The rise of neoliberalism since the 1980s has impacted higher education globally, resulting in its becoming more ‘market-friendly’ in a variety of ways. These include new forms of university governance, greater requirements to raise money from industry, rankings tables and competitive marketing strategies, and framing students as consumers. In this context, the nature of knowledge researched and taught is increasingly under pressure to be directly relevant to the workplace. As part of this, the traditional academic emphasis on ‘episteme’, or abstract knowledge, is becoming rivalled by growing forms of ‘techne’, or applied knowledge (Parry 2014). One manifestation of this shift is the growth of practice-based learning or work-based learning in higher education and the spread of this pedagogic approach to traditional academic disciplines such as Political Studies.

For many scholars of practice-based learning, the epistemological contrast at stake in this pedagogic approach is the divide between abstract or theoretical knowledge and applied knowledge, more specifically the contrast between teaching the general principles of practice on the one hand and enacting or implementing these capabilities in actual workplace situations on the other (Billett 2013, 104). While these arguments are made with professional or occupational disciplines such as medicine, law or teaching in mind, this conception has now spread to include ‘all programs that develop the capacities required for specific occupations’ (Billett 2013, 101). In recent times these programmes have spread to academic disciplines that are not directly or obviously practice based, for example, a programme I teach in Sweden, a master's in work-integrated learning (WIL), with a focus on Political Studies.

Now while traditionally academic disciplines like Political Studies and International Relations have a variety of vocational applications in government, party politics, the media, non-governmental and research organisations, they are generally orientated towards developing academic rather than occupational capacities. As reflected in the wide variety of professions that graduates take up, traditional academic disciplines develop forms of knowledge production that are not just abstract, but also normative. That is, in addition to reflecting on the principles of different electoral systems, for example, scholars of comparative politics will also be exposed to criticisms of the mainstream model of democracy as being about representative government through elections.