Peter Murphy, Universities and Innovation Economies: The Creative Wasteland of Post-Industrial Society

Abstract

Abstract. This is a brilliant, indeed an indispensable book. It provides a compelling diagnosis of the decline and failure of the contemporary bureaucratic and managerially governed university, the post-industrial-bureaucratic driven economy, and the social-liberal-democratic-bureaucratic state. It deals with matters that those of us who work in universities, particularly in Australia and the United Kingdom (US universities are still far less centralized), and who know from the inside that so much of what has happened over the last thirty years or so has pretty well destroyed the university as a place for reading, reflection, discussion, dispute,  deliberation, and inventive imaginative responses to what are thrown up by the spirits of the times. But what makes the book truly remarkable is the thoroughness of the diagnosis and the mountains of evidence that the book marshals to make its case. Moreover, both the diagnosis and the evidence that is summoned to confirm the diagnosis could only have been made by someone who effortlessly moves between the disciplinary compartmentalisations, which, when kept separate, only serve to dilute any diagnosis of the nature of the problems and the forces and interests that conspire not only to create the problems but, sadly, to make then insoluble. Murphy is, to use one of those buzz-words that usually smacks of ‘bureaucratise’, ‘multi-skilled’ - precisely because he exemplifies that combination that is, sadly, all too rarely to be found, let alone nurtured in universities today: he is a real scholar, a prodigious researcher, and an inventive thinker.

Keywords. Universities, Creativity, Knowledge economy, Bureaucracy, Post-industrial society, Modern administrative state, Managerialism.

JEL. L16, L50, N10, Q31, Q32, Q35, Q55.