Rajani Naidoo

University of Bath | UB · International centre for Higher Education Management

Low completion rates amongst students from Black working-class backgrounds remain a persistent challenge to post-apartheid university transformation in South Africa. Notions of universities as colour-blind, meritocratic, and post-racial have developed around a deficit and victim-blaming majoritarian narrative that individualises educational under-a...

The chapter examines the position of academics in English universities since the period when Halsey (Decline of donnish dominion: The British academic professions in the twentieth century. Clarendon Press, 1992) wrote his classic treatise on the decline of the English ‘don’. It surveys the effects of neo liberalism and of marketisation in higher ed...

A contribution to the UNESCO IESALC report on the Futures of Higher Education led by Dr Emma Sabzalieva. The concept note outlines a vision for HE in 2050 which rests on the assumption that there is a dynamic inter-relationship between the past and the present, and that the future will be produced through human intervention, and in interaction wi...

Knowledge remains timely in education. The need for academics to contemplate its relevance, worth, use and everything in-between deems a continuous intellectual project, rather than a conundrum to be solved. This book takes the South African context by the horns as it challenges the often dormant and traditionalist ways in which higher education sp...

A video of a conversation between Rajani Naidoo and Margaret Heffernan. Universities and research institutes compete the world over for students, researchers and the luminaries who will attract them. That was before the pandemic. Today, the business model and how it gets delivered is being invented on the fly, with every institution watching, copyi...

The strict relational nature of P. Bourdieu’s framework and his concept of the ‘arbitrary’ have placed limits on the extent to which his theory can offer a more in-depth account of the relationship between higher education and society. At the heart of Bourdieu’s work on higher education has been his desire to expose higher education as a powerful c...

The proliferation of global rankings has led to vigorous debates about the dominance of world-class universities and the encroaching institutional isomorphism in higher education. Specifically, the narrow metrics of rankings celebrate STEM research and institutional reputation at the expense of the humanist roots of higher education: teaching, self...

Despite the recognition that society is composed by a web of interconnected fields, much of the research has focussed on the fields’ internal dynamics treated as silos, while the effect of cross-field linkages remains under-explored both theoretically and empirically. By drawing on the sociological literature on agency, we develop an analytical mod...

In English higher education, the Teaching Excellence Framework represents a very significant recent policy lever in the continued operation of a measured market in the sector. Conceived as a policy to enhance and make further transparent the quality of teaching, it utilises a variety of key measurements to establish sets of related outcomes upon wh...

Contemporary education reform worldwide appears to be locked in a competition fetish. This article explores the varieties of competition, including traditional academic forms, contests sponsored by governments and international organisations, market competition and status wars intensified by rankings. Resisting interpretations of competition as nat...

Our paper examines the rise of a new category of professional support staff whom we refer to as ‘audit-market intermediaries’ in the context of a rapidly changing regulatory and funding environment in British higher education. We explore the roles they play in articulating environmental changes in research-intensive universities related to the audi...

The goal of our paper is to provide an account of the relationships between the inter-linkages with proximate fields and strategic action in organizational fields across periods of stability, contention and settlement. We move beyond the extant literature on external jolts by proposing that inter-field linkages are relevant to explain strategic act...

This chapter focuses on the growing differentiation of institutional types, functions and roles of the academic profession. It reports on changing external relationships between universities and other social institutions and considers the implications of these changes for the roles and careers of the academic profession. More specifically, this inc...

Higher education has been positioned as an important contributor to development in low-income countries in the context of the knowledge economy. This paper assesses the potential for building sustainable higher education systems that can contribute to development in low-income countries. The premise of this paper is that developing countries cannot...

This article examines national branding of UK higher education, a strategic intent and action to collectively brand UK higher education with the aim to attract prospective international students, using a Bourdieusian approach to understanding promises of capitals. We trace its development between 1999 and 2014 through a sociological study, one of t...

This article examines national branding of UK higher education, a strategic intent and action to collectively brand UK higher education with the aim to attract prospective international students, using a Bourdieusian approach to understanding promises of capitals. We trace its development between 1999 and 2014 through a sociological study, one of t...

This article examines national branding of UK higher education, a strategic intent and action to collectively brand UK higher education with the aim to attract prospective international students, using a Bourdieusian approach to understanding promises of capitals. We trace its development between 1999 and 2014 through a sociological study, one of t...

The restructuring of higher education (HE) according to neoliberal market principles has constructed the student consumer as a social category, thereby altering the nature, purpose and values of HE. In England, a key government attempt to champion the rights of the student consumer has taken the form of institutional charters which indicate the lev...

This paper explores the growth of corporate branding in higher education and its use by academic and professional managers as a mechanism for not only enhancing institutional reputation but also for facilitating internal culture change. It uses Bourdieu’s framework of field, capital and habitus to analyse case studies of branding in two English bu...

The positioning of students as ‘consumers’ of education is becoming a global phenomenon. This paper begins by drawing on insights from both the marketing and education literatures to assess the impact of this development on the processes and outcomes of education, on the professional practices of faculty and on widening participation. Pierre Bourdi...

This paper explores the growth of corporate branding in higher education (HE) and its use by academic and professional managers as a mechanism for not only enhancing institutional reputation but also for facilitating internal culture change. It uses Bourdieu’s framework of field, capital and habitus to analyse case studies of branding in two Englis...

This paper explores the growth of corporate branding in higher education and its use by academic and professional managers as a mechanism for not only enhancing institutional reputation but also for facilitating internal culture change. It uses Bourdieu’s framework of field, capital and habitus to analyse case studies of branding in two English bus...

Gedruckte Ausg. im Verlag Jenior, Kassel, erschienen.

Insights from the marketing and education literature are combined to analyse government rationales and mechanisms related to the positioning of contemporary students as consumers and to assess the impact on the process and outcomes of education, on the professional practices of faculty and on widening participation. Pierre Bourdieu's conceptual fra...

'The Handbook constitutes an essential reference source for everyone interested in studying the current meaning, scope and implications of globalization. Strongly recommended.' - Higher Education Review. Higher education has entered centre-stage in the context of the knowledge economy and has been deployed in the search for economic competitiveness...

The chapter reviews our current state of knowledge of higher education’s contribution to social equity and the achievement of a just and fair society. It examines the balance between higher education’s contribution to extending opportunities and enhancing mobility on the one hand and to protecting privilege and reproducing inequalities on the other...

The article examines the theoretical and empirical literature on higher education’s role in relation to social equity and related notions of citizenship, social justice, social cohesion and meritocracy. It considers both the education and the research functions of higher education and how these impact upon different sections of society, on who bene...

Public rationales for a wide variety of government interventions in higher education have been linked to the integration of national economies and other political and cultural changes associated with globalisation and the emergence of the knowledge-driven economy. This new economy signals a trend away from material production and manual work in dev...

Transnational Higher Education: A New Strategic Issue? T hroughout the 1990s, transnational higher education, i.e. everything involving international student and teacher mobility, curricular exchanges and inter-institutional educational cooperation, has grown considerably and constitutes one of the most notable forces transforming higher education...

The study examines the changing nature of doctoral study in higher education in the context of significant global changes in higher education. From its origins with Humboldt, the trajectory of doctoral study is traced through the traditional Ph.D, the extended 'American model', to the professional doctorate. A university case study charts how these...

About the Book: The unfolding of the ‘knowledge society’ is crucially important for governments, the world of learning and research, and society at large in the 21st century. This volume explores the ramifications of the knowledge society in its special relationship to higher education. At stake is a deeper understanding of how to ensure sustainabl...

In the context of globalisation and the knowledge economy, there has been a dramatic change in the attitudes of powerful international organisations and governments on the importance of higher education in developing countries, which is now perceived to be central to socio-political and economic development. At the same time, the formidable obstacl...

Ce document traite du débat sur le troisième cycle de l’enseignement supérieur en Europe. En effet, de nombreux efforts sont déployés à l’heure actuelle, dans le contexte européen du Processus de Bologne et des objectifs de Lisbonne, pour perfectionner la structure et améliorer la qualité des formations doctorales. Pourtant, les documents d’orienta...

Incl. bibl., abstract This paper addresses the debate on the third cycle of European higher education. Currently, much attention is paid to improving the structure and quality of doctorate education in the European context of the Bologna process and the Lisbon objectives. However, alternatives to the traditional doctorate are hardly addressed in th...

The paper seeks to link the structural and the institutional to learning outcomes in order to articulate a research agenda capable of evaluating the impact of consumerism on learning and teaching in higher education. Consumerist mechanisms are situated in the context of quasi‐market and new managerial regulatory frameworks and concepts developed by...

This paper takes as its focus the concept of ‘field’, which has received relatively less attention than Bourdieu's other concepts such as ‘cultural capital’ and ‘habitus’ in the sociology of education. The development of the concept is outlined to present Bourdieu's understanding of higher education as a field consisting of cognitive and structural...

Governments world-wide have linked higher education reform strategies to the concept of ‘globalization’ which has encompassed a variety of developments including the intensified integration of national economies, the acceleration of advances in information technology and the development of post-Fordist work practices (Castells, 1996; Waters, 1995)....

This paper analyses higher education reform in relation to the 'knowledge' society and recent political frameworks developed by governments in response to sociopolitical and economic change. It argues that a wide range of countries have responded to forces associated with globalisation by adopting a 'third way' political approach, which lies mid-wa...

This article identifies the three discursive forces of ‘equity and redress’, ‘development’ and ‘academic standards’ in the structuring of access and admission policies in South Africa. It is argued that these forces undergo a process of complex repositioning within the policy making arena of the National Commission on Higher Education. The discours...

One of a selection of twelve country reports written as a contribution to the international Changing Academic Profession study that features over 20 countries. Each chapter addresses the issues of relevance, internationalisation and management and their implications for the academic profession in a particular country. These are: Australia, Brazil,...