Political economy is all about the study of the relationships of power that determine the distribution of resources in the economy. What does today’s Queen’s Speech say in this context? Most of all it says that this is a government without power.
here the outlines of a significant attempt at supply-side reform – one pitched at challenging post-92 universities where provision is mainly ‘classroom’ subjects in the arts, humanities and social sciences.
"The Teaching Excellence Framework is best understood then as an effort to create a proxy signal to indicate quality to potential students and rival institutions through its gold, silver and bronze badges."
Our increasing inability to view globalised higher education from any perspective other than that of competing nation states in a transnational system, and of universities as competing capitals inside that world-view, is highlighted by Matt Lingard’s report on the Universities UK event, Open and online learning: Making the most of Moocs and other models. Critically, Lingard highlights how MOOCs are being utilised to catalyse further marketisation of education in the global North with the on-line space being used less as a socially transformative experience, and more as a space for public/private partnership, in order to lever global labour arbitrage and strengthen the transnational power of specific corporations:
In a new interview Klein says that it’s important to question why the big green groups lo have been so unwilling to follow science to its logical conclusions.