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The elitism dispositif: hierarchization, discourses of excellence and organizational change in European economics

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Abstract

From the 1990s onwards, economics departments in Europe have changed toward a culture of “excellence.” Strong academic hierarchies and new forms of academic organization replace “institutes” and “colleges” by fully equipped “economics departments.” This article seeks to demonstrate how and why hierarchization, discourses of excellence and organizational change takes place in European economics departments. The concept of “elitism dispositif” will be developed in order to understand these changes as a discursive as well as power-related phenomenon based on rankings, on the formation of new academic classes as well as on the construction of an elite myth. An elitism dispositif is defined as a discursive power apparatus that transforms symbolic differences among researchers, constructed by rankings, into material inequalities, based on an unequal distribution of academic capital between departments and researchers. Based on an empirical study, the article will focus on a selection of economics departments in Germany and in the UK, in order to study the emergence of an “elite class” as well as the functioning of an “excellence culture” that is based on discourses of power and inequality.

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Source Han (2003: 271)

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Notes

  1. This FED project was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

  2. These categories are labels used by actors in economics. They are not the author’s invention and therefore I make no claim for sociological validity.

  3. All the results are here: http://www.rae.ac.uk/submissions/submissions.aspx?id=34&type=uoa.

  4. Independent schools, which are called private schools in the United States.

  5. For Marx, the apostrophe in “C’” refers to two things: on the one hand to surplus value as a quantitative increase compared to “C”, and on the other hand to the fact of capital reproduction. Since “capital” is not a thing but a social relation of power, the apostrophe indicates the fact that a capitalist social relation is established through accumulation processes, i.e. through the continuous transformation of academic resources into traditional academic capital and new academic capital. My representation of Marx’s formula does not need the quantitative aspect of “surplus value” as it refers to the fact that a capitalist academic social relation is now constructed in the step from “C” to “C′”.

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    Jens Maesse

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Guest Editor Name: Guest Editors of Political Economy of Higher Education (Prof. Dr. Johannes Angermuller, Dr. Jens Maesse, Dr. Tilman Reitz, and Prof. Dr. Tobias Schulze-Cleven).

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Maesse, J. The elitism dispositif: hierarchization, discourses of excellence and organizational change in European economics. High Educ 73, 909–927 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-016-0019-7

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