Higher education after neoliberalism: Towards a new epistemic order

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the contemporary neoliberal discourses in relation to higher education and also asks whether and in what ways the prevailing episteme of higher education can or should re-define and rethink its interpretive concepts and the relationships between them. It suggests that such an enterprise is ‘of its time’: the world as mirrored in the existing disciplines has changed, and poses problems that may need the capacities of new theories and methodologies. It is argued that there a shift in the cultural form of European higher education systems, a shift into a market metaphor. In this, it suggests that the new politics of higher education require a re-imagining of the focus and study of higher education; a change of paradigm is required.