Abstract
Neoliberal capitalism has faced severe criticism both in principle and in practice since the Lehman Shock in 2008. The purpose of the paper is to identify and explain how the current mode of neoliberal capitalism redefines and reshapes the societal roles of the university sector in neoliberal capitalist societies, notably the UK and the US in the post-credit crunch period. The paper examines capital-labour relations in relation to the concept of capitalism, which is then interpreted in the context of the socio-economic roles of the universities. This paper argues that the 2008 financial crisis per se has not removed government expectation of the economic role of the universities, which has been shaped in government neoliberal policy and practice over three decades and lately developed in relation to the discourse of the knowledge economy. The effect of 2008 was rather the rise of ontological insecurity, the loss of credibility in degrees and awareness on problematic graduates’ transition from university to work in a secure, managerial or professional occupation, as new dominant political discourses such as ‘lost generation’, ‘youth unemployment’ and ‘living wage’ suggest. This paper clarifies the differences between higher education access and graduate employment opportunities.
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Notes
Weber referred to capitalism. However, he did not consider that it is the crucial component of the modern society, but bureaucracy and rationalisation in relation to technology and human organisation.
Durkheim and Weber criticised this capitalism-centric point of view on the modern society.
For instance, Taylor (2009) argues that the interaction between the financial bubble and loose monetary policies caused the financial crisis. Posner (2009) interprets that the financial crisis originated from a failure of the institutions to regulate its mechanism over the past two decades, rather than external factors such as wars, oil shocks, national disasters and global pandemics.
The wage gap between CEOs and lowest waged workers in a firm was 40 per cent in 1960s and 1970s. It is 450 per cent in the 2000s.
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Yokoyama, K. The Effect of Changing Capital-Labour Relations on the Universities: Some Interpretations of the 2008 Financial Crisis. Interchange 50, 137–154 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-018-9346-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-018-9346-1