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The aim of this article is to contextualise universities historically within capitalism and to analyse academic labour and the deployment of digital media theoretically and critically. It argues that the post-war expansion of the university can be considered as medium and outcome of informational capitalism and as a dialectical development of social achievement and advanced commodification. The article strives to identify the class position of academic workers, introduces the distinction between academic work and labour, discusses the connection between academic, information and cultural work, and suggests a broad definition of university labour. It presents a theoretical model of working conditions that helps to systematically analyse the academic labour process and to provide an overview of working conditions at universities. The paper furthermore argues for the need to consider the development of education technologies as a dialectics of continuity and discontinuity, discusses the changing nature of the forces and relations of production, and the impact on the working conditions of academics in the digital university. Based on Erik Olin Wright's inclusive approach of social transformation, the article concludes with the need to bring together anarchist, social democratic and revolutionary strategies for establishing a socialist university in a commons-based information society.

The aim of this article is to contextualise universities historically within capitalism and to analyse academic labour and the deployment of digital media theoretically and critically. It argues that the post-war expansion of the university can be considered as medium and outcome of informational capitalism and as a dialectical development of social achievement and advanced commodification. The article strives to identify the class position of academic workers, introduces the distinction between academic work and labour, discusses the connection between academic, information and cultural work, and suggests a broad definition of university labour. It presents a model of working conditions that helps to systematically analyse the academic labour process and to provide an overview of working conditions at universities. The article furthermore argues for the need to consider the development of education technologies as a dialectics of continuity and discontinuity, discusses the changing nature of the forces and relations of production, and the impact on the working conditions of academics in the digital university. Based on Erik Olin Wright's inclusive approach of social transformation, the article concludes with the need to bring together anarchist, social democratic and revolutionary strategies for establishing a socialist university in a commons-based information society.

"This book provides a critical perspective on the digitalisation of universities and precarisation of academic labour. While research and teaching become more virtual and digital at universities, academic labour is becoming more and more casualised and temporary. This book aims to analyse and theorise academic labour and study the experiences academic workers have made at universities that are shaped by economic, political and cultural contexts. It will be a valuable tool for international scholars and students of subjects such as media, communication and cultural studies, sociology, education, management and labour studies. The insights will also be of particular relevance for unions and other initiatives that are concerned about the working conditions at universities"--

This paper contributes to the literature on change in the higher education sector arising from massification, increased political control, international mobility and competition. Drawing on various data sources and labour shortage models, it considers academic labour in UK accounting and finance academia over the period 2000 to 2012. A disequilibrium between supply and demand is evidenced through the identification of recruitment problems, unfilled vacancies, and retirements. The impact of research assessment on faculty backgrounds is shown to result in inadequate supply of faculty with the required skills. Strategic responses to labour shortages include: increased recruitment efforts, early promotions, enhanced remuneration and reducing restrictions on occupational entry. The consequences and future implications of shortages and strategies are considered. In particular, the decoupling of research and teaching in accounting is challenging the future existence of accounting as an academic discipline. The current generation of accounting academics is also under threat – if they neither excel at research nor are professionally-qualified they risk becoming undesirable.

This paper deploys an orthodox Marxian reading of the concept of subsumption of labour under capital. It does so through a brief, critical overview of the components of the Marxian conceptual instrument of subsumption of labour under capital (formal, real, hybrid and ideal subsumption). Recapitulating Marx's concept, it sheds some light on the consequences of such a reading as a way of understanding the current transformation of the global higher education sector into a capitalist production sector per se. The reconstruction is then considered here as an attempt to approximate the specifics of the subsumption of labour under capital within the higher education sector. Moreover, the paper aims at showing that a discussion of the university dominated by capital with reference to the functioning or constituting of markets does not provide real opportunities for the understanding and solution of such problems as precarization, exploitation or acceleration of academic work. Thus, it joins a wider stream of Marxist higher education research and could be seen as a conceptual contribution to a critique of the political economy of higher education.

"Using Marxist critique, this book explores manifestations of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in higher education and demonstrates how it contributes to the functioning and existence of the capitalist university. Challenging the idea that AI is a break from previous capitalist technologies, the book offers nuanced examination of the impacts of AI on the control and regulation of academic work and labour, on digital learning and remote teaching, and on the value of learning and knowledge. Applying a Marxist perspective, Preston argues that commodity fetishism, surveillance, and increasing productivity ushered in by the growth of AI, further alienates and exploits academic labour and commodifies learning and research. The text puts forward a solid theoretical framework and methodology for thinking about AI to inform critical and revolutionary pedagogies. Offering an impactful and timely analysis, this book provides a critical engagement and application of key Marxist concepts in the study of AI's role in higher education. It will be of interest to those working or researching in higher education"--

Although it hasn't much been considered as such, the Digital Humanities movements (or at least the most theoretically informed parts of it) offers a critique "from within" of the recent mutation of the higher education and research systems. This paper offers an analysis, from a Critical Theory perspective, of a key element of this critique: the theory vs. practice debate, which, in the Digital Humanities, is translated into the famous "hack" versus "yack" motto, where DHers usually call for the pre-eminence of the former over the latter. I show how this debate aims to criticize the social situation of employment in academia in the digital age and can further be interpreted with the Cultural industry theoretical concept, as a continuance of the domination of the intellectual labour (ie. yack in this case) over the manual labour (hack). Nevertheless, I argue that, pushing this debate to its very dialectical limit in the post-industrial academic labour situation, one realizes that the two terms aren't in opposition anymore: the actual theory as well as the actual practice are below their very critical concepts in the academic labour. Therefore, I call for a reconfiguration of this debate, aiming at the rediscovering of an actual theory in the academic production, as well as a rediscovering of a praxis, the latter being outside of the scientific realm and rules: it is political.

Using data from a 2017 survey of Czech academics this article examines the casualisation of working conditions in the Czech academic labour market (ALM) and explores gender, sectoral, and institutional inequalities through the lens of the theory of labour market segmentation. A hierarchical cluster analysis reveals three segments in the Czech ALM: core (40%), periphery (28%), and semi‐periphery (32%), which roughly align with work positions in the early, middle, and senior stages of an academic career. In the semi‐periphery gender is found to be a key factor in in determining working conditions, while in the periphery working conditions are most affected by the type of institution. In the core, gender differences are mainly reflected in the gender wage gap. The effects of casualisation on working conditions are found to be more pronounced in STEM fields than in the social sciences and humanities across the ALM, but wages are generally higher in STEM fields.