Dependency or Emancipation? Institutional Histories, Social Value, and UK Higher Education
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS
- Room
- B103
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
This event is part of the SOAS Economics Seminar Series 2025/26.
In Anglo/US contexts, universities are facing a polycrisis. They are increasingly evaluated through market-based metrics, while their broader contributions to democracy, knowledge production, and social development remain systematically undervalued. While the neoliberalisation of higher education has been widely analysed across the social sciences, less attention has been paid to how changing institutional arrangements shape the development of academic disciplines and the forms of economic reasoning they sustain.
My talk examines how institutional configurations in higher education affect both the production of economic knowledge and the articulation of educational value. Firstly, I draw on Original Institutional Economics, which conceptualises universities as crucial non-market institutions serving a public purpose by supporting technological progress, social provisioning, and overall economic betterment (Veblen, 1918; Dewey, 1939). Secondly, I present archival research on the case of UK higher education between the 1960s-1990s, pointing to the shifting political–economic logics through which higher education has been framed either as a source of emancipation or as a site of dependency.
Focusing on the historical rise of UK polytechnics in the 1960s, I show how alternative institutional arrangements supported pluralist approaches to economics education aligned with collective provision, social mobility, and regional development, temporarily sustaining broader, non-market articulations of educational value. Rather than advocating a return to institutional specialisation, the historical experience of polytechnics highlights how institutional arrangements shape both economic knowledge and the social value attributed to universities, while also revealing the analytical possibilities of an institutional political economy approach to higher education.
Header image credit: Lucas Davies via Unsplash.
About the speaker
Danielle Guizzo is an Associate Professor at the School of Economics and a researcher at the Centre for Higher Education Transformations (CHET) at the University of Bristol, UK.
She is the 2024 recipient of the Clarence E. Ayres Scholar Prize, awarded by the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE). Her research expertise lies at the intersection of the history of economics, the political economy of higher education, and the sociology of knowledge in economics. She previously held positions at the University of the West of England (2016–2020) and the State University of Santa Catarina (2012–2015).
She holds a PhD in Economics & Public Policy from the Federal University of Paraná, Brazil (2016). She is currently the elected Coordinator of the Association for Heterodox Economics (AHE) (2022–2024) and an editorial board member of the Journal of Economic Issues and Review of Political Economy.
