Changing Higher Education in the United Kingdom: Examining Three Trends through a Neoliberal Lens

Perry discusses how neoliberalism has had a dramatic impact on higher education in the UK. She traces the history of neoliberalism in broad strokes from the pre-Thatcher years to the post-Thatcher years and identifies three key trends in higher education: widening participation and the politics of aspiration, the emergence of the student entrepreneur-consumer, and the marketization of higher education. With specific reference to the third trend, she discusses the use of Internet-based education by higher education institutions and its potential impact on students. The coronavirus pandemic has posed major challenges for student recruitment and increased the precariousness of students in the instructional process.

Inclusive and sustainable growth. A mission-driven multi-stakeholder approach

Este documento trata sobre cómo aprender de la experiencia pasada y cómo avanzar hacia las nuevas formas de capitalismo que deben estar en el centro de un sistema impulsado por la misión, en el que los grandes problemas de nuestro tiempo, como la brecha digital, los sistemas sanitarios y el cambio climático sean centrales, y cómo trabajar juntos para abordarlos. Este documento trata sobre cómo diseñar un sistema de producción que sea colectivo, pero sobre todo que distribuya adecuadamente las recompensas, en lugar de la forma disfuncional en que lo hacemos actualmente, que consiste en socializar los riesgos y los costes y privatizar después los beneficios. He tenido el honor de trabajar con responsables políticos de todo el mundo para llevar la noción de reto, propósito e impulso hacia la misión al corazón del diseño de las políticas públicas. Este documento trata también de los cambios sistémicos, de lo que realmente significan, de cómo entendemos la economía, de cómo producir de otra manera.Alternate :This paper is about how to learn from past experience and how to move towards the new forms of capitalism that must be at the heart of a mission-driven system, in which the big issues of our time such as the digital divide, health systems and climate change are central, and how to work together to address them. This paper is about how to design a production system that is collective, but more importantly one that properly distributes the rewards, rather than the dysfunctional way we currently do it, which is to socialise the risks and costs and then privatise the benefits. I have had the honour of working with policy makers around the world to bring the notion of challenge, purpose and mission-drive to the heart of public policy design. This paper is also about systemic change, about what it really means, about how we understand the economy, about how to produce differently.

PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS: POLICY PRESCRIPTION DURING THE ERA OF PANDEMICS

The COVID-19 pandemic caused disruptions in global supply chains that have resulted in prolonged shortages and financial hardships for many corporations. While organizations have dealt with supply chain interruptions for natural disasters and stock market crashes before, the COVID-19 pandemic presented a larger and unique challenge, and it required the need for resiliency in supply chains. This paper discusses several alternatives that can mitigate potential supply chain disruptions. Despite the natural inclination to protect domestic companies and industries, this paper cautions against the use of protectionism policies to prevent supply chain disruptions, as protectionism is proven to be damaging to innovation and eliminates the positive aspects of international trade and globalization. The paper recommends that governments and corporations establish strategically designed and aligned public-private partnerships that simultaneously encourage the principles of the free-market economy while providing increased preparation for supply chain disruptions caused by future global events. We further attest that Public-private partnerships will increase supply chain resiliency while simultaneously enhancing public welfare.

Personal Responsibility, Personal Shame: A Discourse Tracing of Individualism about Healthcare Costs

America's individualistic culture is reflected in deeply held beliefs about how people should manage their health and their (lack of) money. In this essay, we trace the ideological discourse of individualism at macro and micro levels, explicating how macro-level discourses surrounding finances and health fulfill key functions of individualism: explanatory and evaluative as well as identity and prescriptive. For each function, we illustrate at the micro level how social adherence to discourses of individualism affects people, relationships, and communities. In particular, we argue, failure to live up to individualistic ideals fosters internalized shame and guilt and worsens mental, physical, and financial health. Grounded in critical rhetorical theory and drawing upon critical interpersonal and family communication and health communication approaches, we illustrate how individualistic discourse is circulated and taken up by people, constituting their identities and relationships. We also showcase the benefits of investigating exigent social issues from multidisciplinary vantage points.

ECONOMICS OF TIME: ADVANTAGES OF E-LEARNING IN PROPORTION TO THE TIME UTILIZED AND THE TRADEOFF BETWEEN WORK AND STUDIES

. The COVID-19 pandemic created a disruption of the educational system. The transition to e-learning in a state of emergency involved breaching barriers and challenges for both faculty and students. In the current study, we examine the opinion of students on the advantages of e-learning, in a systemic, multi-institutional perspective. Based on 1,859 respondents from several academic institutions, we employed a mixed methods research, combining quantitative and qualitative techniques. The findings show that variables related to time saving significantly affect the preference for e-teaching. In contrast, money-saving variables were not found to be significant. Reduction in travel time was found to be the most important dimension involved in the preference for e-teaching, followed by the convenience of studying from home and lesson recordings. These measures emphasize the advantages of digitization in the modern era and the option of perceiving learning as a consumer product that does not require physical presence. Globalization has facilitated e-commerce with no geographical barriers, from the convenience of one's home or organization, together with a significant reduction in time required. However academic institutions are lagging in this regard. The COVID-19 era has raised the need for the academic establishment to adapt to the new reality and the advantages of technological modernization in the 21st century.

Reorienting the sharing economy for social benefit: the nonprofit digital platform business model

Purpose>Digital platforms enable the sharing economy and have become dominant business models in many industries. Despite their many benefits, negative externalities associated with the growth of for-profit digital platforms, such as Uber and Google, have ignited concerns among market participants, policymakers and society as a whole, without corrective market forces in sight. One way to address this problem is through a combination of government regulation, criminal enforcement actions and private antitrust litigation. This study aims to analyze an alternative approach, called the nonprofit digital platform (NDP), which is an emerging business model capable of unleashing free-market forces and enhancing the sharing economy’s social benefits.Design/methodology/approach>This study documents the negative externalities (actual and potential) of for-profit digital platforms, uses the product attributes model to explain the market position and strategy of NDPs with respect to for-profit digital platforms and provides recommendations for the successful launch and management of NDPs.Findings>An NDP is a market-based alternative to antitrust, regulation and litigation that enhances the social value created by the sharing economy, but its success requires startup-like management that attracts and retains talent, capital, effective advertising and positive network externalities.Social implications>NDPs can force free-market adjustments in the industries they enter, reduce the negative spillovers of for-profit digital platforms and increase social value by incrementally raising the level of competition.Originality/value>This study conceptually explores the value that nonprofits could bring to the sharing economy in fulfilling its promise and provides strategic recommendations for social-digital entrepreneurs and nonprofits.

Precarity in Later life: Understanding Risk, Vulnerability, and Resilence

Neoliberalism is a policy framework that promotes the transferring of economic factors from the public sector to the private sector;it endorses limiting government spending, government regulation, and public ownership;and fosters stimulating free market capitalism (Brown, 2003;Greenhouse, 2010). Since the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., neoliberalism ushered in the policies of austerity and reduced government spending on social programs in general, and for older people (Pierson, 1995). In gerontology, this set of ideas challenged the heterogeneity of aging, contributing insights on power relations in regard to age and multiple and diverse social locations (Calasanti, 2009;Calasanti and King, 2015). (2017) , "Precarity draws attention to the implications of neoliberal practices that have altered late life through the combined impacts of the increased short-term contracts, decline in trade unionism, and declining forms of social protection that include a reliance on family/kin or market care, and private market pensions." Even prior to the COVID-19 crisis, the relationship between the construction of older people and the political response to their needs was shifting. Since the 1980s, a vortex of complementary demographic (the older population's tremendous growth), economic (anemic growth);fiscal (unprecedented budget deficits), and political (deeply embedded left-right conflict) pressures emerged (Hudson and Gonyea, 2012).

THE CURSE OF OVERLOOKING SECONDARY CONSEQUENCES: THE COVID-19 EXAMPLE

Since January 2020, the global community has faced what may be tagged a biological war against the ravaging COVID-19 pandemic. While many countries in the world have been hard hit by this virus, response patterns to the pandemic have varied from country to country and, expectedly, with varying success rates. The global community witnessed a surge in socialist policies as a response pattern to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper argued that the countries with poor COVID-19 responses are predominantly capitalist economies under the curse of overlooking secondary consequences. The paper examined concepts such as socialism, capitalism, free market and command economy. The paper then offered philosophical argumentation for its conclusion that the COVID-19 reality is strong evidence that adopting socialist policies in an economy is more reliable than a predominantly capitalist economy, and should be the background to rebuilding the post COVID-19 economies.

The Moral Failings of Vaccine Procurement

In November 2020, the world received the good news that some vaccine candidates were highly effective at preventing COVID-19. Yet, the demand for COVID-19 vaccines within the global free market has led wealthy nations to procure most of the vaccine supply, leaving low- and middle-income countries in dire circumstances. This article considers the morality of our global procurement strategies and argues that, although what we are witnessing may be adhering to the parameters set out in global business and global politics, it nonetheless has moral deficiencies.