Using critical discourse analysis (CDA), this paper exposes the neoliberal ideology of the knowledge-based economy embedded within university policies, specifically those that regulate faculty hiring, promotion, and remuneration in two national contexts: Turkey and Mexico. The paper follows four stages of CDA: (1) focus upon a social wrong in its…

A lack of esteem for teachers and the teaching profession is a central tenet underpinning policy reforms put forward by the 2010 UK Government White Paper "The Importance of Teaching". This article argues that the policy problem and solutions presented in the White Paper lack awareness of the historical and social positioning of…

Despite profound changes to the higher education sector in the UK over recent years, which have tended to emphasise the role of prospective students as active choosers within a marketplace and encourage higher education institutions (HEIs) to place more emphasis on student engagement and representation as a means of improving the quality of the…

Liberal egalitarians are rightly interested in the meaning and scope of educational justice. Much of this work involves developing an account of what the fair allocation of educational resources ought to look like under ideal conditions. However, recent developments in competitive global capitalism, including the protracted nature of the global…

This paper is an attempt to think aloud about the current policy proposals in circulation in England that address pre-service teacher education. Rather than dealing with details of policy and points of specificity in practice, the focus of this paper is with how propositions are justified and the overall ways in which meanings are being managed; a…

This study examines ways in which economic and sociological explanations of higher education (HE) choices may intersect through student's use of information. We find substantial positive associations between intention to go to university in England and each of: (i) parents' education; (ii) cultural capital; and (iii) expectations of the…

Teach For America (TFA), an organization that places college graduates in urban and rural classrooms for two-year terms of service, is lauded by reformers who see its five-week summer training institute as evidence that teachers have little to learn before entering classrooms. Yet, while boosters see TFA as a radical alternative to traditional…

Current national reforms in Australian higher education have prioritised efforts to reduce educational disadvantage within a vernacular expression of neoliberal education policy. Student-equity policy in universities is enmeshed in a set of competitive student recruitment relations. This raises practice-based tensions as universities strive to…

This paper aims to contribute to the debate on neoliberal governmentality in higher education by focusing its analysis on the constitution of conflictual subjectivities. Starting from the hypothesis that resistance is constitutive to any power relation and coextensive with it, the paper problematizes the production of conflictual subjectivities in…

During the latter half of the twentieth century, Australia, like many countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, experienced rapid expansion in participation in higher education which was supported by government through increases in the number of publicly funded university places. However, in spite of this expansion, a…

For more than two decades, governments around the world, led by the English-speaking polities, have moved higher education systems closer to the forms of textbook economic markets. Reforms include corporatisation, competitive funding, student charges, output formats and performance reporting. But, no country has established a bona fide economic…

In this article, a deconstructive "survol" of the term "standards" suggests that the concept contributes to an "outside-in" professionalism masquerading as "inside-out" professionalism. In examining a case of "standards" in action, the authors point out the inadequacy of "standards" as…

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is currently engaging in a worldwide feasibility study entitled International Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO). This feasibility study seeks to develop measures that would assess student learning outcomes that would be valid across different languages,…

This article presents a discourse analysis of President Barack Obama's 2011 State of the Union Address. Fredric Jameson's concepts of cognitive mapping, cultural revolution, and the unconscious are employed to examine the president's vision of educational and economic transformation. Ultimately, it is argued this vision evokes a world in which…

This paper was born of the authors' discussions about the imbalance between critique and constructive thinking within the sociology of education, and work on education policy. They were concerned that their research--and the body of work to which their research contributes--is becoming increasingly irrelevant to policy and practice. For British…