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Book Review: Academic Capitalism and the New Economy Sheila Slaughter & Gary Rhoades. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Market, State, and Higher Education. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press. 2004. 366 pp. $39.95 (hardcover).
As an integral part of teacher education programs, social foundations of education tends to focus on developing interpretative, critical, and normative perspectives regarding the relationship between K-12 schools and society. Yet, emphasizing the contextual understanding of educational ideas, practices, and policies, foundational scholars must attend to how the new economy is shaping the existing teacher education programs situated in higher education institutions. Under these circumstance, I find that Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Market, State, and Higher Education by Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades represents a timely scholarly work that unveils the complex development of academic capitalism and calls for a critical re-examination of the mission of higher education institutions. In what follows, I first summarize the theoretical framework, findings, analyses, and conclusion of Slaughter and Rhoades' study. Next, I explore the possibilities for transforming academic capitalism within and beyond higher education institutions.
Building from Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University published in 1997, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy offer critical examinations of the formation and operation of academic capitalism in the U. S. Grounded in Foucault's work on "disciplinary regimes" (1980), Mann's theory of social power (1986), and Castells' conception of the network society (1996), Slaughter and Rhoades' analyses of academic capitalism center on the reciprocal interactions between higher education institutions and the post-industrial economy. More specifically, their analyses are based on the recognition that faculty, students, administrators, and academic professionals are "actors" who use "a variety of state resources to create new circuits of knowledge that link higher education institutions to the new economy" (p. 1). From this standpoint, these actors play an active role in (1) instituting the corporate model into higher education institutions, (2) developing networks intermediating private and public sectors, and (3) expanding managerial capacity to utilize resources and restructure academic institutions. These actors are by no means autonomous and independent agents operating in accordance with divergent value systems. Rather, they commonly privilege the free market and endorse a laissez-fair state. Crossing the boundaries of public and private sectors,...