Entrepreneurship within higher education is most often examined as set of market and market-like behaviors within colleges and universities. The field of entrepreneurship studies has been largely neglected by higher education scholars. This qualitative study focuses on entrepreneurship as an academic discipline emerging within the academic capitalist/learning regime. Specific attention is paid to expanding student markets, capitalist behaviors among entrepreneurship students, and the emerging multidisciplinary faculty culture associated with the expanding academic discipline of entrepreneurial studies.I used semi-structured individual interviews, document analysis, and self-administered student questionnaires as the methods for collecting data essential to better understanding the evolution of entrepreneurship education within the context of academic capitalism. The research was conducted at two public research universities: the University of Iowa and the University of Texas at El Paso. From this study, I show the increasing trend of undergraduate students acting as state-subsidized capitalists, the fluid and recursive nature of the capitalist academy, and the multidimensional traits of the faculty cultures that are emerging within the academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime.

This multi-layered case study examines the evolution and operations of one long-lived organized research unit (ORU), the Office of Arid Lands Studies (OALS), at the University of Arizona (UA). The first part includes a history of arid lands research at the UA and the beginning of OALS, a review of the Office's extramural and internal funding since 1964, and a comparison of that data and other performance indicators with other ORUs and, to some extent, with departments. The results are examined in relation to U.S. science policy and the theory of academic capitalism. The second part explores the causes of OALS' 1981 administrative move from the Vice President for Research Office to the College of Agriculture in the context of the University's multiple cultures and institutional and resource dependence theories of organizational change. The final part considers the influence of student workers on faculty supervisors who work as technicians in an OALS lab, and the role of funding agencies in the lab's operations. Theories of power and technology in the workplace provide a frame for the discussion. Findings suggest the placement of this ORU in a college has been beneficial in clarifying research turf, minimizing conflicts, supporting instruction, and in terms of funding. OALS' extramural support has averaged more than four dollars to every one dollar received internally, and OALS faculty compare favorably with other faculty in numbers of publications, and to a certain extent with teaching and advising. While the OALS remote sensing lab does utilize students as sources of cheap labor, the students do have considerable influence over how the lab operates. The only areas of conflict occurred over linking thesis topics to research projects and in meeting funding agency deadlines.

One of the most debated topics within public universities in Brazil is the development of alternative resources generated from entrepreneurial activities in order to supplement the lack of government funding for higher education. This study analyzes this issue, addresses questions about the creation of private institutions that provide fiscal support to federal universities, and discusses the relationship between federal universities and these private organizations. In particular, the research for this project is based on a case study of the Federal University of Ceara (UFC) and the eight private foundations that function within its structure and are sources of additional revenue for the institution. This study draws on resource dependency theory, academic capitalism theory, and globalization theory as its theoretical framework. Resource dependency theory is used to clarify why federal universities in Brazil have turned to private institutions within their structures in order to generate external revenue. Academic capitalism theory provides an understanding as to why universities are shifting their focus and functions towards a new market orientation. Globalization theory is used to explain how emerging international markets and concepts are affecting the new environment in public institutions in Brazil. The present research is based on UFC's experience with the eight private organizations which exist to provide support to their respective departments and to the university as a whole. The data collected is based on institutional documents such as statutes, contracts, and financial statements. Interviews were the other source of data gathering. The results indicate that private institutions (foundations and faculty associations) contribute significantly to the activities of their federal universities by generating additional, external revenue. At the same time, this national phenomenon is the subject of a heated debate centering on the question of whether public higher education in Brazil is essentially becoming privatized. The research also confirms that foundations are contributing to a shift in public higher education toward the new market orientation.

Enrollment management practices, principles, and administrative structure are changing the behavior of the contemporary university. Through an examination of public Carnegie Research Intensive and Extensive universities in states anticipating growth in the high school graduate population, the study seeks to provide a greater understanding of enrollment management. The theoretical lenses of institutional theory (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983), resource dependence (Tolbert, 1985), and academic capitalism (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), are employed to develop a new view of administrative behavior in current enrollment management organizations. In depth interviews with the individuals leading enrollment efforts at selected universities identify the enrollment manager as an administrator, educator, and entrepreneur. These individuals operate in complex political environments balancing their personal educational philosophies with the needs of their universities. Comprehensive reviews of the strategic enrollment plans at study universities reveal three main goals across all institutions: maintaining financial stability, increasing student and institutional quality, and increasing student diversity. Administrative behavior shows that all three goals are not treated equally and that revenue enhancement activities are prioritized. The administrative behaviors detailed in this study suggest a new ideology related to revenue enhancement for public higher education in the United States.

Creating spinout companies (USOs) from university research is one focus of innovation policy. The phenomenon features in two main fields of enquiry: academic entrepreneurship studies, and literature on academic capitalism and the entrepreneurial university. Studies have explored the academic entrepreneur, the development stages of these nascent ventures, and the tools universities can provide to encourage and assist in the spinout process. This literature is however limited in that it is overwhelmingly concerned with resources, and little is known about how the USO relates to the parent research institution over time. The purpose of this study is therefore to explore social forces in research linked to a USO, and the main research question is: how can a social lens help us to understand some of the forces at play in research commercialisation, specifically through the early development of a USO from a parent research organisation? The case study is based on interviews and observations of university researchers, USO actors, and representatives from state agencies and a multinational corporation involved in a technology demonstration project. The sociologist Robert Park’s concepts of social groups, the individual within the collective, and social forces are used to explore the experiences of actors involved in academic research and industrial development throughout the changing relationship of a research group and USO. Five social forces were identified around the border between academia and industry, based on some of the concepts that seem to inform the actors’ understandings of the case at hand. An exploration of these forces helps to develop an understanding of how actors experience and negotiate various forces, and positions the results of the study in relation to the dominant models in academic entrepreneurship and academic life. Park’s concepts of specialised roles moves the discussion forward by considering how social forces might be handled within research and research commercialisation, and how such forces might in turn motivate the movement of individuals within and out of a particular social group. This discussion leads into the metaphor of the theatre, connected to project management literature, and research commercialisation as a performance by actors to safeguard the collective’s interests.

This interpretive critical inquiry was aimed at coming to understand the experiences of faculty at research universities who teach using educational technology in the present academic capitalism era, and how these experiences affect their job satisfaction. The study was carried out in the South Central region of the US at two research universities—University A and University B—of one university system. Purposive sampling was used to select 10 tenured faculty members as study participants. The data collection included ethnographic interviews, participant observations, and document analyses and occurred over an 8-month period between April and December 2007. The interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) approach to content analysis. Based on the themes and subthemes that emerged, the experiences of teaching using educational technology seemed to yield positive end results that served as rationales. However, the participants did experience obstacles such as time constraints, steep learning curves, technical problems, and various pedagogical challenges. Those who seemed least burdened appeared to be those with the most departmental support. The participants’ experiences portrayed the professorship in the research university as an independent and autonomous position with a heavy work load and constant juggling of different tasks. The path to successful promotion and tenure appeared to be clearly marked by guidelines that require research productivity through external funds, an instance of academic capitalism. Teaching appeared to be secondary or tertiary in importance. Conflicts seemed to exist between the faculty and administrators in the utilities of teaching using educational technologies in terms of mismatched rationales or motivations, and therefore, mismatched outcome expectations. The majority of the participants appeared to be very satisfied with their jobs. Even so, all ten stated they had turnover intentions to leave University A or B at one point or another in the past, although perhaps not the professoriate. Many said teaching using educational technology was personally satisfying. The conclusion includes implications to students, faculty, research universities, and HRD; recommendations for future research; and three working hypotheses.

The concept of industry transferring work to academia is developed and studied using multiple cases at three different university research sites. Industry sometimes partners with academia specifically to have academia perform work with certain equipments or obtain knowledge for the purpose of process, product or knowledge development. The term "non-traditional" technology transfer is introduced to describe this activity. Case studies using research faculty and their students as well as industry partners were conducted at two Engineering Research Centers and an engineering department of a relatively smaller institution that has developed an engineering clinic approach to research. The literature drawn upon includes: historical perspectives of the academia-industry technology transfer arena (including the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980), trends, the relationship between academic capitalism and technology transfer and the role played by technology transfer in environmental research. Findings of this study indicate that industry has, in some cases, chosen to have their collaborative research team partners accomplish work for them. Access to resultant data is difficult to obtain and has implications for the concept of academic freedom. Advantages of the technology transfer process include the generation of value for each of the project partners, education of graduate and undergraduate students and benefits to the public good in terms of the environment; disadvantages are identified but considered uncertain. Technology transfer, including the non-traditional type defined herein, can be used as a tool to overcome the reality of today's austere university budget environment; the Bayh-Dole Act has served as an enabler of that approach.

Globalization and the new knowledge economy have far-reaching implications for higher education mainly in the economic, political, social and technological aspects of knowledge production. Higher education institutions are the main providers of both knowledge and knowledge workers. While research and teaching are the main processes for producing knowledge at colleges and universities (Clark, 1983), information technology has been an enabling infrastructure for globalization and the main vehicle for the dissemination of knowledge as well as for facilitating knowledge in becoming a commodity (Altbach, 2006; Altbach & Teichler, 2001; McBurnie, 2001). This has led to the penetration of higher education institutions by market forces and the business sector. The commercial value of these knowledge assets in the new knowledge economy has brought economic, political, and social implications for higher education institutions. Now, they seek to strategically manage their organizational knowledge (Metcalfe, 2006; Trow, 2001). Information technology has become embedded in higher education's knowledge production and has led to reorganization of conventional academic structures, faculty work, and teaching practices.This research addresses diverse fields of study such as organizational change, sociology of organizations, and political economy of organizations, and focuses on a single developing country. The structurational model of technology, the power-process perspective of technology, the theory of academic capitalism, and the framework for strategic management of intellectual capital were joined in this study to examine: (a) the intellectual capital created through instructional production and delivery of information technology enhanced courses and its strategic management; and (b) the impact of information technology on the organization of higher education and faculty's academic work with regard to instructional production and delivery.Findings show that information technology is not regarded as an opportunity to develop intellectual capital; thus, dependency on foreign technology is favored. An academic capitalist knowledge/learning regime is still incipient in developing countries; therefore, intellectual property policies and commercialization of intellectual assets are new to higher education institutions. The vast majority of these institutions are teaching-oriented; hence, the incorporation of information technology has re-structured their organization and in turn had an impact on managerial capacity, academic work and the academic profession.

This dissertation is a qualitative investigation into international postdoctoral employment in life science and engineering fields at universities in the United States and United Kingdom. Data were gathered through 49 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with international postdocs, faculty members who have supervised international postdocs from abroad at two universities in the US and two universities in the UK. The number of postdoctoral appointments has increased dramatically over the past decade, as has the share of these appointees who come from aboard. Yet few studies have investigated what is underlying this growing trend. By examining interactions between structure and agency at local, global and national levels, this study explored the roles that international postdocs play in academic production and the process by which they become mobile. Theory on globalization, higher education policy and models of academic production guide this study. Findings show that international postdocs are becoming scientific employees, rather than trainees, who are incorporated into capitalist modes of academic production as low-cost, high-yield scientific workers. Universities and individual faculty members seek international postdocs because of their contributions to research production; however, few postdocs have the opportunity to move into tenure-tracked faculty jobs. For international postdocs, becoming mobile is an individual process that is often constructed by individuals who negotiate home country academic policies in a global academic market. Mobility is a multi-stage process that begins with the potential to become mobile and is realized by actual mobility, which occurs through a transnational space produced by international journals that define global science.

This study was undertaken to begin to understand better the emergence of academic capitalism in public higher education in less developed countries. How and why income-generating practices have appeared in public universities in less developed countries has not been well examined (Maldonado-Maldonado 2014, 201). I chose the Iraqi Kurdistan region as the locus for this study in part for convenience, but also because it is unique in having emerged after the Second Gulf War from an oppressive National Socialist ruling government overtly hostile to market-based economic activities (Republic of Iraq 1970, Article 28). I found several instances of academic capitalist/income generating activities at Kurdish public universities. Consulting and language centers were in place well before the study began. Evening programs and parallel education emerged over the course of the inquiry as the economy in the region declined. I also elaborate on the specific relationship between the Kurdish Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research and the region's universities in developing and fostering different types of academic capitalism. Such cooperation is previously undescribed in the literature. I used an academic capitalism theoretical framework to guide my inquiry. This model provides four observable characteristics of neoliberal educational reform on higher education: new circuits of knowledge, interstitial organizational emergence, intermediating organizations, and expanded managerial capacity (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004, 26). I collected data through semi-structured interviews and document analysis. Following on similar approaches by Hackett (1990, 249) and Kleinman and Vallas (2007, 290), this study incorporated selective sampling of institutions which were likely to be engaged in academic capitalism, and included Ministry of Higher Education officials, as well as public university administrators and faculty members who were likely to have knowledge of these academic capitalism activities. / Ph. D.