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This article examines a popularized term, the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), and its underlying paradigm of neoliberalism. It elucidates neoliberalism's maddening effects on the education sector, especially public education. To analyze these effects, I draw from and adapt Michel Foucault's analytical approach to madness. My analysis focuses on the following maddening effects of neoliberalism on education: (1) it obstructs us from seeing inequalities; (2) it creates a desperate passion amid the rise of school choice; and (3) it eliminates reason and creates unreason in the school selection and admissions processes. My analysis is based on reflections on my decade-long research on school marketization and school choice in Canada. I conclude by suggesting that collective visions and concrete steps are needed to move toward equitable educational structures, discourses, and practices that resist or challenge the neoliberal education reform madness (NERM).

For decades, there has been a well-coordinated effort to unmake public education in Canada and around the globe. Neoliberal reformers have undermined public education through increased privatization, marketization, and managerialism. Government austerity measures have shaped policy that falsely necessitates, validates, and legitimizes the privatization of public education. All of these forces that fuel the neoliberal reform movement diminish the collective aims, benefits, and responsibility of/for public education. Instead, the movement encourages systems that ration education. The moves to emulate business models in education systems exacerbate inequities and run counter to the purpose of public education. Indeed, attempts to marketize, commodify, privatize, and dismantle public education are well-organized and coordinated. Yet, in Canada, provincial and territorial fragmentation has veiled the well-organized rhetoric and tactics of neoliberal education reforms. As a result, community and political responses have often been confined within borders. The reformers have been centrally organized, but the resistance has not. Recognizing that provincial and territorial borders can act as barriers to collective advocacy, this special issue is intended to share activities, research, and writing from across Canada about the tactics and impacts of privatization, to recognize the efforts being made to organize a collective response to privatization efforts, and to encourage national conversations beyond borders.

This article analyzes how information and communication technology (ICT) has changed higher education in Mexico. While ICT has modified operations and working conditions in almost all sectors of the economy, its impact on higher education remained limited until 2019. In 2020, however, the COVID-19 pandemic led to its rapid adoption in most higher education institutions. Our analysis looks at this phenomenon from three perspectives. Using an educational perspective, we analyze how universities use ICT for teaching and learning. Before 2020, few students and teachers had embraced these technologies. Relying on organizational theory, we analyzed how the structures and rules of the game changed when institutions adapt to outside demands. In this field, research on the effects of ICT in various institutions shows that organizations can become more efficient, competitive and provide better client services. However, there is little research on whether ICT has caused an organizational change in higher education. Lastly, we use an academic capitalism perspective to ascertain how higher education institutions are knowledge-producing organizations, and how incorporating ICT can change the mode of production from a pre-capitalist to a capitalist one. This allowed us to look at how change affects who owns, manages, commercializes, and profits from knowledge. Considering changes from these perspectives, we conclude that digitalization favors ICT providers, but this however hardly benefits academic staff. At the same time, the national government is unconvinced of online teaching and has cut the budget during the pandemic. As a result, Mexican higher education will probably de-digitalize and return to traditional forms of instruction.

The digitization of academic practices has transformed how research output is shared and discussed, with academic social network sites (ASNS) like Academia.edu and ResearchGate emerging as pivotal platforms. However, their uptake and implications in contexts like Latin America still need to be explored. This study examines the emerging tensions related to using ASNS (Academia.edu and ResearchGate). As such, it offers a qualitative data analysis from 28 interviews with Chilean university researchers. It focuses on three emerging and overlapping tensions: the quantification of research via altmetrics, reputation building, and self-promotion. The findings underscore that altmetrics--despite providing a broader view of research impact--can mirror and perpetuate the problematic aspects of academic capitalism. Digital reputation, tied to high scores, conflicts with more qualitative aspects. The observed ambivalence towards self-promotion exposes a tension between the traditional scientific ethos and academic capitalism. Ultimately, this research unveils the multifaceted implications and paradoxes introduced by these platforms in the Chilean academic milieu.

Within a neoliberal educational policy context, we are increasingly witness to educational leaders compelled to become strategic operators to ensure the survival of their schools. Drawing on the tenets of institutional ethnography (IE), this article traces the everyday work and experience of a school leader in one Australian private school site that was in 'survival mode' after experiencing an unprecedented decline in enrolment numbers. By tracing the power of global and local market forces informing the work of one educational leader, our intention is to capture how a school leader's subjectivity was influenced by market demands and how he invested his time in strategizing to ensure his school would survive. The article makes two main contributions; first, the case study complements research exploring the impact of neoliberal reform on schooling and, second, we highlight the role of IE in furthering our understanding of the pressures schools face and the lived experience of school leaders.

This article explores students' acquisition of cosmopolitanism through transnational education (TNE). It adopts a critical approach to educational cosmopolitanism, distinguishing 'ways of being' at the dispositional level and 'ways of doing' at the practice level, to unfold the contingency and multiplicity of cosmopolitanism as well as the underlying power dynamics between 'the West' and 'the rest' in a TNE context. Based on a case study of a British TNE institution in China, it examines students' predispositions in their decision-making stage, acquisition of cosmopolitanism during TNE experience and self-perceived changes and future aspirations afterwards. The findings show that TNE experience has largely facilitated their cosmopolitan 'ways of doing' in terms of language competence, foreign encounters and cultural taste, where both consistencies and inconsistencies with their previous 'ways of being' emerged. On the one hand, their performance of cosmopolitanism was situational and limited when it came to non-academic foreign encounters and seemed to be banal and strategic rather than reflexive and ethical. This was foreshadowed in their predispositions in which Western-centrism, consumerism and instrumentalism were more evident than cosmopolitanism. On the other hand, TNE experience enhanced their openness and adaptability, and also provoked cosmopolitan orientations in future aspirations, with potential ethical implications of bridging the boundaries between different social groups and ethnicities. This study thus recommends that TNE institutions further incorporate a more inclusive and ethical approach, moving beyond an essentialist, normative framework of cosmopolitanism and departing from narrowly defined 'Western' competencies that are instrumentally oriented towards global position-taking.

English as a medium of instruction (EMI) is commonly adopted as a strategy for higher education internationalisation. While there are numerous studies on the teaching practices of EMI programmes, the relationship between EMI and structural inequalities has been less investigated, especially in "universal" higher education systems. To address the research gap, this study investigates the EMI practices of two Taiwanese higher education institutions (HEIs) under current government initiatives. Qualitative data from policy documents and semi-structured interviews are analysed with an institutional logics approach and reflexive thematic analysis. The findings suggest that while state, managerial, and academic logics jointly shape EMI strategies in the public university case, EMI practices in the private university of technology case are predominantly driven by market and managerial logics and challenged by academic logic. Furthermore, this study reveals the structural "stuckness" encountered by the private case. In Taiwan's hierarchical higher education system, the promotion of EMI could result in widening horizontal inequalities among HEIs. More specifically, under the EMI grading certification scheme for students and the tiered award system for HEIs, the majority may be left behind whereas the few with linguistic capital are spotlighted. Therefore, this study concludes that in light of organisational conditions, policymakers should allow greater flexibility for HEIs to develop performance indicators appropriate to their students' needs.

In Anglophone neoliberal jurisdictions, policy highlights the private goods associated with higher education but largely neglects the sector's contributions to public good not measurable as economic values, including non-pecuniary individual benefits and collective social outcomes. Governments are silent on the existence and funding of most public goods. The paper reports on understandings of the public good role of higher education in England after nearly a decade of full marketisation. The study, part of a cross-national comparison of 11 countries, consisted of a review of major policy reports, and 24 semi-structured interviews in universities (13) and among higher education policy professionals (11) including regulators, national organisations and experts. England has no policy language for talking about outcomes of higher education other than attenuated performative outputs such as graduate salaries, research impact, knowledge exchange and widening participation, understood as individual access to education as a private good. Awareness of multiple public goods has been suppressed to justify successive fee increases and the imposition of a market in the centralised English system. This has coincided with a shift from direct government funding and collaborative stewardship by state and institutions, to student funding and top-down regulation. Nevertheless, most interviewees, including regulators, advocated an open-ended public good role and provided many examples of public goods in higher education, though the concepts lacked clarity. The policy notion of a zero-sum relation of private and public outcomes, corresponding to the split of private/public costs, was rejected in favour of a positive-sum relation of private and public outcomes.

The 2021 UNESCO report "Reimagining Our Futures Together" presented a compelling case for establishing a new social contract on education that addresses the persistent exclusion of vulnerable individuals and ensures that knowledge and learning contribute to a more sustainable future. Research literature highlights a global trend towards replacing "hard" with "soft" governance in education, whereby legally binding procedures are replaced by advice and persuasion. The report analyzed how this trend is amplified by the current spread of datafication and digitalization in the field of education, as well as by the increasing role of non-state actors, as exemplified by the early childhood care and education (ECCE) sector. In response to this analysis, this article proposes that the risk of developing a commercial model of soft governance can be moderated by creating an innovative, networked approach to educational governance, led by UNESCO as a global convenor.

Recent decades have brought significant worldwide expansion of private supplementary tutoring. Demand is especially driven by social competition, which has intensified in the context of globalization. The main suppliers of tutoring are serving teachers, commercial enterprises, and informal providers such as university students. Private tutoring has far-reaching implications for social inequalities, especially because higher-income households can easily secure more and better tutoring than their lower-income counterparts. While private tutoring can support low-achieving students, further stretch high achievers and provide employment, it can also have a backwash effect on schooling. Further, commercial enterprises and even teachers involved in tutoring may operate with questionable business practices. Yet comparative analysis shows wide variations in the governance and regulation of tutoring. While a few governments enact tight regulations, many others have laissez-faire attitudes toward private tutoring. Stronger multi-stakeholder focus on private tutoring and more robust regulations are needed to achieve the sorts of goals envisaged by UNESCO's International Commission on the Futures of Education.

Neoliberalism has been the hegemonic ideology that has fundamentally transformed planning over the last four decades. Neoliberalism has significantly restructured pre-existing organisations, such as universities that were initially expanded during the period of industrial capitalism. From Foucault's perspective, universities work as components of the dominant control apparatus to subjectively normalise people to docile bodies in the capitalist society. In planning schools, new planning students are introduced to the discipline and its values, norms, knowledge, and practices. This article explores how neoliberalism has changed planning education and subsequently practice in favour of the market operation by detaching planning from its intellectual and theoretical context, and used planning as its scapegoat to conceal its failures. Following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008 and the global pandemic of COVID-19, several thinkers, economists and politicians have declared that 'neoliberalism is dead' and pointed to the necessity of a new doctrine to address the adverse side effects of neoliberalism that include social inequality and climate change. Planning was initially developed to address the environmental issues and social inequality that resulted from industrial capitalism. This article suggests that planning education should traverse neoliberalism by retrieving its critical and theoretical knowledge to redefine its role in the post-neoliberal era.

In this paper, we put in dialogue the local dimension of a nation-state with the global challenges faced by universities worldwide. We focus on the case of Denmark, a nation that was exceptionally active in implementing international university reforms and where digitalisation is a high priority of the public sector governance. The article seeks to contribute to speculative research and critical studies by presenting a mixed-methods study that explores higher education teachers' views about desirable and realistic future scenarios in Denmark. The study draws on data from a survey applied at a large Danish university, analysed both quantitatively (N = 755) and qualitatively (N = 53). The findings show that teachers share clusters of concern about uncontrolled digitalisation and teaching automation, commodification of education, and modularisation of university courses, the latter being a contested but realistic perspective in the latest political reforms. They reaffirm the mission of the university as preparing students for solving real problems and contributing to the challenges of the present time. The paper concludes with a call for university management to recalibrate future imaginaries to the values expressed by the teachers, and the university they wish to create.

Following the 9/11 tragedies, the interest in Arabic language and culture in nontraditional destinations such as MENA (Middle East & North Africa) has become vastly obscured with sociocultural and political issues. The mandate to maintain national security served to designate the language and its destinations critical, producing the hegemony of a political rationality that thrives on the globalist commodification of language and risks the homogenization of world cultures. To interrogate these essentialist discourses and others, we examine the ideologies underlying MENA host-grounded discourses to discern the valorization of the language in those destinations, as steered by the needs of globalization and power relations. Drawing upon an adapted, complementary multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) approach, the current study analyzes the linguistic and visual resources of three study abroad (SA) programs' websites. We argue that the orientalist gaze is bidirectional within the host and U.S. based discourse for matters of sociopolitical and economic interdependencies and that joint constructions of global hierarchies and economic inaccessibilities remain prevalent.

Unsustainable student debt and a precarious labor market continue to raise public doubts over the value of a college degree. Observers note decades of grade inflation, eroding confidence in academic standards. Yet little attention has been paid to the perceptions of professors themselves. This report fills the gap by surveying 223 tenured professors in U.S. public universities. We query faculty on sensitive questions central to debate over academic standards. Results show a substantial fraction of professors affirms the serious problems of grade inflation and declining standards. Moreover, political orientation is the best predictor of where faculty stand on these delicate questions. We close by encouraging viewpoint diversity in higher education and greater self-awareness among liberal faculty of our collective biases.

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) text generator tools and the potential challenges for higher education (HE) have characterised informal academic discussion on multiple fora. Specifically examining the case of English medium instruction (EMI) assessment academic integrity, this study sought to explore this conundrum by conceptualising threats and possible recommendations to counter these by creating a problem-solution matrix for key stakeholders considering the scarce academic literature available. An exploratory Delphi technique was employed as a way of generating ideas, gauging expert perspectives, and establishing consensus based on the premise of wisdom-of-(expert)-crowds. In the data collection stage, this new use of the mixed-methods methodology in the field included iterative Delphi questionnaire rounds and concurrent focus group sessions with a panel of 26 international experts. Quantitative and qualitative data were analysed using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis, respectively. The resulting GenAI and EMI Assessment Problem-Solution Matrix is an empirically informed instrument for key stakeholders in EMI HE that exemplifies a range of GenAI-induced issues and recommendations as to how to proceed going forward in EMI HE pedagogical settings. This contributes to the field in line with broader theoretical assessment principles, particularly with those seeking to mitigate inequitable practices. Further contextual matters pertaining to social justice were highlighted, such as the effects of the massification and commodification of HE on the role of assessment in both EMI didactic contexts and others. The findings here take a step towards addressing the gaps identified but also represent a means of sparking much-needed further discussion in both extant literature and praxis.

This collaborative theoretical essay considers how an Embodied Ethic of Care Framework (Sodhi, 2022), which is informed by Black feminist thought and Indigenous African thought, offers a different way of being in international education. We describe international education in Canada, which focuses on the economy and leads to "conditional hospitality" (Ahmed, 2012) and the commodification of international students (Guo & Guo, 2017). We juxtapose the five elements of the framework to instances of international education in Canada. We demonstrate how current connections with international students are transactional which replicates harmful historical relationships between people of colour, capitalism, and colonialism. The Embodied Ethic of Care Framework is an antidote for this colonial violence because it places relationship building at the center. We invite readers to consider how an ethic of care might inspire a different way of being that could redress coloniality and systemic racism in their own internationalized contexts.

The paper focusses on a collaboration between academia and industry. As an introduction, we present typical behavior of university researchers, who often define the area of application without consulting it with industrial partners, and we propose different approach which led to the definition of the scope of the WrightBroS project. The project, entitled "Collaborative Factory of the Flight Simulators Branch of RISE" is financed by the European Union in the frame of Horizon 2020 MSCA Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) programme. The international Consortium composed of Higher education (Silesian University of Technology from Poland) and industrial (LG Nexera from Austria and Virtual Reality Media from Slovakia) sectors, has designed a project as a collaborative platform whose know-how results from knowledge sharing among partners. Then, from the experience gained in the implementation of the WrightBroS and other similar projects, by using case-study methodology we demonstrate how representatives of education and industry in the new joint environment supplement each other in common research efforts. We also present methods for knowledge sharing, in particular achieved by intersectoral staff exchanging. Then we present the results achieved by collaboration of Higher Education with Industry in the WrightBroS project. Finally, the discussion in the context of tackling broader challenges of intersectoral collaboration leads to the conclusions that this kind of environment is very efficient way to overcome typical difficulties in academia and industry dialog, which is so common in the global world.

Privatisation and commercialisation in education encompass a range of interrelated practices, including the outsourcing of educational services as well as increased reliance on commercially produced resources for the delivery of learning and assessment. An increase in these practices has accompanied the shift from centralised systemic management of schools and specific programs like English as an Additional Language/ Dialect (EAL/D), to school autonomy whereby principals control budget expenditure decisions, ostensibly in response to the needs of their school population. The intersection between school autonomy, commercialisation and delivery of the specialised service of EAL/D is the focus of this paper. This paper presents the findings of a survey with EAL/D teachers in Australia, in relation to the extent to which they are experiencing commercialisation and the impact this is having on the delivery of a longstanding service designed to ensure equity of outcomes for English language learners. The data suggests that the use of commercial products in schools may not be aligned with appropriate educational practices which target language learning needs. There is a strong need for further research in the uptake and use of commercial products for specialist language support. This will elucidate the extent to which EAL/D as a specialisation is being impacted by the use of commercial products both in the appropriacy of the products and in the deprofessionalisation of specialist EAL/D teachers.

Canada's international education system is highly unregulated, with many recruitment agencies and homestay services taking agency in providing these services to students, leaving them vulnerable and open to exploitation. Furthermore, many school boards often do not take responsibility in arranging these services for international students, resulting in a lack of accountability that can further contribute to a cycle of deceit and students navigating this process with limited knowledge or oversight. Utilizing international student security (ISS), this article draws on interviews with six Canadian secondary school teachers from and two Chinese international secondary school students all located in Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) to reveal the profitability of international students, and the exploitative nature of international student services providers like recruitment agencies and homestay companies. Ultimately, the article identifies responsible key stakeholders and beneficial institutional and policy improvements to better regulate international education and protect these vulnerable international youth. [Note: The publication year for v14 n1 (2024) may be incorrect. The correct publication year for this article is 2023.]

This article conceptualises the notion of the 'education hustle' as a case of Bourdieuian doxa and illusio. It is argued that the plethora of education reforms engaged in across the globe encompassing privatisation, corporatisation, marketisation, strong accountability, and the governance structures of the New Public Management (NPM), especially within the Anglo-American capitalist world is tantamount to an 'education hustle' where the ideas and values of a neo-liberal politico-economic framework of globalisation founded on the 'American Model' have been imposed (hustled) into fields such as education. This is about advancing an Anglo-American politico-economic primacy in an increasingly multi-polar world. I argue that an "emulative illusio" [emphasis added] is at work which co-opts nations into maintaining their interest in this policy approach to the detriment of education.

In the neoliberal economic policies adopted by nations, services for social welfare including education are rendered commodities to be purchased by citizens, and the employees' (teachers') skills too get commodified. The pedagogical skills of teachers may often be judged predominantly in terms of their contribution towards ease of profit-making by the private schools rather than facilitating students' learning and growth. Through qualitative autoethnographic analysis of my experiences within private schools as an employee in a major city of Uttar Pradesh state of India, I explore the ways in which commodification of private school education, including teachers' skills and roles, could be potentially dehumanising (being treated as persons unworthy of humanness or care) for teachers. The findings of my autoethnographic analysis point to aspects of such dehumanisation and the challenges ahead for the teachers to work towards making school spaces a growth-inducing experience for students and themselves.

Amid the increasing reliance on digital tools and services in education, this article examines the datafication and commodification of student life in Denmark. We analyse the web and app (iOS and Android) versions of 45 tools and services that teachers in Danish public primary schools use as part of their teaching, the types of data generated by them, and the market actors harvesting and distributing the user data. The analysis finds that the websites and apps collect significant amounts of user data, use it for functional as well as commercial purposes, and distribute it to a long list of third-party services. In light of these findings, we reflect on how the increasing datafication of school life and the inherent commodification of digital learning challenge established welfare state ideals surrounding public schooling, raise challenges for schools and teachers alike, and create new inequalities amongst students.

This paper explores how special educational needs (SEN) and social class can become intertwined in post-primary school choice in Ireland. The paper draws on data generated during a three-year ethnographic study of a DEIS school. Data are analysed using Holland et al.'s (1998. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press) "positional identities," "authored selves" and "figured worlds" in order to examine how learner identities and school choice processes can become informed by emergent school cultures being formed and re-formed by neoliberal marketisation of education and how these actions are taken up in the identity work of young people and their families. Soft barriers and their contribution to aspects of school stratification by social class and SEN in this setting are explored. Finally, the paper calls for recognition of the responsibilities of every school to own diversity in their own settings.

This article revisits the notion of difference used in global education, especially study abroad. It suggests a new framework for study abroad to counter its prevalent notions of immersion and global competence that are based on and perpetuate the static notion of difference among discrete units of 'culture'. I introduce the Commodity Project, which nurtures students' ability to perceive the world as fluid and made of multi-layered global connections shaped by wider structural arrangements and act as agents of change. I call this ability 'structural competence' and suggest it as an alternative to global competence. Study abroad experience can then be seen as shaped by global connections instead of by an independently developed culture of the destination. This article examines three students' Commodity Projects, illustrating how such a project can be carried out before, during, after, and even without -- as may become important during pandemic -- studying abroad.

As a result of the growing commercial marketplace for teachers' digital data, a new organization that includes educational data brokers has evolved. Educational data brokerage is relatively intangible due to the ease of de-identified data being collected and sold via educational technology. There is an urgent need to expose how the brokerage of educational data relates to the commercial mediation of consent and privacy in educational settings. It is difficult due to a lack of consistent terminology about organizations that buy and sell data. This paper offers an extensive analysis of the social learning platform Edmodo and provides evidence that justifies the term 'educational data broker'. The results aim to provide new terminology to a largely obfuscated process in educational settings and bring to light a concrete example of brokerage activity focusing on teachers' online activity.

This article presents an empirical investigation of the effects university brand personality and student-university identification have on student participation and citizenship behaviour in the context of higher education. The study employed a self-administered questionnaire to collect data from 433 university students. The data were analysed using structural equation modelling. The results revealed that only the sincerity and lively facets of university brand personality play a vital role in informing student--university identification. Furthermore, when students perceive their university brand to be more sincere, they are more likely to exhibit citizenship behaviour. The study also found that students who identify with their university engage in various forms of participation and citizenship behaviours. University administrators can streamline their marketing and branding communication to emphasise specific brand characteristics in order to improve student identification with the university and student engagement in university-supportive and extra-role behaviours.

Social media technologies (SMTs), online brand communities, and social customer relationship management (SCRM) Capabilities play an indispensable role in the engagement and loyalty-building of university students to achieve a sustainable university reputation. This study provides pioneering input for higher education institutions (HEIs) by developing a new integrated SCRM model through self-congruity or self-congruence theory, which examines SMTs Use, online brand communities, SCRM Capabilities, customer engagement, customer loyalty, and university reputation. Using cross-sectional data from 400 students from Pakistani public universities, structure equation modeling applies to Smart PLS 3.2.7. Results indicate that all hypotheses have significant positive relationships, except SMTs use found insignificant with university reputation. Also, SCRM Capabilities mediate between SMTs use and university reputation, while customer engagement mediates between online brand communities and customer loyalty. This study indirectly supports public HEIs sustainability. Further, these findings contribute new knowledge to literature and theory.

The global education reform movement has led to the development of quasi-markets and the promotion of business-like operation of schools with the goal of improving education for students and opportunities for teachers. While many types of schools have been influenced by marketisation, the international school market is a prime example of how such processes can be fully integrated into education. However, despite the prevalence of market reforms, little is known of their impact on educational employees. This research investigates the perspectives and experiences of teachers in compulsory-age international schools operated by large multi-national for-profit education management organisations to understand how business-like operations within a school market affect their daily work. Semi-structured interviews were used to create items to measure the business influences. Scales were then developed with Mokken Scale analysis and Rasch analysis. The two scales demonstrate distinct patterns of marketisation. The scale of direct business influences on teachers' work includes items on competition between schools, increasing admissions and improving finances, while the scale of indirect influences includes items about job insecurity, hierarchical organisational structures, fear of repercussions when voicing professional opinions, and an emphasis on evidence of learning. Notably, these quantitative patterns were consistent across many different types of schools, both for-profit, non-profit private schools and government schools. These findings demonstrate the strength of researching teachers' experiences to understand the impact of marketisation on education.

Although often seen as places of culture, cultivation and creativity, language courses borrow the language of creativity for test-centered practices. Research in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology has long recognized language courses as sites for the legitimation of neoliberal ideals that emphasize language as global, individual, and economic, human capital for the global market. Yet research in education often focuses on language education as building student identities, ignoring how it prepares students for participation in an affluent 'creative class.' This paper aims to bring a more critical lens on discourses of creativity in the classroom. It explores how neoliberal ideology is realized in teacher development literature on creative management, and it investigates how this commercial creativity affects the language curriculum and assessment in a New England High School, ending with a call to a more critical, communal creativity.

This article focuses on the relationship between elite British boarding schools and the overseas branches ('satellites') that they have established around the world. While British schools are categorised as charities, the satellites are operated as commercial ventures through subsidiaries. The UK-based schools can thus profit from the export of their 'brands', extracting capital from their satellites overseas and channelling it back to the UK. Drawing on interviews with staff of these satellite schools and on documentary analysis (including Charity Commission reports), we use the lens of racial capitalism to analyse the relationships between British elite schools and their overseas branches. We argue that through their overseas operations, British elite schools engage in extractive practices and are complicit in processes of enclosure and dispossession. These processes are premised along racialised lines and ultimately ensure that the promised 'British eliteness' remains out of reach for those who subsidise its social reproduction.

Employing neoliberal governmentality as a conceptual frame, this paper presents evidence from the mushrooming English language academies from Pakistan to demonstrate that how neoliberal rationality as a normative order of reason governs the minds of learners and teachers without governing. Drawing on the analysis of an open-ended interview protocol and semi-structured interviews, the findings suggest that learning more English is believed to render them competitive in the current linguistic market. The rationality is deeply interwoven with the logic of the market. English is considered instrumental for social survival, a tool that promises all forms of social, cultural, and economic capital. The paper discusses that how the knowledge that neoliberal rationality internalises, apparently governs participants' discourses, actions, and their self-technologies. Self-technologies manifest in their conduct of relentless self-development and self-entrepreneurship. Recurrent neoliberal lexicon embodies their subjectivities. The power of neoliberalism 'inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives' (Foucault [1980]. "Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings", 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon Books). The study concludes that the transformative potential and promises attached to English learning are facile because English does not exist in some neutral social space; instead, it operates in a polarised society where the roots of socioeconomic inequalities are fundamentally structural than access to English.

This article introduces the special issue of "REPCS" dedicated to the analysis of the restructuring of higher education in Alberta, Canada. It describes the acceleration of the processes of commodification of education and research and the corporatization of institutional governance under the government that took office in April 2019. The Alberta case is situated within the political economy of this petro-state, governed by a right-wing populist party, as well as in relation to the global trends in post-secondary education driven by neoliberal regimes. Further, the article highlights the cracks in the foundations of modern universities that have deeper historical origins than neoliberalism, and that are widening as the governance and raison d'être of these institutions are challenged by global socio-ecological crises and Indigenous-led decolonization and climate justice movements. Drawing upon first-hand knowledge, as a participant in the struggles at the University of Alberta, as well as extensive research into the government's restructuring agenda and the impacts on the post-secondary sector, the author outlines proposals for reform of the legislative framework governing the relationship between universities and the state, as well as the internal governance of the institution, and assesses the current terrain of agency for such transformation.

This article provides an account of the undermining of collegial governance at the University of Alberta in relation to the restructuring of the university in 2020 by the senior administration and board on advice provided by the Australian consultancy firm, the Nous Group. The current president of the university has publicly promoted the restructuring in venues including the "Times Higher Education" supplement as a model for other universities. The model, a disastrous one for collegial governance, demands widespread attention along with the means by which it was achieved. As Bill Readings declared in his 1997 book "The University in Ruins," "the changing institutional form of the university is something that intellectuals cannot afford to ignore." At the University of Alberta, that changing form is being determined by fossil-fuelled academic capitalism. The account of what has happened is provided by a professor who has served on the university's senior academic body, the General Faculties Council, for almost a decade. It concludes with several concrete recommendations for bolstering collegial governance at universities in Alberta, elsewhere in Canada, and possibly worldwide--wherever collegial governance is being undermined by restructuring, the corporatization of the academy, academic capitalism, or the disrespect of university boards for the authority of faculty and the academic mission.

The objective of this article is to explore differentiation of education through juridification. We examine changes in school governing, including trends towards globalization and marketization, as well as increased regulatory intervention in addressing complex social problems. Drawing on Luhmann's theory of functional differentiation and Teubner's problematization of juridification, we scrutinize three sets of distinct legislative regulations in a Swedish context. We uncover a multifaceted juridification alongside a multifunctional school organization nested in a complex web of differentiated and interconnected subsystems. Traditional forms of differentiation persist, albeit with juridification as a lever, thus sparking renewed tensions.

In the context of threats to their financial sustainability, this paper uses Resource Dependency Theory to explore the challenges being faced by a sample of 10 small new public universities in England. It discusses the responses being taken and prospects for the future in this segment of the sector. It concludes that some of the most important elements of income and expenditure are also areas where institutions have amongst the lowest levels of autonomy, including tuition fees, staff salaries and pension costs. It suggests that institutions are proactively seeking ways to both adapt their strategy and influence the environment in which they operate, including the introduction of new organisational forms, models for employing staff, the diversification into new programmes and markets, and greater use of domestic and international partnerships.

We explore the literature on internationalization in higher education and distinguish between the mainstream and radical approaches to critical scholarship. We argue that the mainstream approach continues to steer internationalization towards socially progressive and equitable aims, while growing concerns have surfaced especially with regard to its commercialization. We focus on the postcolonial approach and suggest that it has inherent limitations stemming from its roots in a 'modern global/colonial imaginary' based on an outdated bipolar or unipolar, rather than multipolar, view of geopolitics. In the analysis of higher education, this perspective fails to recognize contemporary forms of colonialism and, in contrast to other strands of critical scholarship, neglects the shifting nature of geopolitics and the various forms and locations of colonialism. Consequently, we argue that the postcolonial approach becomes myopic, as it tends to be West-centric, selectively critical and denies local agency. Moreover, it falls short in explaining the motives behind internationalization in diverse contexts. Therefore, we argue for a plurality of critical approaches, widely applied, to gain a comprehensive understanding of internationalization on a global scale.

This article explores how the Swedish policy of municipal adult education (MAE) is interpreted, translated, and enacted in study and career counselling. The data consists of semi-structured interviews with adult education leaders and study and career counsellors. Swedish MAE is characterised by extensive marketisation, with many different providers, which makes the education system complex. The findings show that a study and career counsellor is characterised as a key person for both the students and the organisation, with a role as a marketer and 'map reader' for applicants, in addition to responsibilities in admissions, the validation and mapping of students' knowledge, and quality work. The counsellor becomes a hub in a system that applicants and students find difficult to navigate and fulfils a vital function in the marketing of adult education and quality work. Thus, this complex system requires more resources for counselling to function to the benefit of the individual student. However, there is no clear regulation for how counselling should be organised, which means that counselling is organised in different ways in different municipalities with different providers. This in turn means that the availability of adequate counselling may depend on the municipality in which you live.

The last 25 years have seen a dramatic shift in tuition fee policy in England. This paper uses Critical Discourse Analysis to understand the motivations behind policy setting, comparing the pivotal reviews undertaken by Dearing, Browne and Augar. It concludes that four themes may have influenced tuition fee policy making: national politics and political narrative; the marketisation and neoliberalisation of HE; the link between the costs and benefits of education; and the pressures of the economic environment.

The aim of this study is to examine how a particular object for consumption, professional development for teachers and principals, is marketed to schools, and what propositions and understandings are embedded in such offers. Adopting a conceptualization of marketing as a "perpetual questioning machine," the study deploys and develops a theoretical approach from marketing studies to a new context: edu-marketing. The study is guided by the assumption that marketing functions as projection screen for the products and services offered to schools, but, also as a social and cultural space where dreams and desires are performed and governed. As such, marketing to school is not exclusively about selling things; but about what to be or who to become. Besides the theoretical contribution, the study contributes with empirical knowledge about (1) what concerns and desires this marketing "questioning machine" mobilizes and circulates and (2) how objects for consumption are de/stabilized in the education market. Thereby, it demonstrates some of the intricate relations between the growing education market and the values that those who work in schools are invited to strive for. It is argued that consumption at the education market-place is a question of identity, and therefore of branding and possible success.

The trend towards seeing education as a commodity and part of a global industry has transformed the field of education. We argue that these transformations are reducing the autonomy of the field of education as it has incorporated business rhetoric, logic and practice. We examine this through an analysis of discursive formations manifested in two major international edu-business events in Finland -- "Dare to Learn" and "XcitED." The performativity existing in these events, combining actions and interactions, objective and subjective elements and materialized and symbolic interests and outcomes, enables convergences between business and education. In Finland, where education is overwhelmingly public, there is a subtle marketization, increasingly integrating business rationales and attitudes in education. We employed event ethnography and discourse analysis to examine points of diffraction between education and business. A transversal movement between the field of education and the field of business is enabled by symbolic power. "Dare to Learn" and "XcitED" discursive formations reveal the penetration of business in education, which reframes the field of education and fosters the global education industry in Finland and abroad, challenging notions and practices of democracy and citizenship in education.

National policies aiming at marketisation and privatisation in welfare sectors such as Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) require governance and organisation to be realised. In Sweden, the municipalities are key but largely under-researched organisers for preschool quasi-market infrastructures. This study explores the different ways in which Swedish municipalities act as quasi-market organisers in the preschool setting. Following organisational theory, we analyse their market shaping activities in translating national regulations in efforts to influence, support and control their local preschool quasi-market. Documents, websites, and interviews with public officials from 30 municipalities characterised as having either a large (N = 10), medium (N = 10), or small (N = 10) private ECEC sector are analysed. The analysis highlights large variations on how municipalities act as market makers, which is further discussed in the form of three ideal types: the "Frontier", the "Keeper", and the "Endorser." We conclude that municipalities' varying and hybridised market shaping activities and local characteristics are important to understand the implications that emerge in terms of different rules of the game, stakeholder interdependencies and relationships, composition of market actors etc. Attentiveness to the sub-national/local actors are essential in understanding different welfare quasi-markets within national policy frameworks of marketisation and privatisation.

This study targets hitherto largely understudied empirical processes and activities through which certain ideas and imaginaries are being commercialised and used by corporate actors in the global Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) industry. The aim is to analyse and critically discuss representations of the Scandinavian ECEC regime in the context of ECEC export. This is achieved empirically through a case study of a Swedish education company and its expansion in Germany, as well as by devoting analytical attention to the social, political and fantasmatic logics in the processes that constitute and characterise the "Scandinavian ECEC offer" as it is being exported. The analysis draws on corporate documents, websites and interviews with top-level company representatives. The analysis highlights how the Scandinavian ECEC regime is made up of four interlinked elements; equality, the autonomous child, integration of care and learning and outdoor pedagogy, aligned and sustained by "gripping" and "sticking" forces in fantasmatic logics that hide contingencies. In summary, the powerful imaginary of the Scandinavian ECEC regime, bringing accessibility, social justice, gender equality, nature, democracy, children's rights and autonomy, serves to conceal the political and ideological dimension of the economic logic of capitalism.

For decades, academic freedom and shared governance have stood as cornerstones of higher education in the United States, but these principles face unprecedented challenges. Recent developments point to a disturbing decline in these critical values, stirring debates on the future viability of the higher education system. This study delves into the problematic trajectory of modern higher education, spotlighting the rise of corporate practices within academic institutions, the swelling ranks of university administration, and the disproportionate weight given to student evaluations in assessing faculty. These factors have converged to push academia into an unstable transition, a liminal phase fueled by external and internal forces. This study examines the evolving landscape of academic freedom within the corporatized university model. Utilizing the concept of liminality, it explores the transitional challenges faced by academia in balancing traditional scholarly values with emerging market-driven paradigms, arguing that the corporatization of universities represents a liminal phase, wherein the identity and purpose of academic institutions are in flux, significantly impacting the notion of academic freedom. The shift toward a consumer-oriented ethos endangers the foundational principles of higher education, risking substituting educational substance with the mere transaction of educational services. The study concludes by issuing a call to action for all stakeholders in higher education to acknowledge and confront these detrimental trends, thereby safeguarding the principles of academic freedom, shared governance, and the educational system's overall integrity and dynamism.

This multiple case study explores how researchers are motivated to perform their third mission activities in terms of collaborative projects with public and private actors. The study also investigates the involvement of universities' third mission support personnel and technology transfer executives in the collaboration. The study contributes new insights into individual motivations for academic engagement and commercialisation. This is done by empirically demonstrating that commercialisation projects are based on ideas originated from novel and basic research, while academic engagement is based more on the general knowledge and capabilities of researchers and their research groups. The findings also revealed that motivations for taking on third mission activities were mainly about disseminating the results of research to wider society, rather than being driven by monetary rewards. This is demonstrated not only for the researchers, but also for the external partners, the support personnel, and technology transfer executives. The findings further imply that researchers are more satisfied with the support structure set up at their university for academic engagement projects than with the support structures for commercialisation of research, such as technology transfer offices. The findings can have implications for both policymakers and practitioners within knowledge and technology transfer.