The Uberfication of the University

Forerunners: Ideas First

by Gary Hall

Even after the 2008 financial crisis, neoliberalism has been able to advance its program of privatization and deregulation. The Uberfication of the University analyzes the emergence of the sharing economy—an economy that has little to do with sharing access to good and services and everything to do with selling this access—and the companies behind it: LinkedIn, Uber, and Airbnb. In this society, we all are encouraged to become microentrepreneurs of the self, acting as if we are our own precarious freelance enterprises at a time when we are being steadily deprived of employment rights, public services, and welfare support. The book considers the contemporary university, itself subject to such entrepreneurial practices, as one polemical site for the affirmative disruption of this model.

Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Genres: Nonfiction, Education

74 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 17, 2016

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Gary Hall is professor of media and performing arts at Coventry University. He is the author of Digitize This Book! (Minnesota, 2008), Pirate Philosophy, and Culture in Bits. He is founding coeditor of the peer-reviewed online journal Culture Machine and cofounder of the Open Humanities Press.

Reviews

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very digestible wee book on the potential pitfalls of a higher education system in a platform capitalism model—though this book is as much about how platform capitalism is changing how we think of ourselves and how others think of us as it is about education. Well worth a read.

[Nathanial Garrod · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked up this book thinking it would have interesting ideas on how academia can move into the future while retaining some semblance of its identity, but it just reads like an old man yelling at a cloud that passed a few days ago.

[they think that i'm tom cruise · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a scary world we live in... a nice primer on the sharing economy, platform capitalism, and the superconvenient/superexploitative gig economy. I'm not sure what affirmative disruption is, though...

[Michael Mareno · Rating 3 out of 5]

for-profit knowledge sharing economies, academic precariat, disposable labor

[Cameron Selbig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Giving this 4 stars because I used to want to be a professor before reading this

[Frank Karioris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting ideas. I definitely need to reread it and see what is lurking further beneath the surface. On first examination, it seems less radical than might originally seem. Full of interesting information and viewpoints, and will hopefully, as the series says, start a conversation.