Here’s the English-language abstract of her paper:

Since the 1990s universities have seen a proliferation of methods for quality assessment and management. Borrowed from the New Public Management business model, they impose a definition of quality on universities which is radically opposed to their traditionally held values of quality of knowledge and professional autonomy. This unprecedented movement can now be seen as participating in the capitalist absorption of a non-commercial public sector. We endeavour here to analyse its origins and the uses of quality measurements and management techniques in the process. We assess where this transition could lead according to the recent British government White Paper (May 2016) which intends to establish a market open to all providers, for-profit and non-profit, granted equal access to the public funding of students’ loans. This market would be regulated by a single non-departmental quality agency, concerned only with students’ value for money.

What I like about her paper is that it considers a set of policies and trends that are familiar to anthropologists working on “neoliberal” European higher education, but from a quite different angle and a higher level of abstraction. As a point of terminology, Vinokur generally uses the European category “New Public Management” (NPM) instead of the more ambiguous term “neoliberalism.” I agree with her that NPM is a much more precise category and that “neoliberalism” can become a fraught term, but I will freely use both terms here because both have been widely used in the literature on this topic.

Much of the work on neoliberal policy in Europe has been broadly influenced by Foucault, and as such, has treated discourse — neoliberal policy discourse in particular — as the chief cause of a number of other social effects. As this literature has shown (I can provide citations if anyone wants them), these effects would include:

• Reshaping everyday academic work practices (often making them more grant- and ranking-focused).
• Creating more entrepreneurial and calculating (but also more stressed, anxious and precarious) subjective stances among academics.
• Declining support for permanent, tenured academic work, which gets replaced by precarious, temporary, grant-funded and contract-based forms of labor.
• Withdrawing public funding and increasing tuition burdens on individual students.
• Making public universities more subject to contract and incentive-based forms of management (instead of direct management by the state apparatus).
• Shifting the image of higher education as a public good into a private good. (For students, education becomes an individual investment in their own human capital and workplace skills. For European public universities as institutions, they may find themselves transformed into something like publicly owned corporations, owning their own real estate, running their own budgets, managing investments, etc. In France, this system has already led to a number of budget crises…)

I don’t mean this list to be comprehensive, but just to give a quick overview of phenomena usually associated with European university neoliberalism. What Vinokur brings to those of us steeped in this literature is, in essence, a high-level view of a non-Foucauldian analysis of this situation. For Vinokur, policy discourse is an intermediate effect, not a first cause. What is primary, meanwhile, is a large-scale structural analysis of conflicts between labor, capital and the state as they confront a given historical moment. This enables Vinokur to usefully retheorize a series of seemingly disconnected policy moments — those relating to Quality Assurance in this case — as fitting together into a coherent process.

Let me make a quick aside about theoretical causality in this literature. I am not saying that anyone participating in this research is committed to a clear metaphysical view about first causes and secondary effects. This is social research, not philosophy. You very rarely get a clear a priori claim that X is the cause of Y, whether X is “capital flows,” “discourse,” or anything else. (With apologies to philosophers, this is probably a good thing, since static metaphysical claims about social reality have a way of causing more controversy than they avoid.) What you find instead, as a reader of this literature, is that in the process of doing social analysis, scholars always end up having to treat some phenomena as primary and others as secondary, classifying some things as causes of other things. So my observations about neoliberal discourse being a primary cause for some people and an intermediate effect for others are only meant to describe the way they attribute causality in particular cases, not to attribute a metaphysics (whether Marxian, Foucauldian, or whatever other kind).

It is a purely academic exercise to compare theoretical approaches in the abstract. The real question is: what new knowledge can you produce, given your presuppositions? At its most basic, Vinokur’s argument is that the proliferation of Quality Assurance methods is “participating in the capitalist absorption of a non-commercial public sector.” I’m not a Marxian economist, but my impression is that Vinokur draws here on a longstanding view in critical (~Marxian) political economy. The underlying thought there is that as capitalist firms search continually to maximize profit, they see opportunities in every non-capitalist sector of the economy, such as the post-1945 welfare state university system. Needless to say, in the post-1945 period, higher education has been increasingly integrated into systems of social and professional reproduction that themselves are necessary prerequisites of corporate enterprise, but there is a clear difference between higher education as a reproductive prerequisite of corporate enterprise and higher education as a corporate profit center.

In any case, given its point of departure, I found Vinokur’s paper quite “good to think with,” as it went on to deploy a sort of high-level taxonomical thinking about this ongoing re-integration of public higher education into corporate capitalism. For instance, she organizes different moments in New Public Management policy into three logical “stages” in the capitalist appropriation process:

1. After “the liberation of international flows of capital and the deregulation of finance in the 1970s-80s”, university management is redone to conform to the NPM style of governance by incentive and contract. (The state correspondingly gets out of the business of directly providing public services.)
2. Universities are pressured to conform more directly to the “new needs of the economy” as a post-industrial “knowledge economy” becomes trendy, and university organizations become subject to quality assurance regimes that put universities in competition with each other on international markets. (Though as Vinokur suggests elsewhere, arguably the real function of universities is to systematically produce a surplus of graduates who end up unemployed and keep down wages among the skilled workforce…)
3. After the 2008 financial crisis, “the overabundance of global liquidity is in search of rents” (as she puts it) and seizes on education as a major market opportunity.

In the French case, I note, pressures to make universities “conform to economic needs” date back at least to the late 1960s. (In October 1968, for instance, one French legislator complained publicly about the “insufficient effectiveness of the adjustment between the education system and working life,” as Romuald Bodin and Sophie Orange have recently reported.) Vinokur is providing a high-level schema, not a detailed history. But I found it clarifying to think of some of the earlier managerial and ideological reorganizations of public universities — which in themselves do not entail privatization, per se — as prequels to new forms of for-profit higher education. The more universities are standardized and rationalized, the more they are rendered into abstract competitors on a globalized educational market, the more – arguably — they are ripe for further competition from non-public entities. At least, this would be the hypothesis that one could explore in more historical detail.

Vinokur also draws out a useful set of types of academic “quality control” and helps us see their connections to fundamentally capitalist forms of international standardization. She distinguishes (I’ll translate from §3):

• Quality of the product: bibliometrics, patents, standardized tests, measurement and certification of “skills”, “tuning” the norms of the European system of credit transfer, universal grading standards, etc.
• Quality of the production process: ISO 9000+ quality assurance standards, audits, “best practices,” quality assurance frameworks, etc.
• Quality of the producer: H-index, ratings, rankings, benchmarking, grading institutions by credit rating agencies, job placement and income of graduates, amount of grants [volume des contrats], etc.

Again, what I liked about this list was that it evokes the eerily totalizing nature of what might otherwise seem a very disparate set of academic practices. Common grading standards seem very different from grants and credit ratings. Bibliometrics (assessing the quality of research products) seem very different from skill certifications (which measures the qualities of students-as-products). Yet, as Vinokur points out, these can all be seen as partaking in an educational system where products are measured for quality, production processes are measured for quality, and producers are measured for quality.

Vinokur’s paper is largely devoted to a general overview of the historical schema that she brings up. I do, though, want to highlight a couple of specific institutional moments that she mentions. It is well known that organizations like the OECD have sought to subject higher education to market standards, but I hadn’t been aware that UNESCO, a seemingly more “cultural” organization, had also been an organ of this process. Yet Vinokur cites a remarkable 1998 UNESCO conference that declares that higher education must adapt itself to “the logic of risks,” and that “the effective independence of the university depends more and more on its capacity to demonstrate its efficacy and efficiency.” She also emphasizes that the ISO (International Standards Organization), usually known (if at all) for fairly dull standards for encoding country names or dates, also has a set of process quality guidelines, the ISO 9000 series, that seem to have inspired European projects of educational standardization, such as the ones introduced by the Bologna Process. As Elizabeth Dunn has noted in another context, “Because standards such as the ISO’s 9000 series dictate not only the qualities of the finished product but also the manufacturing process itself, they offered the possibility of disciplining firms from the inside out” (2005:176). Though I am still not completely clear on the ISO’s role in European higher education, it is interesting to see how some New Public Management instruments have private sector origins, rather than being, say, a pure invention of state authorities.

One last note on an American comparison. Inasmuch as Donald Trump represents anything in education, I would suggest that he has been the vehicle for a process of trying to extract symbolic value from elite higher education while also trying to crassly hijack higher education as a new source of potential profits (both symbolic and monetary).  This at least is what I learned earlier this year about his own educational history and his ill-fated Trump University project. As the Trump administration’s educational policies have been devoted almost solely to critiquing public schools and offering renewed “choices” of for-profit or religious education, one can only wonder whether this policy direction will also come to affect U.S. higher education (which already has a large and complex private sector, to be sure).

If so, it will be interesting to revisit Vinokur’s general thesis that NPM’s quality assurance sets the stage for a full corporate takeover of higher education. The U.S. case could not be directly comparable to the European case, since New Public Management does not really exist in the United States. (As Bonnie Urciuoli points out, neoliberal ideologies that work through state policy in Europe often work in the U.S. through market and publicity mechanisms. Davydd Greenwood also has a useful comparative paper, “Bologna in America,” that is worth re-reading here.) But since the U.S. federal government controls massive revenue flows in higher education, by administering the student aid apparatus, one has to wonder whether Vinokur’s glum scenario could get realized in the U.S. by alternative institutional means.

Briot and Soulié document an exceptionally militant political culture among the staff of an experimental university, the University of Paris 8—Vincennes-Saint-Denis, founded in 1968 after the massive protest movement of that May-June (see Un mythe à détruire, 2012). The fieldsite is close to my own interests, since my fieldwork on French higher education focused on this same university forty years later, after it had been relocated from its original site at Vincennes to a new campus in Saint-Denis. I note that Soulié has long supported my own ethnographic research on this campus, where he also teaches — the world of critical research on higher education is not so large. Briot for his part was formerly the secretary of the Paris 8 Sociology Department, which places him in the unusual category of administrative staff conducting reflexive research on their own institutions.

One might think that the very definition of this research object, “administrative and service workers,” was straightforward. In fact the title of the paper reveals important cultural differences in higher education organization. In France, non-teaching staff are typically labelled with the acronym “personnels BIATOSS,” a bit of institutional jargon that designates Librarians, Engineers, Administrators, Technicians, and Service and Health Workers. As Briot and Soulié point out, this acronym thus includes a very diverse population “belonging to different trades,” such that “ultimately there are few relations between these separate worlds,” including everything from janitors to campus-wide administrators (208). Nevertheless, the French term BIATOSS is generally used where a North American might speak of generically “staff” as opposed to “faculty,” or where a British speaker might refer to “non-teaching staff.” The long acronym, BIATOSS, incidentally, is a typical bit of French bureaucratic jargon, of the sort that makes the French university system especially hard for outsiders to comprehend. Making things even more complicated, as Briot and Soulié note, the very acronym has evolved over time. Librarians (bibliothécaires) for instance were not originally included, since at one point they were assigned to a different arm of the state apparatus that worked in concert with the public university system, rather than being part of it.

This leads us towards the real cultural and institutional difference here. While a North American might expect that “administrative and service workers” are generally legal employees of the university in question, in France most permanent university staff were in fact civil servants, and thus technically employed by the French state apparatus rather than by the university per se. And as public universities were a national public service, they were also integrated into other public services. To this day, “social services” like dining and housing are not technically part of a specific university campus, but rather are provided by different arms of public administration working on the same site [link: CROUS]. Recent university reforms have transferred payroll functions away from the state administration to the public universities themselves, and it is possible to have a work contract (especially a temporary contract) directly with a French university instead of a civil servant status. Still, I must emphasize that an American notion of “campus workers” only corresponds loosely to the French “personnels BIATOSS,” in legal terms.

What does translate more directly is the negatively defined, low status nature of non-teaching work. As Briot and Soulié remark, “one can say that these are the ‘invisibles’ of this universe, a professional group that is symbolically dominated in the main. That’s what’s emphasized by the privative term ‘non teaching staff’…” (207). At the same time, what Americans would call “opposition to authority” was taken to a level that is to my knowledge absolutely unheard of in the North American academy today. It is not that the staff was not institutionally subordinate at Vincennes, in relation to the teaching staff. But qua dominated group, this group remained exceptionally politicized for several years following the creation of the university (and as my own research in 2009-11 showed, this political culture persisted in part forty years later).

I was amazed to find that in 1979, 56.7% of the staff rejected “the very principle of internal workplace regulations” which stipulated rules about work hours, attendance, and the like (219). Instead, many of the staff defended a remarkably non-traditional aspiration to be judged strictly by “work delivered,” and therefore to be left alone to manage their own work processes. As the authors conclude:

Vincennes est donc une institution où des formes « d’auto organisation » originales se sont développées et articulées notamment autour de la notion de « travail fait », qui signifie notamment que ce qui importe n’est pas tant que les employés soient formellement présents de telle heure à telle heure, mais que le service attendu soit finalement rendu. Bien évidemment, la réalisation de cette utopie a reposé sur des conditions sociales, historiques et politiques de « possibilité » spécifiques, notamment liées à la place de l’institution considérée dans le champ académique de l’époque, comme à la taille, à la composition et aux fonctions des collectifs de travail concernés. On peut penser que le mode de gestion à la fois communautaire, horizontal et très politique de Vincennes la place sans doute aux antipodes du management « rationnel » d’aujourd’hui.

Vincennes was thus an institution where original forms of “self-organization” developed, centering especially on the notion of “work done,” which meant that what mattered was not so much that the employees were formally present at such and such hours, but that the expected service was ultimately delivered. Of course, the realization of this utopia depended on specific social, historical, and political conditions of possibility, linked to the institution’s place in the academic field of the period, and to the size, composition and functions of the work groups involved. One might conclude that Vincennes’ communitarian, horizontal and highly political mode of administration [gestion] sets it at the antipodes of today’s “rational” management.

If you read French, you can read the paper to find out more about the details of this history. But in any event, this case is comparatively important, I think, as an instance of dominated university workers becoming politicized and making their own demands about how to organize the workplace. Of course there are many labor organizing projects on contemporary campuses, but these are typically more for service workers than for administrative or “white collar” workers, and they very rarely go so far as to contest the very possibility of workplace regulations as such. This case thus shows that even the most familiar institutions of modern corporate discipline do not always “go without saying.”

I note as a point of comparative method that Briot and Soulié’s sociological interests are quite different from what one would typically find in American sociology. The most striking difference is about the treatment of race: here they never discuss race directly, although immigrant janitors do get some attention as the “symbol par excellence of the exploited worker” (210). On the other hand, they devote significant attention to age, politicization, educational level (interpreted not just as a matter of “human capital” but as a form of social affiliation with the events of May 1968), and residence location (since living in Paris is generally more bourgeois than living in the banlieue). And they are highly attuned to the demographics of gender difference, noting for instance that the administrative staff were something like 2/3 women (as far as the limited data can tell us), whereas among technicians and manual workers (ouvriers) the gender ratio was reversed.

Moreover, the authors are highly attentive to internal schisms between different sectors of the university workforce. Their paper raises the intriguing prospect of a more general sociology of university workers that does not just examine one or another type of campus labor, but that thinks more structurally about the relations between parts of the university labor system. This is the hallmark of the heritage of relational thinking that Pierre Bourdieu did so much to popularize. In this “relational sociology,” nothing social just is in itself, but rather everything is relational and positional. U.S. social researchers know that in the abstract, of course, but in this Bourdieuian style of French social research, systems of relations are treated more historically and structurally than one would find in any current Anglophone ethnography.

I do still have a few questions for the authors. What did everyday life look like on campus? What was the relationship between campus labor and the structures of campus space and facilities? Granted that it is a highly segregated domain, what specific kinds of social relationships did develop between different kinds of staff (including teaching staff)? To what extent were boundaries between teaching and non-teaching staff blurred, or could non-teaching staff still participate in the intellectual life of the institution? (Briot and Soulié observe that some activist administrators were also adjunct teachers, termed chargés de cours.) And on a more political front, how did internal staff unions develop over the years, and to what extent could they intervene in the precarious status of many campus workers? I gather that Briot and Soulié are continuing their research on Vincennes university staff, so perhaps their future work will examine everyday space and labor organizing in more detail.

You might also be interested in our growing Zotero bibliography of work on labor in higher education.