Introduction

Across the globe, neoliberal agendas continue to alter, inter alia, the structures, landscapes and practices within higher education institutions. Bob Jessop’s (2017) work on predatory capitalism, for instance, centres the tendency towards degree mills, profit-based journal publications (downloads, copyright licences and subscriptions), metrification of academic work and the commercialisation of ideas, as key manifestations or formations of this phenomenon. Yet the augmentation of private financiers or influencers in higher education, and the move towards academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997), also signal a form of self-corporatisation and cultural transformation that aligns knowledge production and workers with those of market rationality and systems. Barry Bozeman and Craig Boardman (2013) tell us therefore that while we are neither capitalism’s slaves nor teaching fugitives, the expanding nature of university–industry relations call into question not just the complexity of these relationships, but more so, the boundary spanning university initiatives that continue to alter the thinking and actions of academics within these sites of knowledge production.

Understanding the significance of this nexus between knowledge work, workers and institutions requires that we critically interrogate the structural aspects that underpin unfolding relations. This type of analysis renders important historical and contemporary notions of the academically constituted subjects and the key factors that influence their negotiation and/or resistance to these narratives. In this chapter, I argue therefore that within the context of higher education, these market-led agendas also influence reconstituted forms of structuralism, with direct implications for deepened forms/systems of coloniality and for transformative praxis. This element of structuralism presents an important way of assessing the intricacies of socio-economic and political contexts for the positionality, ambiguity and criticality of knowledge workers. Catherine Chaput (2010: 6) captures this well in the statement that ‘theorizing neoliberalism demands a structural reorganization in the way we think about political-economic and cultural practices within capitalism … and a new understanding of rhetoric as continuously moving through and connecting different instantiations within the complex structure’. What emerges in this context of academic capitalism is that of the structural realignment of lived realities and inter-subjective dispositions that are socially constituted and/or embodied through the everyday thinking and actions of academic/knowledge workers.