Crises and the Production of Multiple Privatisations in UK Higher Education

This chapter examines multiple forms of privatizing in UK higher education (HE) transforming it into a market. We focus on four UK reports which emerged as policy responses to political and economic challenges. These reports set in motion the structural selectivities that are strategically selective of complex modalities that are privatizing HE. Using Network Text Analysis as method, we show processes of: (1) inserting market logics via New Public Management (NPM) to discipline workers and generate efficiencies; (2) commodifying knowledge to power a new regime of accumulation; (3) instituting a HE market through extending the social imaginary of the university and what it means to be a student and provider; and (4) intensifying novel modes of privatizing via the rise of digital platforms and new financial products. These modalities of privatizing are extending and deepening the social imaginary of HE as a market and services sector.