The new political economy of higher education: between distributional conflicts and discursive stratification

The higher education sector has been undergoing a far-reaching institutional re-orientation during the past two decades. Many adjustments appear to have strengthened the role of competition in the governance of higher education, but the character of the sector?s emerging new political economy has frequently remained unclear. Serving as the introduction for the special issue, this article makes the case for a multidimensional strategy to probe higher education?s competitive transformation. In terms of conceptualizing the major empirical shifts, we argue for analyzing three core phenomena: varieties of academic capitalism, the discursive construction of inequality, and the transformation of hierarchies in competitive settings. With respect to theoretical tools, we emphasize the complementary contributions of institutional, class-oriented, and discourse analytical approaches. As this introduction elaborates and the contributions to the special issue demonstrate, critical dialog among different analytical traditions over the interpretation of change is crucial for improving established understandings. Arguably, it is essential for clarifying the respective roles of capitalist power and hierarchical rule in the construction of the sector?s new order

The Academic Dispositif: Towards a Context-Centred Discourse Analysis

This contribution outlines the dispositif approach, which combines a linguistic discourse analysis of texts with a sociological study of the social context (i.e. the dispositif understood as an institutional arrangement of practices and structures). The authors use the discourse of academic researchers to exemplify this approach. By articulating correspondence analysis of self-representations on researchers’ homepages with institutional data of sociology professors in the United Kingdom, they outline a research design that consists of three components: a linguistic analysis of texts, a sociological analysis of institutional contexts, and a theoretical account of how the two are related in the academic dispositif. The dispositif perspective on discourse aims to respond to a demand for systematic discourse research on the social and institutional contexts of discursive practices

Introduction

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