The globalization of the political economy at the end of the twentieth century is destabilizing the traditional patterns of university professional work. One of the major changes that has taken place as a result of globalization is that faculty, who were previously situated between capital and labor, are now positioned squarely in the marketplace. To grasp the extent of changes taking place and to understand the forces of change, Academic Capitalism examines the current state of academic careers and institutions, with a particular focus on public research universities in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
Slaughter and Leslie… affirm that tertiary education in the U.S. as well as in Australia, Canada, and Great Britain, especially since 1970, has merged with the marketplace, a development that alarms many as a kind of academic prostitution. They view with regret the demise of the concept of the university as a community in which the individual members are oriented primarily toward the greater good of the organization.
Without even mentioning the dreaded and dated Marx, the authors have produced a convincing analysis of the transition of the academy from its own protected form of feudalism to a predatory capitalism… [including] long-term changes in the ethos, aims, and management of universities — changes that have wedded them and their futures to the vagaries of the global marketplace.
Learning Change 