Introduction: writing about academic capitalism

This book may be read in several ways. It may be read as an expression of its authors’ affectively charged, visceral encounters with academic capitalism. At this level, each of its chapters speaks for itself, and it seems remiss to impose an overarching interpretation. Moreover, this book might be read as a contribution to academic debates in sociology, in education, in cultural studies, and in related fields, on affect, on academic capitalism and on the conceptual relationship between the two. We already mapped this conceptual territory a little in Chapter 1, and indicated where we see this book’s innovative contributions in intellectual terms. This opens up space, on these final pages, for a brief reflection on the politics of writing about academic capitalism. In other words, here we are concerned with the question of what this book might mean, written against the backdrop of academic capitalism’s hegemony and released into an already oversaturated market for academic books.

Put differently once more, this seems to be a good time to sketch a sociological analysis of critical and reflexive scholarly writing on academic capitalism. The texts on the preceding pages have been written, converted into a book, marketed, circulated, sold, bought and read within the institutional system of global academic capitalism. Therefore, their meaning, as well as the extent to which they are capable of carrying meaning at all, can be usefully analysed in reference to this institutional system. In the following, we sketch some trains of thought that may lead to such an analysis.

The question therefore is: what’s the point in us writing and you reading this book? Academic capitalism has, under various labels, been a topic of analysis, debate and critique across the social sciences and humanities for decades, from the beginnings of neoliberal governments’ efforts to inflict creative destruction on higher education systems around the world (Edwards, 1989; Slaughter and Leslie, 1997; Hao and Zabielskis, 2020). While the debate continues, the marketisation and commodification of higher education has continued unabated (Hu and Krishna, 2009; Holmwood, 2017).