“Elitism” in Economics: The Construction of Global Academic Discourses after the Bologna Process

The 1990s were a period of intense higher education reform, including most famously the Bologna Process. Cumulatively, individual reforms gave rise to comprehensive changes in the institutions of knowledge generation and transmission, challenging the inherited structures of national research system. The introduction of new technologies of control – including quality assurance and development, rankings, research assessment, and peer review – increasingly scrutinize academic research in what amounts to an “excellence panopticon.” As a result, the academic landscape in Europe has changed in divergent ways. Whereas some disciplines in the Social Sciences and Humanities became reorganised along well-established institutionalised pathways, the academic world(s) of economics in different European countries entered into new forms of global academic discourse. The application of rankings, the institutionalization of professionalized graduate schools, the introduction of a journal-based publishing system, and the hegemony of a model-based science has transformed the formerly separate national and sub-disciplinary fields into a trans-epistemic field with a global orientation and multiple ways of local anchoring. “Elitism” as a discursive-structural characteristic plays a significant role for the organisation and operation of this new academic world. Following a discursive-Marxist approach I want to sketch out the way “elitism” works in economics, thereby taking into account the dialectics between academic discourses, the accumulation of different forms of academic capital, and the exchange processes between academia and society as a trans-epistemic field of power and discourse.