Universities in a knowledge economy or ecology? Policy, contestation and abjection

Abstract

Policies to repurpose universities as drivers of a global knowledge economy are often inspired by formal economic models based on marketable knowledge. Their rationality calls for transactional leaders to impose organizational models on universities to reshape their relationships both internally and with a plethora of stakeholders in the ‘field’ of the global knowledge economy. Polanyi’s ‘substantive economy’ and Tsing’s ‘liveable landscape’ provide alternative ways of conceptualizing this field as an ‘ecology’ where universities are embedded in a tissue of social relationships, which all have to be carefully configured to sustain the university’s principled existence. The article uses ‘anthropology of policy’ as an approach and Denmark as an example to trace how policy-makers’ top–down, ‘authoritative instrumentalist’ approach to university reform involved reworking the concept of ‘freedom’. In contrast, an anthropological and ‘democratic’ approach treats policy as a process in which people from many different sites in society engage in contesting top–down ideas and shaping the kinds of institutions and policy worlds they wish to inhabit. Academics, and especially senior women, contested the new meaning of ‘freedom’ for their research, teaching and public engagement, and the principles on which to organize boundaries and relations with surrounding society. In these contests, the exponents of a more ecological approach were defeated, cast out, abjected.