Academic capitalism and entrepreneurial universities as a new paradigm of ‘Development’

The interest of higher education researchers in entrepreneurialism in European universities began in the late 1990s with the appearance of two path-breaking books: Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie on Academic Capitalism and Burton Clark on Creating Entrepreneurial Universities. Since that time ‘entrepreneurial’ has become a popular term to describe what many people, politicians in particular, believe is necessary for university survival, and indeed economic survival, as the new paradigm of development. Drawing mostly from a three-year comparative study undertaken as part of the European Framework social science research programme, this article explores whether this new paradigm of ‘development’ is a contingent result of the huge expansion of higher education in the previous quarter century or whether it is primarily the result of ideological changes which have led to the current global dominance of neo-liberalism. The view we have attempted to put forward is the latter. The article deploys ideas and research from governmentality theory to suggest some limitations of the use of empirical data in current higher education policy research and some ways of thinking differently about entrepreneurialism and Clark’s ‘pathways of transformation’ to the universities he studied. The article offers a short example of the useful work that social theory can do in relation to policy agendas like university entrepreneurialism which often lie unproblematized within higher policy and practice