture figurative accounts of the exilic intellectual as one of dissidence and resistance to authoritarian regimes, it seems that the commitments they presume are becoming increasingly untenable as authoritarianism takes hold globally and advanced neoliberal governance structures increasingly disrupt universities' 'public missions' and their capacity for political critique and transformation. As Martini and Robertson (2022) suggest, such developments are creating conditions that risk the erasure of any ideal and potency of the scholar-activist and of the university as a platform for social and political change. The twin effects of advanced neo-liberal authoritarianism and the absorption of the scholar into the machinations of bureaucracy therefore arguably represent a new stage in the commodification of the scholar, regulating their capacity to confront their historical moment and its associated crises, where the nature of its resolution remains masked.…”

Let’s do research!

“…Evaluation systems for higher education exist in many countries. National research evaluation systems typically make universities to systematically rank journals and scholars, and they position academic institutions as an extension of the dominant discourse of neoliberal meritocracy (Lorenz, 2012;Martini and Robertson, 2022). However, these metrics and ranking based systems may have significant unintended negative consequences.…”