Gone shopping? Universities on their way to the market

Abstract

In most western countries there is a widely held opinion that, facing competition from other knowledge-producers, universities must change their identity from that of state-financed monopolies to self-financed participants in the knowledge-production markets. Together with a demand for specificity and differentiation, comes the need for comparability and similarity. In order to compete with other sites of knowledge production, universities must make themselves comparable to these. This standard problem is greeted with a standard solution: quality assurance, evaluation and ranking are standard procedures adopted in western Europe and in the countries of former Eastern Bloc. In this paper, we analyze this phenomenon and then illustrate its consequences with examples from current practice in four universities.