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This paper returns to the logic of industrialisation thesis of the 1960s and asks whether higher education can respond to the new infrastructures of global society. Its thesis is that capitalism has generated new global infrastructures (the control of capital empowered by information technology) and that these driving forces have generated changes in knowledge, higher education, research and learning. Higher education is a typical superstructural institution, functional to the infrastructure – but it is finding problems in responding rapidly to the greater demands of the knowledge‐based society of advanced capitalism. It has to change but perhaps it is unable to change sufficiently rapidly, and so the infrastructure is beginning to generate its own educational institutions. More significantly, it would have to be non‐functional to the infrastructure if it were to meet some of the human needs.
Peter Jarvis (Sat,) studied this question.