Subversion to the Economic: The Reconceptualization of Higher Education

Within the United Kingdom there has been a general policy arc from underlying principles of universal provision, state responsibility and wider universal social benefit towards privatisation, emphasis on the expansion and freeing of markets, and the placing of the individual as the core political subject with a concomitant development in parallel with attitudes and policy presentations of citizenship. This policy arc has been significant in reflecting the fundamental ideological shift within the political institutions of the United Kingdom, this political development has seen evolution of political discourse and policy to reflect it. In order to fully understand this phenomenon and political paradigm shift, higher education represents a smaller scale case example to analyse this phenomenon, the shift in policy reflected through discursive changes and evolutions that underpin it, allowing to draw insight from the examples in higher education for further understanding of the wider political paradigm shift and arc in political policy and discourse towards market oriented principles.