Corporatisation, competitiveness, commercialisation: new logics in the globalising of UK higher education

This paper examines the changing form and scope of higher education in the UK with a specific focus on contemporary ‘globalising’ developments within the sector and beyond. Situated within an analysis of transformations under way in the wider global and regional economy, and drawing on Jessop’s strategic relational approach (SRA), I examine the way higher education in the UK has been restructured through the mobilisation of three key logics (corporatisation, competititiveness, commercialisation) to play a central role in the realisation of a globally‐competitive education services sector and imagined ‘knowledge‐based economy’. The main argument of this paper is that from the early 1980s onward, successive rounds of neo‐liberal political projects – shaped by these logics – were mobilised to rework the basis of capital accumulation. A central outcome was to structurally predispose UK HEIs, over time, toward new regionalising and globalising horizons of action.