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Wed 27 February
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Fri 29 February
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Tuesday 26 February 2008 16.30
B-2 ELI02 The academe as an elite arena II: Postwar period
Cave B
Networks: Elites and forerunners , Politics, Citizenship, and Nations Chair: Xu Li
Organizer: Marja Jalava Discussant: Xu Li
Robert Anderson : University Expansion, Elites and Democratization in Britain since 1945
Since 1945, higher education in the United Kingdom has moved from elite to mass provision as in other countries. Expansion in the early years, justified and extended by the Robbins Report of 1963, was in the context of the post-war welfare state. Equality of opportunity was expressed through the creation ... (Show more)
Since 1945, higher education in the United Kingdom has moved from elite to mass provision as in other countries. Expansion in the early years, justified and extended by the Robbins Report of 1963, was in the context of the post-war welfare state. Equality of opportunity was expressed through the creation of impartial, nationally uniform methods of selection. This paper will examine the social consequences of changes in the system. Democratization, in the sense of a shift in the balance of social classes among university entrants, was limited. But expansion led to significant changes in the relationship between education and middle-class careers. The length of full-time education increased, the need for formal qualifications spread to a wider range of occupations and replaced recruitment through local and family links, and new opportunities were created for women. The old elite institutions, notably Oxford and Cambridge universities, retained their central position in the system while the university participation rate rose from 4 to 40 percent. These developments cannot be fully understood outside the specific British context: the hierarchy of prestige in the university (and secondary school) system, a distinctive British elite culture, and the changes in political ideology under the Thatcher-Major (1979-1997) and Blair (1997-2007) governments. The relevant conceptual frameworks are still those of A. H. Halsey and Martin Trow, emphasizing social structure and mobility, and Pierre Bourdieu's theories of reproduction and social capital. But contemporary analysis must also take into account globalization and its impact on nationally-bounded welfare states, and the neo-liberal marketization of public services.

Robert Anderson is professor of modern history at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Universities and Elites in Britain since 1800 (1992) and British Universities Past and Present (2006). (Show less)

Kim Helsvig : Norwegian academia: From social democratic egalitarianism to competitive elitism?
The egalitarian Norwegian political culture’s disdain for any elite also applies for the attitude towards the academic elite during the classical social democratic period. The academic elite has, for its part, traditionally advocated a “politics of pure science” antithetical to any kind of market orientation or state intervention. Nevertheless, in ... (Show more)
The egalitarian Norwegian political culture’s disdain for any elite also applies for the attitude towards the academic elite during the classical social democratic period. The academic elite has, for its part, traditionally advocated a “politics of pure science” antithetical to any kind of market orientation or state intervention. Nevertheless, in the context of the so-called Bologna Process’s reforms, aimed at developing a common European market for both research and higher education, there are strong indications that more explicitly elitist perspectives are gaining new legitimacy among policy makers and academics alike. This seemingly paradox is illuminated by the fact that an orientation towards a competitive European research market could cater to the interest of the academic elite, as it might facilitate a greater degree of differentiation and hierarchy in the Norwegian research system. Such a trajectory could also prove to be highly compatible with fundamental national policy concerns in the emerging “Europe of knowledge” and as a politically marketable expression of the neo-liberal knowledge society's meritocratic elitism. (Show less)

Marja Jalava : Cultural Revolution or Bureaucratic Jargon? - The Finnish Reform of Degrees in the 1970s
My paper focuses on the Reform of degrees in Finland in the 1970s. This reform was originally started in the late 1950s as a mere rationalization process, aiming at increasing the efficiency of university studies. However, in the hands of certain leftist students and younger academic staff of the late ... (Show more)
My paper focuses on the Reform of degrees in Finland in the 1970s. This reform was originally started in the late 1950s as a mere rationalization process, aiming at increasing the efficiency of university studies. However, in the hands of certain leftist students and younger academic staff of the late 1960s, this reformation turned into a profound socio-political reformation programme, a “cultural revolution,” as its advocates put it. Inspired by higher education reforms of Great Britain and Sweden as well as of East Germany and China, the Committee for the Reform of Degrees (in Finnish, FYTT) made the ideal of “open university” (in the most widest sense of the concept) its goal, aiming at the radical democratisation of the Finnish higher education system and, by means of it, at the displacement of the ruling bourgeois and economic elites.

However, as the political climate rapidly changed by the energy crisis of 1973 and the long economic stagnation, democratic aspirations were forced to make way for straightforward claims for vocationalisation of all higher education. This led to harsh power struggles between various academic sub-groups and leading governmental officials and politicians, and, as the consequence, to endless bureaucratic planning. In the end, the reform of degrees managed to achieve little more than enormous increase in administrative duties of academic staff on all levels. In the late 1970s, the University was thus quite vulnerable to neo-liberalist criticism of public sector expansion and bureaucratic inefficiency.

As a whole, my paper is related to my on-going post-doctoral research project “From Claims for Autonomy to Management by Results. Academic Staff, Its Conditions and Subjectivity in Finland c. 1975–1995.” The study explores the strengthened market-orientation of academic institutions as well as the reflections of academic staff, and aims at drawing comparisons between the changes that happened in Finland and in other Western countries during the 1975–1995 period. (Show less)

Maria Teresa Tomas Rangil : How Did the Homo Oeconomicus Became an Homo bellicus? Economics and International Relations Theory in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the years preceding and following the end of the Cold War, there was an explosion of economic literature devoted to the study of international wars. (Hirshleifer 1987, 1994; Grossman 1991) Neoclassical models of conflict based on methodological individualism and rational choice began to proliferate. In these models, nations were ... (Show more)
In the years preceding and following the end of the Cold War, there was an explosion of economic literature devoted to the study of international wars. (Hirshleifer 1987, 1994; Grossman 1991) Neoclassical models of conflict based on methodological individualism and rational choice began to proliferate. In these models, nations were assumed to be rational agents maximizing political or economic power. Following the precepts of “economic imperialism”, some economists thought that economic analytical tools could be used to study international politics per se – and not only to pinpoint the economic factors affecting or resulting from political decisions. (Hirshleifer 1985)


Our aim is to elucidate the historical conditions explaining the birth and immediate success of this literature. (1) We also study how historical changes associated with the end of the Cold War shaped economic models of conflict. (2)


(1) We suggest that the development of public choice theory in the 1960s and, more generally, the extension of the neoclassical theoretical framework to the analysis of non-economic issues in the 1960s and 1970s provided a fertile soil (and an audience) for rational choice theories of international conflicts in American universities. (Becker 1976, Buchanan & Tullock 1962) We show how these ideas progressively filtered into American policy debates and into international organizations’ research initiatives (especially through World Bank researchers).


(2)We show how the historical changes of the period –end of bipolarity, dislocation of the balance of power, new international conflicts and civil wars – influenced the way in which economists modeled wars. Economists imported concepts of international relations theory to enrich their analysis.



Selected References

Becker, Gary S.1976. The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. The University of Chicago Press.
Buchanan, James M. and Gordon Tullock.1962. The Calculus of Consent. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Grossman, H I. 1991. “A general equilibrium model of insurrections,” American Economic Review, 81, 912–921.
Hirshleifer, Jack. 1985. “The Expanding Domain of Economics,” The American Economic Review, 75.6: 53-68.
Hirshleifer, Jack. 1987. “Conflict and settlement,” In J. Eatwell, M. Milgate, & P. Newman (Eds.), New Palgrave dictionary of economics. London: Macmillan Press.
Hirshleifer, Jack. 1994. “The dark side of the force,” Economic Inquiry, 32, 1–10. (Show less)



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