Neoliberalism, Technocracy and Higher Education: Editors’ Introduction

ABSTRACT

This special issue of Social Epistemology has its origin in two symposia organised by the Contemporary Philosophy of Technology Research Group at the University of Birmingham (UK). These were ‘The Digital University in a Neoliberal Age’ in November 2017 and ‘The Neoliberal Imagination’ in February 2018. The articles published here explore the relationship between neoliberalism, technocracy and technology, with a special but not exclusive focus on universities, which are open to contestation concerning their role in the public sphere and the politics of knowledge production. Where universities are discussed, English higher education is focused on, because this is undergoing an intense audit-driven neoliberal re-engineering. English higher education is an outlier in Europe to the extent to which it has undergone marketisation, with top-down reforms imposed by the supposedly rolled back, less-interventionist neoliberal state (Shattock, Times Higher, 3 April 2019). Central to these are state-imposed technocratic audit regimes which are used to provide ‘objective’ data on ‘performance’, which has, always already, to be ‘excellent’ (see Readings’ 1997 classic critique of the vacuity of the notion of ‘excellence’). Before briefly introducing each article, we will situate the concerns mentioned above in the context of a social epistemological critique of knowledge production.

KEYWORDS:

• Audit culture
• authoritarianism
• higher education
• neoliberalism
• technocracy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Justin Cruickshank

Justin Cruickshank is a senior lecturer in Social Theory at the University of Birmingham UK. His research interests cover the politics of knowledge production and the philosophy of the social sciences.

Ross Abbinnett

Ross Abbinnett is a senior lecturer in Social Theory at the University of Birmingham UK. His research interests cover the sociology of technology and contemporary critical theory.