1. Performativity and Domestication of
Markets
• The Case of Sustainable Higher Education
• Ilkka Arminen, professor
• Department of Social Sciences
• University of Helsinki
1

2. SECURING A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE
FOR HIGHER EDUCATION (Browne report 2010)
2

3. 3

4. OECD, (IMHE) Agenda 2004
Two aims:
1) Policy: how, at a time of diminished state funding and
increasing institutional autonomy, governments can
achieve their policy aims through the higher
education system without the ability to direct
institutions and without threatening their financial
sustainability
2) Management: how to manage the institution to
secure its financial and academic sustainability at a
time when the funding and policy environment is
becoming much more competitive and challenging
OECD
2004, 4
p.9

5. 1999, the UK introduced a
commercial-style costing system
(TRAC)
• Three aims of the the Transparency Review method – TRAC :
A) Costing and cost recovery: institutions should determine the full
economic costs of their activities to recover their full economic
costs so that the institution is financially sustainable .
B) Pricing: public funders of research should recognise the full
economic costs of the research when they agree cost-based prices
with universities.
C) Strategic asset management: institutions should develop
comprehensive asset management and investment strategies for
their infrastructure.
Transparent approach 2005
5

6. The Consequences of TRAC
In 2001-2, it was found out that
• nearly all university research was funded at
below the long-run (full economic) cost
• a narrow focus on surplus and deficits of
institutions masked longer-term problems of
under-investment of infrastructures (4-5 % per
annum)
• few institutions had comprehensive asset
management strategies, or any ability to finance
such a strategy OECD
2004, p
52-53
6

7. Discourse on Sustainable
Higher Education
• Discourse on Sustainable Higher Education was
formed in 1999-2004
• HEFCE (the Higher Education Funding Council for
England) had a key role in shifting the
environmental “sustainability” to financial (by
combining the Blairian environmental and
educational agendas)
• J M Consulting Ltd (Jim Port) played also a key
role in the formation of the Discourse on
Sustainable Higher Education
• The Browne report 2010 is a later shift within the
Sustainable Higher Education discourse
7

8. TRAC and J M Consulting
• The Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) was
introduced in 1999 as a Government
accountability requirement, but it is aimed also
support institutional management
• J M Consulting managed the introduction of TRAC
and consulted OPEC/IMHE for 2004 report
• TRAC is an Activity-Based Costing (ABC) system
that uses institutional expenditure information
from published financial statements, and applies
cost drivers (such as academic time allocation
and space usage) to allocate these costs to
academic departments and to activities.
8

9. TRAC has a strong performative power
 Performativity paradigm: “Saying that economics has
failed by neglecting to develop a theory of real markets
and their multiple modes of functioning, amounts to
admitting that there does exist a thing – the economy –
which a science – economics – has taken as its object
of analysis. The point of view that I have adopted in
this introduction, and which the book strives to defend,
is radically different. It consists in maintaining that
economics, in the broad sense of the term, performs,
shapes and formats the economy, rather than
observing how it functions” (Callon, 1998: 2 The Laws
of the Markets).
 TRAC is an organizational restructuring device that
contributes to the marketisation of universities making
them to act like market-oriented firms
9

10. Marketisation of higher education
institutions
OECD
2004,
p.34
10

11. Domestication of university reforms
• The discourse on sustainable higher education involves a
deep sense that institutional reforms are not just technical
but cultural, requiring changes in HEIs and societal
structures
• Further, academic and financial cultures have to be
integrated respecting academic requirements; it is not a
single party trade
• Changes of that magnitude need to be domesticated, i.e.,
foreign frames need to be reconsidered so that processes
become informed by local values and frames so that they
become familiar and eventually taken-for-granted
• The success of domestication solves the direction of
performative processes, i.e., there is the danger of
counterperformativity, market failure and suboptimal
regress
11

12. The lessons of performativity
• The performativity perspective provides an account of the
centrality of markets in modern society, including the
performative role of economic technologies
• Performativity is realized through socio-material networks of
practices and procedures – so called agencement
• TRAC , the Activity-Based Costing (ABC) system, is the
organizational restructuring device that contributes to the
marketisation of universities
• Markets as “calculative collective devices” transform daily life
• Social relations of market actors are transformed when they
become “calculable agencies” − universities to business-like
HEIs
• As Marx put it: ‘Production not only creates an object for the
subject, but also a subject for the object’ 12

13. Thank you!
• Ilkka Arminen
Ilkka.arminen@helsinki.fi
13