Higher Education in Post-Communist States : Comparative and Sociological Perspectives

To what extent have universities in post-Communist states adopted the practices and habits of their branded and consumer-oriented equivalents in the English-speaking world? While not assuming that university education in those states reflects in any mechanistic way the regulated, business-led system long established in places such as the U.S. and now being dramatically realized in countries like Britain, this edited collection identifies some marked shifts in the direction of what might best be described as “neoliberalization,” examining its particularities in local situations where establishment ideologies were, until the early 1990s, deeply alien to all kinds of commercially driven entities. Many of the authors are concerned not only with the linked issues of commercialism, instrumentalism, bureaucracy, and managerialism, framed locally and nationally, but also with the meaning and purpose of universities outside or against their status as efficient gatherers of income. The collection makes specific reference to Lithuania, Hungary, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Georgia and Russia, and takes in both theoretical and empirical studies of diverse but connected subjects, including the marketization of the academy, regional reactions to globalization as expressed in the representational rhetoric of specific curricula, the role and place of civic education, comparisons between educational settings, pedagogies for a critical and ethical consciousness, corporate and state demands and their effects on academic freedom, and the positive potential of new communication technologies. In all these cases, the system of neoliberalism, or rather an uneven process of neoliberalization, forms a backdrop to the particular issues discussed.

A. Salem lectures in sociology at Leeds Beckett University and is on the editorial boards of the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies and Sociologija. Mintis ir Veiksmas/Sociology: Thought and Action.

Gary Hazeldine lectures in sociology at Birmingham City University; previously he taught at the University of Brighton, the University of Sussex, and Manchester Metropolitan University.

David Morgan teaches art history and architectural history at Oxford University’s Department of Continuing Education; he taught previously at Birkbeck College, University of London.