The Virtual University?: Knowledge, Markets, and Management

The Virtual University brings together some of the best-known writers ono contemporary social change to reflect on the radical transformations going on in higher education.
Expansion, technology, and changing financial and performance structures have altered universities, affecting the way that they are managed, their relations with the corporate world, their employees, and their users/customers/students. Has a culture of collegiality been replaced by one of managerialism? Has the liberal/national university been replaced by the global/virtual one? What changes does the digital world bring to the practice and experience of education?
This book refuses to adopt a narrow focus towards its subject, reflecting technology-centered and education policy-focused approaches. Arguing for a need to situate changes in higher education in the broad contexts of trends, the book combines close attention to the complexities of on-the-ground changes in higher education with sensitivity towards the most consequential contextual pressures.
The book lifts consideration of higher education into the mainstream of social transformations in the twenty-first century, arguing that a wide debate about changes in knowledge, markets, and management is demanded since the 'virtual university' concerns the chanracter of intellectual culture itself.
Higher education is changing--the scope, style, technology, and objectives. This book looks at the impact of information technologies on higher education and the reoganization of universities in more managerial and business directions. The book combines empirical and analytical chapters from scholars on both sides of the Atlantic.

Kevin Robins studied at the universities of Sussex, York, and Kent. He is Professor of Communications, Goldsmith's College, University of London. His books include The Technical Fix: Education, Computers, and Industry (1989, with Frank Webster), Into the Image (1996), Times of the Technoculture (1999, with Frank Webster), and Spaces of Identity (1995, with David Morley). Frank Webster was educated at the University of Durham and the London School of Economics. He is Professor of Sociology at City University. He was previously Professor of Sociology in the Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology, University of Birmingham (1999-2002). Recent publications are: Times of the Technoculture (1999, with Kevin Robins), Theories of the Information Society (2002), and Culture and Politics in the Information Age (2001).