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Purpose: There is limited scholarship on artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education governance, despite the growing prevalence of AI-powered technologies in many fields, including education. However, as the technology is still nascent and has yet to reach its full potential, ideas and arguments abound, championing or cautioning against the use of these technologies. Design/Approach/Methods: To fill this gap in research on policy networks and AI in British higher education, this article employs network ethnography and discourse analysis to study how ideas about AI-powered technologies in higher education circulate in policy networks in the United Kingdom. Findings: The findings evidence a policy network showing signs of a heterarchy permeated by neoliberal rationales and populated by policy actors actively promoting artificial intelligence technologies to be used in education. Originality/Value: This paper builds on existing research by looking at the university and not-for-profit sectors, in addition to the governmental and educational technology sectors. Using network ethnography, this article expands our understanding of the policy actors involved and critically analyzes ideas regarding the use of AI in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on issues of identity and identification in a UK-based institution of higher education (Westville1 Institute). It is suggested that identity, both individual and collective, and the processes of identification which bind people to organizations, are constituted in the personal and shared narratives that people author in their efforts to make sense of their world and read meaning into their lives. The research contribution this paper makes is threefold. First, it illustrates how an organization's identity narrative evolves over time, and the variety of identification narratives, including dis-identification, neutral identification and schizo-identification, in terms of which participants define their relationship to it. Second, it makes a contribution to what are still rather inchoate efforts to theorize the dynamics of individual-collective processes of identification and identity construction. Finally, it argues that the efforts of senior managers to control processes of organizational identity formation, and participant identification, are interpretable as hegemonic acts required for legitimation purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are in the midst of a 'research-bourgeois' revolution within higher education in the UK. Part of the global project of neo-liberalism to strengthen the link between money and work, and driven by research assessment, diverse research use-values are being subordinated to homogeneous RAE-value. Academic research workers are becoming alienated from the product of their labour. Once freely available to all academics, 'intellectual commons' — well-stocked library, material security, time and other resources — are being enclosed, access becoming dependent upon production of RAE-value. Two new classes are emerging in academia as some research workers are forced to alienate their own research-labour-power, selling their ability to carry out research work to 'research capitalists', who are able to appropriate a portion of the RAE-value which results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

UK universities are having to come to terms with the double whammy of a 2010 Spending Review that will see budgets reduced from £7.1 billion to £4.2 billion by 2014, and the Browne Review of higher education funding and student finance, which argues that those who benefit (i.e. students) should make a far greater contribution to the cost than is currently required. Against this backdrop the authors seek to contribute to the graduate skills debate. They will demonstrate that delivering employment-ready graduates ignores the demands of a radically altered world of work in the face of the government's response to the latest economic crisis. While its primary focus is on the supply side (graduates) the authors are cognisant of the market research industry, which itself is facing external pressures to shift from a milieu of data gathering to a future of intelligent insight providers. We then go on to present the development of a new type of university, which has actively sought to reduce its dependency on traditional funding sources. Finally, we present a model of a research facility at one university that has successfully engaged with the local and regional business community to the benefit of its student workforce. In doing so, it has helped to develop over 70 graduate researchers, with entrepreneurial mindsets, who have all gone on to secure enterprising futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the changes in higher education particularly on the quality of teaching in biochemistry and the threats posed by the disruptions caused by enforced institutional organisations. He comments on the efforts of the British government to address national indifference to education. He highlights the findings of a report made by the Royal Society of Medicine on the public understanding of science. He cites the need to maintain the standards of learning through expanding and lengthening of degree courses.

This article posits the idea of the ‘fictive entrepreneur’ and the ‘fictive student’ to explore how the historical masculinisation of entrepreneurship has informed UK policy and higher education (HE) approaches to entrepreneurship education, and the implications of this for female students. Using a Bourdieuian perspective, discourse analysis is employed to critically analyse policy and research documents and identify entrepreneurship discourses that construct both a ‘fictive entrepreneur’ that students should aspire to become, and a ‘fictive student’ who will benefit from HE entrepreneurship education. It argues that rather than being gender neutral or meritocratic, these discourses of entrepreneurship are saturated with gendered meanings which position HE students and entrepreneurs in potentially damaging ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of higher education raises the risk environment for school-leavers as more occupations become partially graduate with the result that occupational signals are fuzzy. This makes the educational decision more difficult and more risky, especially with more of the cost of higher education being transferred to the individual. After a discussion of the nature of risk, derived from Beck, and of the role of government policy and of economics in obscuring this, the analysis uses simple quantitative techniques, based on British Labour Force Survey data, to demonstrate the increased fuzziness of graduate work. It is also shown that a rising proportion of graduates receive only average pay, thus raising the risks associated with educational investments even further. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the effects of material inequality and gender expectations in structuring working-class girls' aspirations about higher education (HE). Through reference to recent ethnographic work in an inner-London secondary school two key arguments are made about how the combined effects of gender and class limit the social mobility HE is expected to provide. First, it is argued that family ties generate gender-specific obligations for working-class women, which have strong social consequences in terms of the take-up of HE places and labour market participation. This is particularly important since the commitment of working-class girls to home and family has been neglected in many theories of gender and social mobility. Second, it is argued that despite the recent political energy devoted to espousing a democratic HE system, the sense of entitlement to HE entry is, for young working-class people, undermined by a diminishing sense of the right to access middle-class spaces and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how urban working-class youth display their identities through taste and style within the educational field. The authors examine data from longitudinal tracking interview to see how such practices contribute to shaping young people's choices and attitudes towards higher education. The authors suggest that while young people try to generate worth and value through investments in style, these practices also play into oppressive social relations and keep the young people within marginalized social positions.

To survey the expansion of British higher education during the last twenty years is to conduct an inquest into an almost unmitigated disaster. The greatly enlarged university system and the new polytechnics have yielded few of the advantages originally claimed by the proponents of rapid growth. The main reason for this failure is that "expansion" has generally been seen as "more of the same." Since the 1950s, and particularly since the authoritative Robbins Report of 1963, the new universities and polytechnics have too easily become replicas of the old. Higher education has remained geared to the traditional Oxbridge function -- the provision of full time, non-vocational, residential, degree courses for 18 -- 22 year olds. Significantly, one of the most notable success stories has been the Open University. Unlike conventional institutions, this has introduced a fresh concept of higher education. It offers part time courses catering mainly for adults. The courses are based on correspondence materials and television lectures. The Open University has shown how it is possible to extend the role of the university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]