This work analyses how political economic shifts contribute to competition within higher education systems in the US, EU, and Canada. The authors highlight competition for prestige and public and private subsidies, exploring the consequences of these processes through theoretical and empirical analyses. Accordingly, the work highlights topics that will be of interest to a wide range of audiences. Concepts addressed include stratification, privatization of formerly public subsidies, preference for "high tech" academic fields, and the vocationalization of the curriculum (i.e., Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics: [STEM] fields, selected professions, and business) rather than the liberal arts or the Humboldtian vision of the university. Across national contexts and analytic methods, authors analyze the growth of national policies that see universities as a sub set of economic development, casting universities as corporate research laboratories and education as central to job creation. Throughout the volume, the authors make the case that national and regional approaches to politics and markets result in different experiences of consequences of academic capitalism. While these shifts serve the interests of some institutions, others find themselves struggling to meet ever-greater expectations with stagnant or shrinking resource bases.

This work analyses how political economic shifts contribute to competition within higher education systems in the US, EU, and Canada. The authors highlight competition for prestige and public and private subsidies, exploring the consequences of these processes through theoretical and empirical analyses. Accordingly, the work highlights topics that will be of interest to a wide range of audiences. Concepts addressed include stratification, privatization of formerly public subsidies, preference for "high tech" academic fields, and the vocationalization of the curriculum (i.e., Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics: [STEM] fields, selected professions, and business) rather than the liberal arts or the Humboldtian vision of the university. Across national contexts and analytic methods, authors analyze the growth of national policies that see universities as a sub set of economic development, casting universities as corporate research laboratories and education as central to job creation. Throughout the volume, the authors make the case that national and regional approaches to politics and markets result in different experiences of consequences of academic capitalism. While these shifts serve the interests of some institutions, others find themselves struggling to meet ever-greater expectations with stagnant or shrinking resource bases.

As colleges and universities become more entrepreneurial in a post-industrial economy, they focus on knowledge less as a public good than as a commodity to be capitalized on in profit-oriented activities. In "Academic Capitalism and the New Economy," higher education scholars Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades detail the aggressive engagement of U.S. higher education institutions in the knowledge-based economy and analyze the efforts of colleges and universities to develop, market, and sell research products, educational services, and consumer goods in the private marketplace.

Slaughter and Rhoades track changes in policy and practice, revealing new social networks and circuits of knowledge creation and dissemination, as well as new organizational structures and expanded managerial capacity to link higher education institutions and markets. They depict an ascendant academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime expressed in faculty work, departmental activity, and administrative behavior. Clarifying the regime's internal contradictions, they note the public subsidies embedded in new revenue streams and the shift in emphasis from serving student customers to leveraging resources from them.

Defining the terms of academic capitalism in the new economy, this groundbreaking study offers essential insights into the trajectory of American higher education.

Today, nearly every aspect of higher education--including student recruitment, classroom instruction, faculty research, administrative governance, and the control of intellectual property--is embedded in a political economy with links to the market and the state. Academic capitalism offers a powerful framework for understanding this relationship. Essentially, it allows us to understand higher education's shift from creating scholarship and learning as a public good to generating knowledge as a commodity to be monetized in market activities.

In " Academic Capitalism in the Age of Globalization," Brendan Cantwell and Ilkka Kauppinen assemble an international team of leading scholars to explore the profound ways in which globalization and the knowledge economy have transformed higher education around the world. The book offers an in-depth assessment of the theoretical foundations of academic capitalism, as well as new empirical insights into how the process of academic capitalism has played out. Chapters address academic capitalism from historical, transnational, national, and local perspectives. Each contributor offers fascinating insights into both new conceptual interpretations of and practical institutional and national responses to academic capitalism.

Incorporating years of research by influential theorists and building on the work of Sheila Slaughter, Larry Leslie, and Gary Rhoades, "Academic Capitalism in the Age of Globalization" provides a provocative update for understanding academic capitalism. The book will appeal to anyone trying to make sense of contemporary higher education.

"Research has become an indispensable commodity for modern society, and academic researchers are the new superstars and entrepreneurs -- with incomes to match. Not since Clark Kerr's landmark Uses of the University has any book beamed such an exposing light on this dark, neglected development, which is transforming campus teaching and administration. Slaughter and Leslie have pierced the smoke surrounding the tweedy knowledge factories of post-industrial capitalism." -- George Keller, author of Academic Strategy: The Management Revolution in American Higher Education

The globalization of the political economy at the end of the twentieth century is destabilizing the traditional patterns of university professional work. One of the major changes that has taken place as a result of globalization is that faculty, who were previously situated between capital and labor, are now positioned squarely in the marketplace. To grasp the extent of changes taking place and to understand the forces of change, Academic Capitalism examines the current state of academic careers and institutions, with a particular focus on public research universities in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In this wide-ranging analysis, Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie examine every aspect of academic work unexplored: undergraduate and graduate education, teaching and research, student aid policies, and federal research policies.

"In their fascinating study of public research universities, Slaughter and Leslie... affirm that tertiary education in the U.S. as well as in Australia, Canada, and Great Britain, especially since 1970, has merged with the marketplace, a development that alarmsmany as a kind of academic prostitution... This well-written book is must reading for anyone, lay or professional, seriously interested in the future of higher education." -- R. O. Ulin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Choice

"The authors conclude that a better understanding of academic capitalism will foster and empower successful academic capitalists. However, they view with regret the demise of the concept of the university as a community in which the individual members are oriented primarily toward the greater good of the organization... The book provides a valuable overview of the globalization of the political economy." -- Jann Contento, Arizona State University, Education Review

"Without even mentioning the dreaded and dated Marx, the authors have produced a convincing analysis of the transition of the academy from its own protected form of feudalism to a predatory capitalism... [including] long-term changes in the ethos, aims, and management of universities -- changes that have wedded them and their futures to the vagaries of the global marketplace." -- Michael Ryan, College & Research Libraries