PhDTaking higher education (HE) in England as its case study, this PhD adapts and reposes
Roger Lee’s thesis on the Ordinary Economy to help understand how neoliberal
market values become negotiated, embedded and transformed in and through complex
emerging economic geographies. In 2011, pursuing a somewhat neoliberal theme, the
HE White Paper sought to further organize the sector through the application of certain
market values and metrics, whereby a demand-led system would increase efficiency
and competitiveness by making universities more directly accountable to their studentconsumers
than ever before. Since the late 1970s, ascendant forms of neoliberalism
have come under scrutiny with some political economy and governmentality scholars
underscoring neoliberalization’s processual and variegated nature wherein geographies
and extant political economic relations matter to its concrete manifestation. However,
some studies have encountered difficulties in accounting for how top-down political
programmes become “anchored into” the complexity of everyday life, and/or in presupposing
that their desired “subject-effects” will be either automatically realized or
successfully resisted (Barnett, 2005). Thus, by residualising “the social”, theories of
hegemony and governmentality often fail to illuminate the complex interplay between
abstract policy programmes and the complexity of the Ordinary Economy. To
overcome such weaknesses, this PhD follows Lee’s assertion that economic
geographies are always emerging and inherently relational entities in and through
which value emerges from the practice and performance of socio-economic life. Thus,
studying the economy means grappling with the multiple values, social relations and
notions of value that constitute economic geographies. Adapting a framework to
examine four universities in England, the PhD illuminates the transformative power of
both political programmes and socio-economic relations as, in this case, market
hegemony was (re)-produced in multiple and complex forms. Neoliberalization is thus
shown to be a bottom-up as well as top-down process that is constructed in practice.
For it is the practice of socio-spatial economic relations that determines what is and is
not value.ESRC 1+3 scholarshi
