Janja Komljenovic

The dynamics of ‘market-making’ in higher education

Abstract This paper examines what to some is a well-worked furrow; the processes and outcomes involved in what is typically referred to as ‘marketization’ in the higher education sector. We do this through a case study of Newton University, where we reveal a rapid proliferation of market exchanges involving the administrative division of the university with the wider world. Our account of this process of ‘market making’ is developed in two (dialectically related) moves. First, we identify a range of market exchanges that have emerged in the context of wider ideological and political changes in the governance of higher education to make it a more globally competitive producer of knowledge, and a services sector. Second, we explore the ways in which making markets involve a considerable amount of microwork, such as the deployment of a range of framings, and socio-technical tools. Taken together, these market-making processes are recalibrating and remaking the structures, social relations and subjectivities, within and beyond the university and in turn reconstituting the university and the higher education sector.

Non-state actors, and the advance of frontier higher education markets in the global south

Abstract This paper examines the growth of global non-state and multilateral actors in the ‘global south’ and the creation of frontier markets in the higher education sector. These developments are part of market-making changes in higher education as the sector is opened to new actors, logics, and innovative services, aimed at ‘the global south’. Yet making a higher education market that brings in new investors, providers, and consumers from within and across the global north and south is a complex process that requires imagining and materialising through new social devices, norms, and institutions so that the higher education sector works like a capitalist market based on competition, credit, commodification, and creativity. The paper examines these processes through three entry points: recruiters of international students; for-profit providers of HE; and financial agents providing new forms of credit. We argue that these developments both play off, and reinforce, older and newer asymmetries of power between individuals, social groups, and nations, within and between the global north and south, creating an even greater learning divide.

Market ordering as a device for market-making : the case of the emerging students’ recruitment industry

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on market-making in the higher education sector and particularly on the role of the market ordering processes. The entry point to examine relations between market ordering and market-making is a private company called ICEF GmbH from Germany. ICEF is engaged in selling particular kinds of education services, delivered by orchestrating market encounters between education institutions and international student recruitment agents. The novelty of ICEF’s approach to making markets is that it draws on two existing markets in order to be able to monetise the particular market encounters. The first market is the higher education sector as an export industry, which ICEF both promotes and also legitimates. The second market concerns international student recruitment agents, in which ICEF actively constructs market ordering mechanisms. In doing so, ICEF is expanding their own opportunities for making profits at the same time as expanding higher education markets more broadly.

Linkedin, platforming labour, and the new employability mandate for universities

ABSTRACT Students, academics and university administrators are increasingly using and producing digital platforms, including social media. This paper focuses on LinkedIn to start tackling the question of the effects on higher education as a sector, its actors and the established social practices. It argues that LinkedIn moves beyond the passivity of advertising to its users towards actively structuring digital labour markets, in which it strategically includes universities and its constituents. By introducing the term ‘qualification altmetrics’, the paper suggests that LinkedIn is building a global marketplace for skills to run in parallel to, or instead of university degrees. Qualification altmetrics might challenge the established practices of knowledge production and valuation.

Between Western Ideals and Post-Conflict Reconstruction

Post-socialist Europe followed the considerable expansion of higher education, as witnessed in most of the Western European countries in past decades, with a similar dynamic, but with a considerable delay. It is only recently reaching the steepest parts of the upwards sloping curve in countries of the Western Balkans. This part of Europe is a post-conflict region where tensions and conflicts of various types are still present in its societies.