Contingent Logics of Capitalism in Contemporary Academia: A Case for a Post-Foundational Political Economy of Higher Education

While theoretically grounded in a specific interpretation of Laclauian post-foundational discourse theory, this dissertation is intended as an immanent critique of this theory. More specifically, I tackle in it a silence which has pertained to political economy in Laclauian post-foundational discourse theory and argue that there is nothing in the theory itself meriting this silence. To this end, I develop what I term post-foundational political economy, and apply it for the study of political economy of higher education in three specific contexts: Finnish public higher education; the Plan S on academic Open Access publishing; and private higher education in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. By studying the contingent economic foundations of higher education through these distinct cases, I make two additional contributions to the field of world politics. Firstly, by articulating and putting to use my interpretation of Laclauian post-foundational political economy, I show how it provides a novel theoretical perspective for research in world politics, international/global political economy included. Secondly, with this dissertation as such I contribute to the nascent literature in world politics which deals with (the political economy of) higher education.

The Introductory chapter dives into Laclauian post-foundational discourse theory, its ontology, and analytical concepts, and how these have informed my understanding of the political economy of higher education. It also situates Articles 1–4 with respect to this theory and each other. Here, I also briefly discuss the so-called methodological deficit of post-foundational discourse theory, reflect on my positionality as a researcher in the context of this dissertation, and situate post-foundational political economy with respect to two alternative approaches to critical political economy, that is, neo- Gramscian international political economy and cultural political economy. Finally, some concluding remarks on the dissertation are provided in the final section of the chapter.

Article 1, co-authored with Teivo Teivainen, is a study of the ways in which specific argumentative strategies and assumptions regarding the economy have manifested themselves in debates concerning the status of the University of Helsinki as either a public or a private entity. It explores how privatizing reforms at the University of Helsinki have been premised on specific argumentative strategies, and specific articulations of “the economy” and “economic.” We show how the political nature of concepts like “private” and “privatization” lends them to different strategic uses, some of which are premised not only on how, but also when their meaning gets fixed. We also discuss transformations in the allocation of public funding for Finnish universities, and their possible implications for (internal) democratic decision-making concerning Finnish universities.

Article 2, the first single-authored article, examines how political economy has featured in Laclauian post-foundational discourse theory and analysis, and how it can be theorized and studied from the perspective provided by this theory. I show how there is no justification, on its own terms, why Laclauian post-foundational discourse theory has discarded economic phenomena as an object of study. I conclude that economic phenomena can, and should, be analysed like any other social phenomena by this approach and argue that the concepts of economism and property rights name promising starting points for developing post-foundational political economy as a novel theoretical approach for analysing contemporary capitalist worlds in a critical fashion.

Article 3, the second single-authored article, examines the economic foundations of academic publishing in the context of Plan S, an initiative to hegemonize regionally and even globally a specific form of Open Access as the default option for academic publishing. Here, I study competing articulations of Open Access by focusing on their implicit and explicit assumptions concerning different forms of property rights. I show how the dominant positions on Open Access serve to reproduce the existing unequal global structures of scientific knowledge production and conclude by noting that the Plan S is not as radical as it has been made out to be. On the contrary, the specific antagonism analysed in the article has arguably functioned to exclude other more radical forms of Open Access from the debate.

Finally, Article 4, the third single-authored article, studies the political economy of higher education in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, focusing specifically on its capitalist private for-profit element, its connections to regional capital, and the implications these have for (internal) democratic decision- making in and on Jordanian private universities. Pace the theory of academic capitalism, I argue that Jordanian private universities should be analysed as capitalist corporate entities, and in doing so, raise the question of whether we even need a specific theory of academic capitalism to analyse capitalism in academia.

Overall, this dissertation is put forth as a call for a more nuanced and contextual understanding of higher education’s economic foundations, and more specifically, the contingent nature of these foundations, their implications for higher education, and higher education itself.