Have academics always been entrepreneurial?

Christine Musselin (1)

1 CSO - Centre de sociologie des organisations (Sciences Po, CNRS)

It would take almost all the space dedicated to this commentary to quote all the literature arguing that contemporary universities and academics are confronted to the marketization, commodification, or merchandizing of higher education and research and to the rise of the academic capitalism (among many others, see Slaughter and Leslie 1997 ; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004 ; Bok 2009 ; Berman 2011 ; Münch 2014). Most of this literature if not all of it, explicitly or implicitly considers this is a new – and critical – phenomenon. The special issues published in 2017 by Management and Organizational History on the one hand and History and Technology on the other, convincingly demonstrate that academic entrepreneurship was already part of the development of modern universities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This confirms that the ivory tower of science was much more a normative myth entertained by the Mertonian school than an empirical reality. (first paragraph)

Keywords: marchandisation; enseignement supérieur; recherche; université

Domains: Sociology

Christine Musselin. Have academics always been entrepreneurial?. Management and Organizational History, 2018, 13 (2), pp.94 - 97. ⟨10.1080/17449359.2018.1530844⟩. ⟨hal-01915041⟩