Abstract
The article offers a socio-economic explanation of the much-discussed proliferation of evaluations, performance indicators, rankings and ratings in higher education and research. The aim is to show that these social technologies not only restructure the word of knowledge via status competitions but also serve to align academic stratification with socio-economic inequality. The theoretical framework is derived from critical analyses of the knowledge economy and from the credentialist theory of Randall Collins. Both accounts are further elaborated. With regard to the knowledge economy, the argument is that status hierarchies enable a privileged and profitable use of knowledge even where it is not feasible to establish intellectual property rights. In order to establish this argument, credentialism is extended from a theory about the labour market privileges of graduates to a theory about the social valuation of knowledge producers, knowledge products and knowledge institutions in general. Three main propositions are developed and defended: (1) A capitalist knowledge economy can only work as a status economy where income levels of qualified work and the exploitation of intellectual assets depend on accepted entitlements; (2) basic infrastructures of assessing the status of knowledge and knowledge workers are cultivated in higher education and research; (3) by codifying trust in knowledge, these academic (e)valuations facilitate its private appropriation in reputational capitalism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
The direction of these consequences is ambivalent. While credentialists like Bourdieu are left-leaning, there is also a right-wing, anti-intellectual version: ‘There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard everyday and put their skills to test that aren't taught by some liberal college professor.’ (Rick Santorum, cit. in Mettler 2014: 19f)
This last point has been demonstrated for young German scholars by Rogge (2015): Publication strategies are not only deliberately cultivated but also taught.
It must be noted, however, that (non-academic) employers often prefer established connections and informal reputation to (e)valuations and even rankings; formalized credentialing counts more in academic competition.
Ironically, Bourdieu’s analysis of this process has become empirically contestable in the case of France where, since the 1970s, inheritance is increasingly economic, while the explosion of super-wages in the USA more and more interacts with academic pre-selection (Piketty 2013: 379–424; 286–321).
The data can be found at the following webpage, introduced by a warning about student debt: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/.
Marginson plausibly speaks of a ‘prestige motivation’: ‘especially in the elite universities […] finance is less an end in itself than a means to the real end, status’ (Marginson 2008: 9). This is especially likely where media of measuring status have been established. Sometimes knowledge status as such, or for unspecified use, is also pursued on political and institutional levels, with massive costs, as in the German Excellence Strategy.
This point has already been made by Gouldner: ‘The New [intellectual] Class is a cultural bourgeoisie who appropriates privately the advantages of a historically and collectively produced cultural capital’ (Gouldner 1979: 19).
References
Abbott, A. (1988). The system of professions: an essay on the expert division of labour. Chicago: Chicago UP.
Acemoglu, D., & Autor, D. (2012). What does human capital do? A review of Goldin and Katz’s the race between education and technology. J Econ Lit, 50, 426–463.
Bailey, M. J., & Dynarski, S. (2011). Gains and gaps: changing inequality in U.S. college entry and completion. NBER working paper no. 17633.
Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: how social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven/Conn: Yale UP.
Berman, E. P. (2012). Creating the market university: how academic science became an economic engine. Princeton/NJ: Princeton UP.
Bérubé, M., & Ruth, J. (2015). The humanities, higher education, and academic freedom: three necessary arguments. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Binder, A. J., Davis, D. B., & Bloom, N. (2016). Career funnelling: how elite students learn to define and desire ‘prestigious’ jobs. Sociol Educ, 89(1), 20–39.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Homo academicus. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
Bourdieu, P. (1989). La noblesse d’État. Grandes écoles et esprit de corps. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
Brand, U., Görg, C., Hirsch, J., & Wissen, M. (2008). Conflicts in environmental regulation and the internationalization of the state. Contested terrains. London, New York: Routledge.
Burrows, R. S. (2012). Living with the h-index? Metric assemblages in the contemporary academy. Sociol Rev, 60, 355–372.
Carnevale, A. P., & Strohl, J. (2010). How increasing college access is increasing inequality, and what to do about it. In R. D. Kahlenberg (Ed.), Rewarding strivers: helping low-income students succeed in college (pp. 71–190). New York: Century Foundation.
Castells, M. (1997). The rise of the network society. The information age: economy, society and culture. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.
Collins, R. (1979). The credential society. A historical sociology of education and stratification. New York: Academic Press.
Dearden, L., Fitzsimmons, E., & Wyness, G. (2014). Money for nothing: estimating the impact of student aid on participation in higher education. Econ Educ Rev, 43, 66–78.
Douglass, J. A. (2012). Money, politics, and the rise of for-profit higher education in the US: a story of supply, demand and the Brazilian effect. Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education.
Draheim, S., & Reitz, T. (2005). Währungsreform: Die neue Ökonomie der Bildung. Neue Sammlung, 45(1), 3–13.
Drahos, P., & Braithwaite, J. (2002). Information feudalism. Who owns the knowledge economy? London: Earthscan Publications.
Espeland, W., & Sauder, M. (2007). Rankings and reactivity: how public measures recreate social world. Am J Sociol, 113(1), 1–40.
Etzkowitz, H. (2008). The triple helix: university-industry-government innovation in action. New York et al.: Routledge.
Freidson, E. (2001). Professionalism: the third logic. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gouldner, A. (1979). The future of intellectuals and the rise of the new class. New York: Oxford UP.
Habermas, J. (1961/1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere. An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hartmann, M. (2004). Elitehochschulen: Die soziale Selektion ist entscheidend. Prokla, 34, 535–549.
Hartmann, M. (2015) Die Exzellenzinitiative und die Hierarchisierung des deutschen Hochschulsystems. In: H.-P. Müller & T. Reitz (eds.), Bildung und Klassenbildung. Kritische Perspektiven auf eine Leitinstitution der Gegenwart. Weinheim: Beltz, 208–230.
Hazelkorn, E. (2011). Rankings and the reshaping of higher education. The battle for world-class excellence. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hicks, D., Wouters, P., Waltman, L., de Rijcke, S., & Rafolds, I. (2015). The Leiden manifesto for research metrics. Nature, 520, 429–431.
Internationale Expertenkommission zur Evaluation der Exzellenzinitiative (2016). Endbericht. Berlin: Institut für Innovation und Technik.
Jessop, B. (2007). Knowledge as a fictitious commodity: insights and limits of a Polanyian perspective. In A. Bugra & K. Agartan (Eds.), Reading Karl Polanyi for the twenty-first century: market economy as political project (pp. 115–134). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lamont, M. (2012). Toward a comparative sociology of valuation and evaluation. Annu Rev Sociol, 38, 201–221.
Leuze, K. (2010). Smooth path or long and winding road? How institutions shape the transition from higher education to work. Opladen et al.: Budrich Uni Press.
Lezaun, J., & Montgomery, C. M. (2015). The pharmaceutical commons. Sharing and exclusion in global health drug development. Sci Technol Hum Values, 40(1), 3–29.
Lindley, J., & Machin, S. (2014). The rising post-college wage premium in America and Britain, IZA Discussion Paper No. 5981.
Luhmann, N. (1968). Selbststeuerung der Wissenschaft. Jahrbuch für Sozialwissenschaft, 19(2), 147–170.
MacKenzie, D. (2006). An engine, not a camera: how financial models shape markets. Cambridge/Mass: MIT Press.
Maesse, J. (2015). Economic experts. A discursive political economy of economics. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 10(3), 279–305.
Marginson, S. (2008). A funny thing happened on the way to the k-economy. In New world order in higher education: research rankings, outcome measures and institutional classifications. Paris: OECD.
Marginson, S. (2011). The new world order in higher education. In M. Rostan & M. Vaira (Eds.), Questioning excellence in higher education (Vol. 3, pp. 3–20). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Marginson, S., & van der Wende, M. (2007). To rank or to be ranked: the impact of global rankings in higher education. Journal on Studies in International Education, 11(3–4), 306–330.
Mathies, C., & Slaughter, S. (2013). University trustees as channels between academe and industry: toward an understanding of the executive science network. Res Policy, 42, 1286–1300.
Mazuccato, M. (2013). The entrepreneurial state. Debunking public vs. private sector myths. London.: Anthem Press.
Mettler, S. (2014). Degrees of inequality. How the politics of higher education sabotaged the American dream. New York: Basic Books.
Mortensen, T. C. (2012): Family income and educational attainment. Postsecondary Opportunity 221, Nov. 2012.
Moulier-Boutang, Y. (2007). Cognitive capitalism. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Münch, R. (2011). Akademischer Kapitalismus. Über die politische Ökonomie der Hochschulreform. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp.
Münch, R. (2016). Die Macht der Zahlen in der Evaluation wissenschaftlicher Forschung. Eine soziologische Erklärung, in J. Hamann, J. Maeße, V. Gengnagel & A. Hirschfeld (2016). Macht in Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft. Diskurs- und feldanalytische Perspektiven. Wiesbaden: Springer.
Musselin, C. (2013). How peer review empowers the academic profession and university managers: changes in relationships between the state, universities and the professoriate. Res Policy, 42, 1165–1173.
Neckel, S. (2013). Refeudalisierung – Systematik und Aktualität eines Begriffs der Habermas’schen Gesellschaftsanalyse. Leviathan, 41, 39–56.
Negri, A., & Hardt, M. (2009). Commonwealth. Belknap: Cambridge/Mass.
Oesch, D. (2006). Redrawing the class map. In Stratification and institutions in Britain, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Piketty, T. (2013). Capital in the twenty-first century. Cambridge/Mass: London: Belknap.
Powell, W. W., Owen-Smith, J., & Colyvas, J. A. (2007). Innovation and emulation. Lessons from American universities in selling private rights to public knowledge Minerva, 45, 121–142.
Reinhart, M. (2012). Soziologie und Epistemologie des Peer Review. Baden-Baden: Nomos.
Rivera, L. (2015). Pedigree. In How elite students get elite jobs. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton UP.
Rogge, J.-C. (2015). The winner takes it all? Die Zukunftsperspektiven des wissenschaftlichen Mittelbaus auf dem akademischen Quasi-Markt. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 67, 685–707.
Shavit, Y., Arum, R., & Gamoran, A. (Eds.). (2007). Stratification in higher education. A comparative study. Stanford/Cal: Stanford UP.
Slaughter, S., & Leslie, L. L. (1997). Academic capitalism. In Politics, policies, and the entrepreneurial university. Baltimore/Md: Johns Hopkins UP.
Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. S. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy. Markets, state, and higher education. Baltimore/Md., London: Johns Hopkins UP.
Soares, J. (1999). The decline of privilege. The modernization of Oxford university. Stanford: Stanford UP.
Sørensen, A. B. (2000). Employment relations and class structure. In R. Crompton, F. Devine, M. Savage, & J. Scott (Eds.), Renewing class analysis (pp. 16–42). Oxford: Blackwell.
Stevens, M. (2007). Creating a class. College admissions and the education of elites. Cambridge/Mass: Harvard UP.
Stiglitz, J. (1999). Knowledge as a global public good. In I. Kaul, I. Grunberg, & M. A. Stern (Eds.), Global public goods: international cooperation in the twenty-first century (pp. 308–325). Oxford: Oxford UP.
Sunder Rajan, K. (2006). Biocapital. The constitution of postgenomic life. Durham, London: Duke UP.
Tapscott, D., & Williams, A. D. (2006). Wikinomics. How mass collaboration changes everything. New York: Portfolio.
Vaira, M. (2009). Towards unified and stratified systems of higher education? System convergence and organizational stratified differentiation in Europe. In B. Kehm & B. Stensaker (Eds.), University rankings, diversity, and the new landscape of higher education (pp. 135–153). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
van Zanten, A., & Maxwell, C. (2015). Elite education and the state in France: durable ties and new challenges. Br J Sociol Educ, 36(1), 71–94.
Vercellone, C. (2009). Cognitive capitalism and models for the regulation of wage relations: lessons from the anti-CPE movement. In Edu-factory Collective (Ed.), Toward a global autonomous university (pp. 119–124). New York: Autonomedia.
Wilensky, H. L. (1964). The professionalization of everyone? Am J Sociol, 70, 137–158.
Willke, H. (1998). Organisierte Wissensarbeit. Z Soziol, 27(3), 161–177.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Reitz, T. Academic hierarchies in neo-feudal capitalism: how status competition processes trust and facilitates the appropriation of knowledge. High Educ 73, 871–886 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-017-0115-3
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-017-0115-3