• Media type: E-Article
  • Title: The corporate menagerie
  • Contributor: Hutnyk, John
  • Published: SAGE Publications, 2020
  • Published in: Thesis Eleven, 160 (2020) 1, Seite 121-128
  • Language: English
  • DOI: 10.1177/0725513620949009
  • ISSN: 0725-5136; 1461-7455
  • Origination:
  • Footnote:
  • Description: This paper offers a typology of university management roles in the age of permanent austerity. The repackaging of every function within the university administration as a cost centre – meaning of course a potential profit centre – has long been seen as an unsustainable market model. Yet perversely it persists, and we would do well to name the hyperbolic functionaries of this administered institutional reconstruction, in a place where a humourless credentialism prevails. The paper revives the work, and temperament, of the early 20th-century sociologist Thorstein Bunde Veblen as a heuristic aid. With Veblen, the protocols of commercial imperative in the state education sector masquerade as education as a social good while the ‘university’ itself is skewered with the tragic realism of forms.