Simon Marginson
Biographic Data
| ID | 765285 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Simon Marginson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Simon |
| FAMILY NAME | Marginson |
| SIGNATURE | MARGINSON S |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6738-3128 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 96 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 537 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 92 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Navigating the rapids of today’s research expectations
This collective writing was catalysed by a request from our Faculty Research Office for the School of Education to provide a list of journals that publish ‘quality research’ in education. Tasked with compiling this list, the first author invited all academic staff to name up to three journal titles that they considered fitted this description. The list was already well over 50 titles long, based on responses from fewer than half of the academic s…
The transformative impact of geopolitics in higher education
Higher education institutions face an environment more difficult than at any time since World War II. Disruptive geopolitical tensions and conflicts are triggering rapid changes, especially in cross-border scientific cooperation and the movement of students and academic staff across borders. The Western (and primarily US American) strategy of universal and inclusive globalisation, which dominated international higher education from 1990 to 2015, …
The Double-Coded Self in Higher Education
Education for social sustainability rests on (1) individual learning agency, and (2) graduates prepared in relations between the individual and collective society, in the context of open ontology and emerging ecological, social and political challenges. The self-determining learner in higher education, with antecedents in Confucian self-cultivation and Bildung, is engaged in conscious self-formation, incorporating reflexive autonomous agency, the…
Problems of the public good in higher education
Anglophone societies in which the sovereign individual is primary vis and vis social relations, and policy focuses on economic competition and consumption in education, find it hard to grasp non-pecuniary outcomes in higher education. These include the self-formation of students as persons and collective goods like knowledge, technological capability, social inclusion, political connectedness, tolerance and global understanding. While other cultu…
Introduction to the Special Issue
The Special Issue provides the first consolidated outcomes from a large cross-country research project, conducted by the UK-based Centre for Global Higher Education, on the contributions of higher education to public good outcomes. The public good outcomes of higher education are outcomes other than private pecuniary benefits like individual earnings, employment or social status: (a) shared collective social goods, such as the contributions of hi…
Making the world a better place? English higher education and global public good
UK higher education is highly internationalised. Two-thirds of science papers with UK authors involve international collaboration, one-quarter of higher education students are international, and their fees constitute more than a fifth of institutional income. What then are the contributions of higher education and research to the global public good? The study investigates this in relation to England within UK, drawing on interviews with 37 people…
Higher education and public good in England
In the Anglophone jurisdictions, higher education policy is over-determined by economic policy and subjected to neoliberal regulation based on quasi-market competition between corporatised institutions, regulated by performative comparisons, tuition fees, and outputs imagined as commodities. England installed marketisation in successive policy changes between the Thatcher government’s introduction of commercial fees for international students in …
Cannibals and Cartographers
Dada and Its Later Manifestations in the Geographic Margins: Israel, Romania, Poland and North America, edited by Ronit Milano, Raya Zommer-Tal, and Noam Gonnen, New York: Routledge, 2024, 212 pp., 15 col. and 39 b. & w. illus., hardback, £145, ebook £35. Cannibalizing the Canon: Dada Techniques in East-Central Europe, edited by Oliver A. I. Botar, Irina M. Denischenko, Gábor Dobó, and Pál Szerdi, Leiden: Brill, 2024, 664 pp., 86 col. and 34 b & …
Institutional dual identity in research capacity building in IBCs
Has the public good of higher education been emptied out? The case of England
In Anglophone neoliberal jurisdictions, policy highlights the private goods associated with higher education but largely neglects the sector’s contributions to public good not measurable as economic values, including non-pecuniary individual benefits and collective social outcomes. Governments are silent on the existence and funding of most public goods. The paper reports on understandings of the public good role of higher education in England af…
Mass higher education and the slow road to freedom
Student self-formation
In discussing the functions of education Gert Biesta distinguishes qualification, socialisation and subjectification. In subjectification higher education facilitates the evolution of students as distinctive self-determining persons. This paper foregrounds and discusses ‘student self-formation’, a paradigm of subjectification with fecund potentials for empirical inquiry. Self-formation emphasises reflexive agency, whereby students consciously mon…
Internationalization of University Education
Internationalization is one of the most important contemporary trends in higher education. It has become one of the most common references in the vocabularies commonly used by most universities all over the world. It is an important tool in academic developments as it aims to add and integrate international dimensions in teaching, programs, research and all higher education services of the universities. However, there is a lack of clarity about t…
Higher education and research
Brexit has weakened collaboration between UK higher education institutions and their EU counterparts, with negative implications for UK resources and capacity, without leading to new global strategies and opportunities. In 2020 the UK government withdrew from the Erasmus student mobility scheme and introduced the Turing scheme. While Erasmus had supported both outward UK student mobility and inward movement from Europe, Turing supports only outwa…
Limitations of the leading definition of ‘internationalisation’ of higher education
The paper critically reviews the widely adopted definition of 'internationalisation' of higher education shaped by Knight and colleagues since 1993 through successive revisions and intended for universal application.Here, internationalisation is defined as 'the process of integrating an international, intercultural or global dimension' into post-secondary education.The definition has long led cross-border scholarship, discourse and practice, bein…
What is global higher education
The article moves from a theorisation of the global scale in higher education and knowledge to a critical review of actual global imaginings and practices. Geo-cognitive scales such ‘the global’ or ‘the national’ are constituted by three elements: pre-given material structures, the imaginings and interpretations of agents, and the social practices of agents. Synchronous networks, time/space compression and travel have materially expanded the scop…
Research on international and global higher education
The international and global dimension of higher education continues to expand in an increasingly inter-dependent and connected world, notwithstanding geo-political tensions and conflicts. There are several different strands of research and scholarship in relation to international and global phenomena. Each has distinctive perspectives, methods, and concerns; issues that it seeks to investigate, understand, and explain; and often, policies and pr…
‘All things are in flux’
Since 1990, a large and dynamic global science system has evolved, based on grass roots collaboration, and resting on the resources, infrastructure and personnel housed by national science systems. Euro-American science systems have become intensively networked in a global duopoly; and many other countries have built national science systems, including a group of large- and middle-sized countries that follow semi-autonomous trajectories based on …
Years of Higher Education
Space and scale in higher education
The 2002 ‘glonacal’ paper described higher education as a multi-scalar sector where individual and institutional agents have open possibilities and causation flows from any of the interacting local, national and global scales. None have permanent primacy: global activity is growing; the nation-state is crucial in policy, regulation and funding; and like the other scales, the local scale in higher education and knowledge is continually being remad…
Thinking through the world’
Ancient Chinese civilisation developed two ideas about the ordering of large human spaces. The first was tianxia or ‘all under heaven’, the inclusive and cosmopolitan world as a whole, with no exterior, and governance on the basis of shared values and benefits, which first shaped statecraft in the Western Zhou dynasty (1047–1771 BCE). Second, the centralised nation-state which emerged in the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE). Both strands have been influ…
Hegemony and Inequality in Global Science
The autonomous global system of science, grounded in collegial networks of scientists, publishing, and cross-border papers, is expanding rapidly and spreading to a growing number of countries. Strong national science systems have emerged outside Euro-America. Yet the multipolarization of economic capacity and scientific output plays out within a continuing Euro-American science world regulated by an inside/outside binary. Global science remains p…
What drives global science? The four competing narratives
Since 1990 there has been remarkable growth and diversification of worldwide capacity and output in science, and a distinctive global science system has emerged, primarily grounded in research universities, fostered by Internet-mediated communication and publication in English, cross-border authorship and researcher mobility. While global science overlaps with and is affected by national science systems, it is constituted by pan-national knowledg…
Individual and collective outcomes of higher education
The paper compares Anglo-American and Chinese approaches to the outcomes of higher education, primarily but not solely collective outcomes, by examining the Western domain of ‘public good’ and ‘public goods’ and parallel or near parallel activities in China. It reviews scholarly discourses of society, state and higher education in the respective political cultures (‘traditions’), including individualism and collectivism, university autonomy, the …
National modernisation and global science in China
Global field and global imagining
This paper maps the global dimension of higher education and associated research, including the differentiation of national systems and institutions, while reflecting critically on theoretical tools for working this terrain. Arguably the most sustained theorisation of higher education is by Bourdieu: the paper explores the relevance and limits of Bourdieu’s notions of field of power, agency, positioned and position‐taking; drawing on Gramsci’s no…
Rethinking Academic Work in the Global Era
The impossibility of capitalist markets in higher education
For more than two decades, governments around the world, led by the English-speaking polities, have moved higher education systems closer to the forms of textbook economic markets. Reforms include corporatisation, competitive funding, student charges, output formats and performance reporting. But, no country has established a bona fide economic market in the first-degree education of domestic students. No research university is driven by sharehol…
High Participation Systems of Higher Education
The world is rapidly becoming more educated at higher education level. In nearly all countries with per capita GDP of more than about $5,000 per annum there is a longterm tendency to growth of participation. The worldwide Gross Tertiary Enrollment Ratio (GTER) increased from 10% in 1972 to 32% in 2012, and is now rising by 1% a year. By 2012 the GTER had reached 50% in 54 national systems, compared to 5 systems twenty years before, and there were…
Global University Rankings
Global university rankings have arrived, and though still in a process of rapid evolution, they are likely to substantially influence the long‐term development of higher education across the world. The inclusions, definitions, methods, implications and effects are of great importance. This paper analyses and critiques the two principal rankings systems prepared so far, the research rankings prepared by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the compos…
Globalisation and Higher Education
Economic and cultural globalisation has ushered in a new era in higher education. Higher education was always more internationally open than most sectors because of its immersion in knowledge, which never showed much respect for juridical boundaries. In global knowledge economies, higher education institutions are more important than ever as mediums for a wide range of cross-border relationships and continuous global flows of people, information,…
Limitations of human capital theory
Human capital theory assumes that education determines the marginal productivity of labour and this determines earnings. Since the 1960s, it has dominated the economics, and policy and public understanding, of relations between education and work. It has become widely assumed that intellectual formation constitutes a mode of economic capital, higher education is preparation for work, and primarily education (not social background) determines grad…
University Rankings in Critical Perspective
This article addresses global postsecondary ranking systems by using critical-theoretical perspectives on power. This research suggests rankings are at once a useful lens for studying power in higher education and an important instrument for the exercise of power in service of dominant norms in global higher education
After globalization
Globalization refers to the formation of world systems, as distinct from internationalization which presupposes nations as the essential unit. Globalization includes finance and trade; communications and information technologies; migration and tourism; global societies; linguistic, cultural and ideological convergence; and world systems of signs and images. While it does not negate the nation-state, it changes its circumstances and potentials. In…
Hegemony and Inequality in Global Science
The autonomous global system of science, grounded in collegial networks of scientists, publishing, and cross-border papers, is expanding rapidly and spreading to a growing number of countries. Strong national science systems have emerged outside Euro-America. Yet the multipolarization of economic capacity and scientific output plays out within a continuing Euro-American science world regulated by an inside/outside binary. Global science remains p…
Global trends in higher education financing
Educating Australia
1. Introduction Part I. The Modern Citizen 1960-1975: 2. The expansion of education to 1975 3. The Karmel report and education equality Part II. The Anti-Citizen 1975-1990: 4. The New Right and public policy 5. Individual and government 6. The New Right and education Part III. The Economic Citizen 1985-: 7. Education and national economic reconstruction 8. Participation and equity 9. Economic government in education Part IV. The Multi-Citizen 199…
Public/private in higher education
The public/private distinction is central to higher education but there is no consensus on ‘public’. In neo-classical economic theory, Samuelson distinguishes non-market goods (public) that cannot be produced for profit, from market-based activity (private). This provides a basis for identifying the minimum necessary public expenditure, but does not effectively encompass collective goods, or normative elements. In political theory ‘public’ is oft…
Higher education, economic inequality and social mobility
Putting 'Public' Back into the Public University
The American public university is losing status vis-à-vis the Ivy League private sector. In mass education it is challenged by for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix. Declining state financing is symptomatic of the evacuation of public values inside and outside the university. This has proceeded furthest in the USA. Other university systems are affected by national/local as well as global/American factors. Nevertheless, most pu…
Global Migration and Social Protection Rights
A growing number of students cross national borders for their studies. An expanding global market in higher education has been created. Yet significant gaps exist in the governance of international students' rights. As well as being educational service beneficiaries, cross-border students are migrants, workers, consumers and human beings. A broader view of students, as individuals deserving of ‘social and economic security’, is superior to that w…
Student self-formation
In discussing the functions of education Gert Biesta distinguishes qualification, socialisation and subjectification. In subjectification higher education facilitates the evolution of students as distinctive self-determining persons. This paper foregrounds and discusses ‘student self-formation’, a paradigm of subjectification with fecund potentials for empirical inquiry. Self-formation emphasises reflexive agency, whereby students consciously mon…
Interrogating global flows in higher education
The paper critically reviews the concept of ‘global flows’, beginning with the discussions of flows and networks in Appadurai (1996 Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalisation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]), Castells (2000 Castells, M. 2000. The rise of the network society, Oxford: Blackwell. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and Held et al. (1999 Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D. an…
Individual and collective outcomes of higher education
The paper compares Anglo-American and Chinese approaches to the outcomes of higher education, primarily but not solely collective outcomes, by examining the Western domain of ‘public good’ and ‘public goods’ and parallel or near parallel activities in China. It reviews scholarly discourses of society, state and higher education in the respective political cultures (‘traditions’), including individualism and collectivism, university autonomy, the …
Massification, diversification and internationalisation of higher education in China
Education and neoliberal globalization
This collection of essays is about the struggle between the evils of neoliberalism and the unquestioned goodness of Freirean theory. The essays ‘of opposition’ were written and delivered by Carlos Alberto Torres to diverse audiences and in different locations and languages. Yet they contain one overarching message suggesting that neoliberal globalization can be contested, challenged, and undermined by illuminating the moral weakness upon which it…
The determinants of quality national higher education systems
This paper evaluates the performance of national higher education systems in 48 countries as measured with 20 variables grouped under the four headings of Resources, Environment, Connectivity and Output. Rankings within each module are then combined into an overall ranking that is topped by the United States followed by Sweden, Canada, Finland and Denmark. Relationships between different attributes are explored. Countries ranked highest on output…
Australian University International Student Finances
Open Source Knowledge and University Rankings
The fecund growth of open source knowledge goods in the global communicative environment underlines their public good character. Once knowledge goods are disseminated, their cost and price tend towards zero. It is now obvious (as apparent in recent OECD policy documents) that commercial research and trade in intellectual property capture only a small fraction of open source knowledge, which is expanding even more rapidly than global markets. But …
What drives global science? The four competing narratives
Since 1990 there has been remarkable growth and diversification of worldwide capacity and output in science, and a distinctive global science system has emerged, primarily grounded in research universities, fostered by Internet-mediated communication and publication in English, cross-border authorship and researcher mobility. While global science overlaps with and is affected by national science systems, it is constituted by pan-national knowledg…
The Culture of the White Paper
Prepared for the Institute for Cultural Policy Studies Conference, Griffith University, 1-4 December 1988. Thanks to Lesley Johnson, Michael Bartos, Ralph Hall, Di Zetlin, Simon During, Graham McCulloch, and especially Gary Wickham for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this argument. Notes *Prepared for the Institute for Cultural Policy Studies Conference, Griffith University, 1-4 December 1988. Thanks to Lesley Johnson, Michael Bar…
Positive economics and negative effects
(1992). Positive economics and negative effects: Economic rationalism and education. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 16, No. 33, pp. 1-7
Education and Public Policy in Australia
The gap between the demands placed on education in Australia and the resources allocated to it by government has increased dramatically in recent years. The education system is expected to absorb youth unemployment and play a key role in the modernisation of the economy, yet education spending as a proportion of GDP has declined. The notion of education as being important for its own sake and a key to equality in society seems to have been set as…
Education and Public Policy in Australia
This book summarises and analyses the major issues in Australian education policy today: the relationship between education and work; the reform of higher education and vocational training; outputs and resources; class sizes; the role of government and the public-private debate in schooling. It also examines the main economic theories about education, including human capital theory and free market theory, and finds them seriously inadequate as a …
Education and public policy in Australia
University Organisation in an Age of Perpetual Motion
Educating Australia
This book is the first comprehensive history of Australian education systems, programs and policies of the period since 1960. The narrative of changes in schooling, training and university life is placed in the context of changing policies and governments and evolving economic and social trends. The book draws on economic and sociological data, key texts and political events, anecdotes and a review of other analyses to build its rich picture of t…
Steering from a distance
Investment in the self
Changes in student financing in higher education are normally analysed in the terms of political economy, for example as a shift in the public-private balance of costs. This does not do full justice to neo-liberal reform in higher education, in which methods of government are being transformed, with implications for the identities (subjectivities) of students themselves. Focauldian theory provides one framework for exploring these effects. It sug…
Subjects and Subjugation
Value creation in the production of services
Marx argued that value-creating (productive) labour was labour exchanged against capital, ie, employed as wage labour. Thus capitalist services could create surplus value. But he saw capitalist services as 'insignificant', and in relation to the finance sector argued that because value was created only in production and never in realisation, commerical services were unproductive. Thus Marx predicted that the role of commercial-financial capital w…
After globalization
Globalization refers to the formation of world systems, as distinct from internationalization which presupposes nations as the essential unit. Globalization includes finance and trade; communications and information technologies; migration and tourism; global societies; linguistic, cultural and ideological convergence; and world systems of signs and images. While it does not negate the nation-state, it changes its circumstances and potentials. In…
Educating Australia
1. Introduction Part I. The Modern Citizen 1960-1975: 2. The expansion of education to 1975 3. The Karmel report and education equality Part II. The Anti-Citizen 1975-1990: 4. The New Right and public policy 5. Individual and government 6. The New Right and education Part III. The Economic Citizen 1985-: 7. Education and national economic reconstruction 8. Participation and equity 9. Economic government in education Part IV. The Multi-Citizen 199…
Rethinking Academic Work in the Global Era
Beyond national states, markets, and systems of higher education
The assessment of universities in Argentina and Australia
Postgraduate training in the social sciences
Competition and Markets in Higher Education
Higher education — particularly the research-intensive university, which is the focus of this article — is the subject of global/national/local effects, and is shaped by hierarchy and uneven development on a world scale. The article theorises social competition in higher education, and traces inter-university competition and stratification on the national and global planes with the help of figures and tables. It argues that social competition is …
Interrogating global flows in higher education
The paper critically reviews the concept of ‘global flows’, beginning with the discussions of flows and networks in Appadurai (1996 Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalisation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]), Castells (2000 Castells, M. 2000. The rise of the network society, Oxford: Blackwell. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and Held et al. (1999 Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D. an…
Global Migration and Social Protection Rights
A growing number of students cross national borders for their studies. An expanding global market in higher education has been created. Yet significant gaps exist in the governance of international students' rights. As well as being educational service beneficiaries, cross-border students are migrants, workers, consumers and human beings. A broader view of students, as individuals deserving of ‘social and economic security’, is superior to that w…
Dynamics of National and Global Competition in Higher Education
The Anglo-American University at its Global High Tide
Putting 'Public' Back into the Public University
The American public university is losing status vis-à-vis the Ivy League private sector. In mass education it is challenged by for-profit institutions such as the University of Phoenix. Declining state financing is symptomatic of the evacuation of public values inside and outside the university. This has proceeded furthest in the USA. Other university systems are affected by national/local as well as global/American factors. Nevertheless, most pu…
The public/private divide in higher education
To Rank or To Be Ranked
Global university rankings have cemented the notion of a world university market arranged in a single “league table” for comparative purposes and have given a powerful impetus to intranational and international competitive pressures in the sector. Both the research rankings by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the composite rankings by the Times Higher Education Supplement have been widely publicised and already appear to have generated incentive…
Political science (79 works) · Sociology (67 works) · Higher Education Governance and Development (62 works) · Economics (56 works) · Higher education (52 works) · Law (48 works) · Economic growth (39 works) · Social science (30 works) · Politics (26 works) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (25 works)