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.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• market-making
• recruitment agents
• international students
• ICEF

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Janja Komljenovic http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5951-5189

Notes

1 In this paper, I am using the term ‘university’ generically so that it includes all education institutions at the higher education level regardless of their form or name.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission FP7 People programme: Marie Curie Initial Training Network UNIKE (Universities in Knowledge Economies) (H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions) [grant agreement number 317452].