CRIS SHORE AND LAURA MCLAUCHLAN

‘Third mission’ activities,

commercialisation and academic
entrepreneurs

The growth of ‘third mission’ activities aimed at commercialising universities and creating more entrepreneurial
academics is a global phenomenon yet has received scant attention from anthropologists. This paper reports on
an ethnographic study that examines the rise of university commercialisation in New Zealand, a country that
pioneered many of the reforms associated with neoliberalism. Exploring different sites and spaces of university
commercialisation we ask: what impact is commercialisation having on the meaning and mission of the
university? Who are the new academic entrepreneurs of the neoliberal university? What does ‘entrepreneurship’
mean in a public university context? Finally, we analyse the challenges and contradictions this is creating for
the public university.

Key words universities, third mission, commercialisation, academic entrepreneurs, New Zealand

Introduction: the rise of ‘third mission’ activities

and their implications for universities

One of the most interesting yet curiously under-researched developments to have

occurred within many universities over the past decade or so, particularly within the
English-speaking world, has been the rise in policies and practices aimed at promoting
so-called ‘third mission’ or ‘third stream’ activities, i.e. activities geared towards
‘knowledge transfer’, forging links with industry and commercialising university
research and teaching. Of course universities have long been involved in knowledge
transfer and external partnerships with the communities they serve. But what is new is
the extent to which university–business linkages have become institutionalised through
the direct involvement of the universities themselves (Etzkowitz 2003; Laredo 2007) in
what appear to be conscious strategies to translate university knowledge into revenue
through leasing academic and technological resources to business (Philpott et al. 2010).
This trend towards academic entrepreneurialism has been driven largely by external
circumstances, most notably by changes in the political economy of higher education
and progressive state disinvestment in tertiary education as policy makers increasingly
view university education as a personal, private investment rather than a public good

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2012) 20, 3 267–286. 

C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 267
doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2012.00207.x
268 CRIS SHORE AND LAURA MCLAUCHLAN

(Robertson and Kitigawa 2009; Vernon 2010; Thrift 2011). Indeed, a recurring theme
from our fieldwork interviews is that personal, private investment and immediate
financial returns are now increasingly being cast as the public good. As a result, public
universities seemingly everywhere are being forced to find new income streams to
balance their budgets, meet new ‘key performance indicators’ and, in some instances,
stave off the threat of insolvency.
Since the 1990s, and as a result of this, major changes have occurred in the nature
of university–industry relations. Knowledge transfer (‘KT’) has become an increasingly
important strategic issue for university vice-chancellors as well as politicians and
policy makers: both as a source of income for the universities and as a policy
tool for governments in their pursuit of economic development. Yet the nature of
these relationships, how these partnerships work in practice and the implications of
commercialising university research and teaching, remain largely under-theorised areas
of research (Robertson and Kitigawa 2009; Viale and Etzkowitz 2010). To date, we
know relatively little about how universities are responding to the challenges and
opportunities posed by the advance of ‘knowledge capitalism’ and the new kinds of
relationships, professional identities and research practices that these responses are
creating (Deem 2001; Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). In short, how is commercialisation
affecting academic knowledge production, university missions and the boundaries of
the public university?

Universities and ‘third stream’ activities

While there is no singular definition of what ‘knowledge transfer’ means and what
constitutes ‘third stream’ activity, knowledge transfer – or ‘knowledge exchange’ as
some call it – is generally taken to refer to the linking of research to commercial outcomes
(i.e. spin out and ‘spin-in’ companies, entrepreneurial incubators, start-up businesses,
commercial patenting and licensing, the marketisation of research innovations), and
externally-referenced relationships. However, it also includes other activities aimed at
strengthening academia–business ties such as consultancy and contract research, student
projects in industry, capacity building and continuing professional education. Teaching
and research are the two traditional core activities of any university, but universities
have also long played a major role in more applied fields such as policymaking and
wealth creation. These activities have acquired the moniker of the ‘Third Mission’
of universities. The most widely cited and accepted definition of what such activities
encompass, as set out in the 2002 Science Policy Research Unit Report to the Russell
Group of Universities, are those that are ‘concerned with the generation, use, application
and exploitation of knowledge and other university capabilities outside academic
environments’ (Molas-Gallart et al. 2002).
One way that universities might do this is by creating new kinds of subjects who can
act as brokers for the application or exploitation of academic knowledge in new contexts
characterised as external to, or ‘outside’ of, academia. In this sense, universities can be
usefully conceptualised as vehicles for ‘manufacturing citizenship’ (Bénëi 2005) and
‘making up people’ or, to echo Foucault (1991), Hacking (1991) and Rose (1998 [1996]),
as political ‘technologies’ for creating new kinds of political subjects. The transformation


C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
 REMAKING THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY 269

of the contemporary public university also provides a useful site for grounding theories
of governmentality and debates over ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (Wacquant 2012),
or what others have termed the ‘variegated’ geographies of neoliberalisation (Brenner
et al. 2010; Hilgers 2012). In this respect, it seems pertinent to ask, ‘What new kinds
of subjects or categories of person are being created within these education institutions
themselves as a result of the neoliberal reforms that have been transforming public
sector institutions over the past two decades?’
These questions are addressed in the context of changing conceptions of the
public university in New Zealand. As various writers have observed, New Zealand
during the 1980s pioneered many of the institutional reforms commonly associated
with neoliberalism and New Public Management (Kelsey 1998; Olssen and Peters
2005; Larner and Le Heron 2005; Shore 2010). The ‘New Zealand Experiment’, as it
subsequently came to be known, was described by John Gray (1998) as one of the
most ambitious attempts at constructing the free market as a social institution to be
implemented anywhere this century – and hailed by the World Bank, the Economist,
and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as a model
for the rest of the world to follow (Kelsey 1997: 62).
This article reports on an ethnographic study that examines the rise of so-called
‘third stream’ activities in one of New Zealand’s largest universities and its implications
for academic research, knowledge production and the construction of professional
identities. In doing so, we explore some of the different forms that commercialisation
has taken and the way that different actors within the university – particularly those
who are pioneering these third mission activities – understand and interpret their
actions. The current research, which is part of a wider study of university reform and
globalisation, 1 was based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over several months and
16 in-depth interviews with key academics and administrators involved in third stream
activities. 2 These included institutions and research clusters engaged in bioengineering
and biotechnology, New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, various fundraising and alumni
bodies, and officials in the Research Office, the School of Business and the Tertiary
Education Union.
This part of that study particularly sought to address the following questions:

• How is this emphasis on ‘third stream’ activities and the commercialisation of

knowledge impacting on social relations within the university (including relations
between different categories of university employees as well as between academics
and university management)?
• What new kinds of subjects are these ‘third stream’ activities forging within the
modern university (including the university itself as a form of institutional subject),
and what model of citizenship are they promoting?

1 Ethnographic fieldwork on the reform of New Zealand’s universities was carried out over five years,
from 2007 to the present. To date, this study has involved over 60 in-depth interviews across a range
of different university stakeholders, including university managers, Council members, academics,
students, ministry officials and government ministers.
2 We would like to thank the Faculty of Arts of The University of Auckland for providing the funding
that enabled us to carry out the fieldwork for this study. We also wish to thank our interviewees,
whose experiences and reflections provided the data for this study. As with all ethnographic research,
any omissions or commissions in the analysis of these data are our responsibility.


C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
270 CRIS SHORE AND LAURA MCLAUCHLAN

• Where do we see most evidence of the influence of commercialisation within the

academy?
• What conflicts and tensions are these third mission activities creating and are they in
conflict with the other more traditional missions of the university?

Our hypothesis is that the current emphasis on commercialisation of university

knowledge and the institutionalisation of university–industry partnerships is having a
significant impact on universities in two important ways. It is:

1 Redefining power relations in favour of management and those who control

substantial budgets and staffing (what we might term the rise of the ‘budgetariat’
and demise of the professoriat).
2 Transforming social relations within universities; creating new divisions, hierarchies
and tensions not only between academics and management, but also between
academics themselves, and between faculties and between universities. This also raises
wider question about who can claim to speak for ‘the university’ and who sets its
policy agenda (and questions about the ontology of the university itself: i.e. what it
is and what it is for).

The rise of third stream activities in New Zealand and in other countries such as
the UK and Australia is being driven largely by government funding policies, but also
by the new discourse of ‘relevance’ that holds that universities must make themselves
more responsive to stakeholders and to society. However, ‘society’ is usually conflated
with business and commerce, these being the primary ‘users’ who populate government
imaginaries of what constitutes society (see Slaughter and Leslie 1997; Strathern 2005).
Rather than seeing this as a departure from the traditional mission of the university
to promote public knowledge, helping business make money by commercialising and
privatising university knowledge is increasingly seen as consistent with the university’s
social mission. Indeed, many university officials and representatives from government
organisations that we interviewed were quite adamant that, in their view, helping
individuals or business make money is a social good. Much of the literature on
university reform and globalisation highlights the extent to which universities have been
‘penetrated’ and ‘colonised’ by industry and commerce. While commerce undoubtedly
assumes a more prominent role in contemporary research universities, we suggest
that colonial appropriation may not be the best metaphor for understanding these
developments. Far from being victims of a project to bring about the neoliberal
colonisation of universities, many parts of the academy appear to have eagerly embraced
the logic of privatisation and the ethos of entrepreneurialism.

Fr o m t h e u n i v e r s i t y i n r u i n s t o t h e r i s e o f a c a d e m i c
entrepreneurs

One writer whose work is particularly salient for these debates is Bill Readings.
Writing over 15 years ago, Readings gave a prescient account of the effects of
commercialisation on the university and the production of knowledge. The traditional
liberal idea of the university based on the autonomy of knowledge as an end in
itself, he claimed, was fast being supplanted by a new commercial rationality. If


C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
 REMAKING THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY 271

one expression of this was casualisation of junior academic staff and the increasing
number of new employees being placed on insecure, short-term and part-time contracts,
another was the ‘proletarianisation of the professoriat’ itself through the disciplinary
regimes of auditing and New Public Management (NPM). As Readings pessimistically
noted:

We have entered a posthistorical phase. The mission of liberal education is lost.

There is no longer a subject that can incarnate this principle. . . . The adventure
of a liberal education no longer has a hero. Neither a student to embark upon it,
nor a professor hero as its end. (Readings 1996: 1)

With universities increasingly being reorganised to resemble transnational business

corporations, the administrator rather than the professor had become the central hero
and protagonist in the story of the university. For Readings this meaning and mission
of the university had become so blurred that it was ‘no longer clear what the place of
the University is within society nor what the exact nature of that society is’ (Readings
1996: 2).
Readings was writing in the mid-1990s at a time when the neoliberalisation of
universities – and the spread of New Public Management – was still in its relative
infancy in most OECD countries. Since the 1990s those neoliberal processes have
developed in a number of uneven and often contradictory ways that have invariably
been inflected through different national policy agendas (Peck and Tickell 2002: 383;
Brenner et al. 2010: 183). However, one common and recurring theme has been the
institutionalisation of entrepreneurial activities aimed at bridging the perceived ‘gap’
between academia and industry. This has created new opportunity structures and spaces
of identity for those able to exploit the opportunities offered. As a result, a new group of
‘heroic protagonists’ has emerged in the story of the modern university: the professorial
entrepreneurs, colloquially referred to as the ‘big hitters’ or ‘academic super-stars’.

A c a d e m i c e n t r e p r e n e u r s : a n e t h n o g r a p h i c p r o fi l e

While Readings emphasised the emergence of the administrator as the central protag-
onist within the increasingly neoliberalised university, our research identified another,
emergent hero figure: the ‘entrepreneurial academic’. For some, the phrase ‘academic
entrepreneur’ is an oxymoron or contradiction in terms as academia, by definition,
is supposed to be a space for reflection set apart from the pecuniary imperatives
of the market. Yet the fact that it has become such an accepted and commonplace
term is indicative of the changing character of contemporary universities. Repeatedly
referred to as the ‘super-stars’ of the university, these entrepreneurial academics were
individuals who effectively combined their academic skills with entrepreneur business
acumen. Typically, they were individuals who had raised substantial sums of money
through government grants or contract research, often forming relationships with
business in order to secure such grants. The greatest of these were those who had
successfully founded (and directed) large-scale research institutes such as the University
of Auckland’s Liggins Institute (Professor Sir Peter Gluckman) and the Auckland
Bioengineering Institute (Professor Peter Hunter), or in the social sciences, centres


C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
272 CRIS SHORE AND LAURA MCLAUCHLAN

funded through external grants – frequently ‘public good’ contract research funding –
such as ‘COMPASS’ (Professor Peter Davis) or ‘Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga’, the
Maori Centre of Excellence. In short, entrepreneurial academics are knowledge brokers
and mediators with track records for income-generation; individuals who are able to
successfully operate in the space between the academy and industry, able to leverage
external funding for their research and to employ teams of researchers and support staff.
They are seen as innovators who have succeeded in creating or running viable spinout
businesses.
An ‘entrepreneur’ is, by definition, an individual who undertakes industrial and
commercial activities with a view to making a profit and who ‘will usually invest
capital in the business and take on the risks associated with the investment’ (Law and
Smullen 2008). While precise meanings of the term may vary, the most commonly
accepted definition of an entrepreneur is someone who risks capital in the hope of
substantial financial gains – the emphasis being on ‘calculated risk-taking’ (Scott and
Marshall 2009). The idea that entrepreneurs are dynamic innovators and wealth-creators
– as opposed to conventional risk-averse managers or business-owners that conform
to established procedures – is a conception that originated with Joseph Schumpeter
(1934), yet remains curiously embedded in modern capitalist countries. This begs the
question, ‘what risks are borne by the academic entrepreneur? (Or ‘intrapreneur’, since
most remain employees within the university in which they work). Typically, academic
entrepreneurs were identified as individuals who exercised financial and managerial
control over those human and financial resources (i.e. budgets and staffing). In this
respect, they occupy an ambiguous mediating position not too dissimilar to that of the
cultural brokers and middlemen described in the classical anthropological literature
on patron–client relations in complex societies (Wolf 1966). These entrepreneurial
individuals were usually framed as being particularly passionate and energetic, with
a real desire to create ‘relevant’ research and to interact with the public. In this way, our
protagonist was seen as a highly moral figure, desiring to give back to the community
or taxpayer. However, they were not seen as individuals who necessarily bore the
risks associated with any financial investments (i.e. they were not investing their own
money, only their professional credibility). But beyond trying to map the features
of the entrepreneurial academic as a new social category, we were also interested in
understanding these people as individuals and actors, i.e. how do they perceive their
role within the university, negotiate the apparent contradictions of that position, and
conceptualise the relationship between the university and society?
Our research identified three key sites where the commercialisation of universities
appears most evident and most advanced: UniServices (the University’s commercialisa-
tion arm), the recently opened Institute for Innovation in Biotechnology, and the School
of Business. However, combining the words ‘commercialisation’ and ‘universities’
in the same breath raises an immediate paradox in the context of New Zealand:
Unlike the United States and much of the developing world, New Zealand’s eight
universities are all ‘public institutions’ and are legally defined as ‘not for profit’
organisations whose primary mission is defined in terms of public good teaching
and research. How universities reconcile their charitable status with the current
emphasis on generating surpluses and patents from commercialising their intellectual
property is just one of several conundrums the rise of third stream activities is
creating.


C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
 REMAKING THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY 273

W h e r e c o m m e r c e m e e t s t h e a c a d e m y. C a s e s t u d y 1 :
UniSer vices Ltd.

Auckland UniServices Ltd. is a limited liability company wholly owned by the

University of Auckland, formed in 1989 as the ‘commercialisation arm’ of the University
(Uniservices Ltd. 2010). It has three main objectives: commercialising University
research by identifying and supporting potentially financially valuable research to a
commercial outcome; brokering and managing external research contracts; and contract
education in which UniServices educates governments and businesses in processes
of commercialisation. As UniServices is owned by the University, it is, for taxation
purposes, a charitable company. The company operates within the not-for-profit
structure of the University, integrating any surplus it makes back into the operations of
the University. This was cited by a number of informants as evidence that UniServices’
operations were entirely consistent with the University’s ‘public good’ mandate.
In the 2010 financial year, UniServices made $125 million in surplus, largely
through contract research, making it not only ‘a major asset for The University of
Auckland’ but also ‘the country’s leading vehicle for commercialisation of research
from public organisations’. There are goals in place to double this yearly surplus by
2020 (UniServices Ltd. 2010). The 2009 Budget Report proudly extols UniServices’
contribution to the University:

Commercial revenue through UniServices and public good contracts administered

through the Research Office each account for roughly half the 2009 total –
$93.6m and $98.7m respectively. UniServices revenue, however, is growing at
a faster rate than public good research revenue, reflecting both the smallness
and relatively static nature of public research funding pools in New Zealand
as well as UniServices’ outstanding success in leveraging commercial revenue
from the University’s academics and the intellectual property they generate. (The
University of Auckland 2009: 3)

This provides a clear illustration of why University management now regards

commercial research as preferable to public good research. In the University’s 2009
Annual Report the Vice-Chancellor particularly lauded those parts of the University
that were raising commercial revenue:

Externally funded research grew strongly, reaching $206 million in 2009,

56 percent up on the $131 million in 2004. This reflects the confidence granting
agencies and businesses have in our research staff. The most obvious example
of the quality of our researchers, and of the connection of fundamental research
to real outcomes is the work of Distinguished Professor Peter Hunter, 2009
winner of the Rutherford Medal, New Zealand’s top science honor. Professor
Hunter is, with Professors Ted Baker and Richard Faull, the third University of
Auckland scientist to win the Rutherford medal in the last four years. Much of
their work, and that of many other leading researchers at the University, finds
application through the activities of our research commercialization company,
Auckland UniServices Ltd. UniServices’ revenue has grown by 15 percent in the
last year, a spectacular result given the recession. (The University of Auckland
2009: 7)

C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
274 CRIS SHORE AND LAURA MCLAUCHLAN

As the quote above shows, the University’s most prominent academic entrepreneurs are
now lionised as the heroes of the University, in large measure because of the commercial
value of their research.
Our interviews included five key individuals who were either employed by or
worked closely with UniServices. From these, we can extrapolate four interesting
dimensions of the changing relationship between academia and industry.

Perceived benefits of creating a commercial wing or annex

The creation of UniServices as an operation annexed off from the University has several
benefits. As its Director explained, academics are generally good at research but ‘not
good at business’. By forming UniServices as a separate company, the University had
‘in its wisdom’ both reduced risk and maximised profits, in part by not having to make
only ethical investments. Through setting up UniServices as a limited liability company,
the University was able to undertake risky investments that it would otherwise not be
able to. As the director of UniServices explained:

Universities can’t own shares because then you would be seen to be investing
public money into risky investments. There’s a finance act that precludes that. All
of the things the University has trouble doing, we can do. We provide a business
friendly face to business. So we can make quick decisions, we can write quick
contracts, we can buy and sell companies. We can do those things the University
can’t do well, or couldn’t do at all.

From a theoretical perspective, this is the university equivalent of the ‘duty free’ area,
the casino or offshore tax haven; i.e. spaces where the ‘normal’ rules of society have
been suspended. Perhaps a better analogy for this kind of ‘legitimation of lawlessness’
is philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s (2005) idea of the ‘state of exception’ – or what we
might also call the ‘Guantanamo principle’; that is, deliberately designed spaces where
conventional legal principles and practices are conveniently by-passed or rendered
inoperable.

Providing a matchmaker service?

A second advantage of UniServices is that it provides a framework for business to

identify research that could be directed towards more applied applications, but without
too much overt interference with academic freedom of investigation. Businesses are
often ‘frustrated’ by the academic goal of pursuing knowledge for its own sake, so
the Director explained. UniServices provides a portal through which companies can
interact with academic researchers and see what kinds of research are going on inside
the University that might have commercial potential. The message to companies is that
they might ‘find unexpected big new things’, the UniServices by-line being ‘UniServices:
The Start of Something Big’. The Director added, ‘and that’s our promise to business.
Because, if you come here, you will find things that you might not have thought of
yourself’.
Interestingly, the Director of UniServices appears genuinely protective of aca-
demics’ rights not to be dictated to by business. However, in order to cater to business’

C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
 REMAKING THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY 275

desire to direct research, UniServices actually hires in its own researchers. It currently
has some 700 researchers on its books, many of them contracted in.

Fulfilling the national government’s policy agenda

By contrast, a senior manager of UniServices held a very different view of what

the University was for; namely, to create relevant research that will deliver social
and economic development. The current centre-right coalition government led by
the National party has been particularly keen to emphasise that university funding
should be defined as an investment for the New Zealand economy and not as a ‘grant’.
However, in his view this position was not all that different to that of the previous
Labour government, which was equally ‘enthusiastic’ about emphasising the need to
get quantifiable returns from the money spent on higher education.

The University has many objectives. Firstly, it has a very strong mission to be
relevant to business and society. How does it do that? It does that in a range
of ways, including having relevant and useful degree courses. But a direct and
tangible way is by actually working directly with business or government to help
achieve their policy objectives. That’s a way in which academic research can be
applied in a completely direct way. . . (. . .) . . . Grant money from the government
to universities under a contestable system is increasingly being construed as an
investment, not a grant. That’s the main change. It’s an investment in the future
of New Zealand, and in particular, New Zealand’s economic growth and social
development. That’s a key driver now. And if you can’t demonstrate that in your
grant application, you won’t get grants. (UniServices interview 2011)

Like the interviewee above, other University managers also expressed the view that
research should not be funded unless it demonstrated relevance for policy.

The myth surrounding Intellectual Property

Despite the emphasis on commercialising Intellectual Property (IP), the University

actually earns very little from licensing or IP. Licensing income only accounted for
some $5–10 million of UniServices’ $125 million revenue in 2010. One University
administrator described this as ‘the big lie of UniServices’: ‘although they are successful,
and are touted as a great commercialisation engine, their emphasis on securing IP doesn’t
actually do them any favours. They would be much better off to concentrate on building
good relationships with business.’ Another informant, whose academic career was based
on commercial partnerships, also highlighted the problems caused by IP restrictions. In
order to secure contracts with leading New Zealand companies, she said ‘I pretty much
had to give away my IP’. She described this as a ‘pragmatic sacrifice’ and likened it to a
‘loss leader’.

C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
276 CRIS SHORE AND LAURA MCLAUCHLAN

New spaces of entrepreneurialism. Case study 2:

the Institute for Innovation in Biotechnology

The Institute for Innovation in Biotechnology (IIB) was initiated in 2006 as an industry
portal, brokering the co-location of businesses within the School of Biological Sciences,
holding industry events and running the Master in Bioscience Enterprise programme
under contract from the University. Owned by the University of Auckland and operated
by the School of Biological Sciences and located in an extension to the School of
Biological Sciences on the University of Auckland’s city campus, the Institute is a
‘virtual’ entity; its only direct employees are its director and his personal assistant. Like
other Schools and Departments in the University, the School of Biological Sciences
runs on a full cost recovery model in which it pays commercial rent on the buildings
it occupies as well as on depreciation of machinery and infrastructure. The idea is that
biotechnology companies lease space and resources from the Institute at full commercial
rates (or ‘domestic’ rates if they are located within the Institute itself), which in turn rents
them from the School of Biological Sciences, which itself leases from the University.
The resulting hierarchy of contractual relations is increasingly typical of management–
employee relations within the neoliberal university.
The IIB is the first such institute of its kind in New Zealand, with state-of-the-art
facilities and a brand new extension that was officially opened by Prime Minister John
Key in April 2011. With its 10,000 m2 of office and lab space, the new annex is a fully
integrated research complex that can accommodate up to 500 scientists, researchers and
students, and a dozen biotechnology companies. Of the $35 million that it cost to build,
the government contributed $10 million under its so-called ‘Partnerships for Excellence’
scheme (InSCight 2009: 13). Designed to forge stronger links between universities
and industry, the Partnership for Excellence scheme is itself an interesting example of
New Zealand neoliberalism and the way government has sought to encourage public–
private partnerships by incentivising commercial companies to support large capital
projects.
At the time of writing there were nine biotechnology companies located at the
Institute and six organisations with interests in science and innovation were involved as
partners. The Institute’s director emphasised the symbolism of the then almost finished
building’s architecture, in which the large glass windows in the airy offices look out over
trees and lawn, reflecting the IIB’s position as a part of a whole ‘bio industry ecosystem’.
The director emphasised that all researchers, whether academic or commercial, would
enter through the building’s single door; this physical intermingling of industry and
academia was a key part of the design vision; i.e. unlike other ‘incubators’, businesses
that co-located inside the Institute would not be ‘annexed off’, but rather industry
researchers would be located among academics, sharing tearooms and the single entrance
into the complex.
Joerg Kistler, the IIB’s Swiss-born director, was often referred to as the epitome
of the entrepreneurial academic: a man who has sought to pioneer the university-as-
business model. The commercialisation of academic research was entirely consistent
with Kistler’s vision of the School of Biological Sciences (which he described as ‘a
40 million dollar per annum enterprise’). But he also acknowledged that many colleagues
opposed his enterprise model. While the School of Biological Sciences operates the IIB,
the IIB plays a very different role to that of the School: ‘it is effectively an industry
liaison institute. We don’t do any research. We don’t do any teaching. We are basically

C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
 REMAKING THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY 277

real estate agents’. As if to underline this point, Kistler went on to state, in a somewhat
self-deprecatory tone, ‘I’m really a sort of “professor in real estate”’.
For Kistler, the IIB was an ‘industry portal’ whose mission is to ‘interact with
industry’. Its remit included providing space for companies, giving them ‘access to
infrastructure’, organising ‘enterprise training’, running ‘industry workshops, forums
and networking events’ and hosting for the University a highly successful ‘Masters in
Bioscience Enterprise’ programme.
The significant point here is that the IIB (and by extension the University itself)
has become a new type of ‘knowledge broker’ whose aim is to create new income
streams from spinouts, patents, licences – and rent. Like a matchmaker or go-between,
Kistler sees the IIB’s role as bringing together academic and scientific expertise with
external venture capitalists. How this impacts on the University’s definition of itself
as a ‘public institution’ and ‘not for profit’ organisation is a question we will address
later. For Kistler, however, these contradictions are recognised but dismissed. As a
‘knowledge broker’ engaged in what he termed ‘translational research’, he sees himself
as an entrepreneur who is helping to ‘bridge the divide’ between academia and industry
by bringing university research to those who have the ‘know how’ to exploit and market
it. The metaphors of ‘bridges’ and ‘gaps’ feature prominently in the discourse of the
new breed of university entrepreneur:

We’re breaking down the barriers between industry and academia, so increasingly
the university becomes more commercially oriented, the research becomes more
translational. This is a world-wide trend that we see with pure science funding
. . . government funding increasingly is being looked at as an investment that has
to pay a return to the economic goals of the country. And that’s why that money
increasingly gets put into research themes that are a little bit closer to market.
(IIB interviews 2011)

But this new partnership involves industry personnel playing a more active role
in academia and in the delivery of teaching programmes. For example, the programme
director for the Masters in Bioscience Enterprise Programme is not an academic but a
person ‘contracted in from industry’, as is the manager of the Biopharma programme,
which was described as a ‘sort of umbrella over all biomedical research in the Medical
School and in Biological Sciences’. In SBS, Kistler explained:

We have formed what’s called the ‘centre for genomics and proteomics’ where we
have put all the genomics equipment, DNA sequencers, mass spectrometers, and
all that stuff into a laboratory, and we put all these fancy machines that can analyse
what’s in a mixture into another unit. Then we hired the appropriate expert staff
to run these things. It’s basically run as a service, but the academics can use that
service [too]. (IIB interviews 2011)

This has resulted in various start-up or ‘spin out’ companies, but also spin-ins,
as external companies decide to locate themselves within the Institute. Often these
are venture capital firms or start-up companies such as ‘Comvita’, a New Zealand
manufacturer of high-potency manuka honey products.

C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
278 CRIS SHORE AND LAURA MCLAUCHLAN

Creating new university subjects

These new teaching and research initiatives in enterprise and entrepreneurship require a
different type of employee from that of the conventional academic subject. Kistler spoke
enthusiastically about the ‘large cohort of very entrepreneurial staff’ he had brought
together. He explained that, as Director for the past 10 yeas, he had been recruiting
people with a more entrepreneurial outlook. He drew a distinction between two kinds
of academic (illustrating this by drawing a line on the table with his finger to show
two ends of a spectrum): at one end (furthest from himself) are the ‘purist’ or ‘classic
academics’ of the traditional type, which he placed at ‘the more integrative, evolutionary
and holistic’ end of biological science. At the other, more ‘translational end’, were those
who preferred commercial research: people like himself who wanted to ‘make science
more meaningful’ (i.e. applied). For Kistler, both types of research were necessary:

We want good basic science to be done, it is essential to drive the innovation

engine, but to actually translate it to something that will flow back into the
economy and into better heath of people, better food, a better environment . . . .
For us, patents are equally important to a science paper. (IIB interviews 2011)

However, a hierarchy of status has emerged between people on the different ends
of this spectrum. Kistler explained that 80% of the external research income came
from the ‘entrepreneurial folk’, although he acknowledged that ‘classic academics’
contributed in terms of PhD supervision and teaching revenue. The quantity of external
revenue raised was now a key measure of academic virtue (and has become a prominent
feature of the standard academic ‘CV’). Of the $40 million in revenue that the School
generated, roughly one third was paid back to the centre as the School’s ‘contribution
to the University’, which, he explained, was consistent with the University’s ‘full cost
recovery model’. But there was also an implicit assumption that the traditional or ‘purist’
academic was becoming something of an anachronism:

The tension is more around the philosophy around what is a university. The pure
academic thinks that the university should be pure, independent, have nothing to
do with industry; we are just a think tank, you know, that’s totally independent.
That is the way it used to be. However, the modern landscape is very, very
different. Universities around the world have changed hugely in the last 10 years
and have become increasingly dependent on other sources other than just a pure
public funding. (IIB interviews 2011)

A former Dean of Science and one of the architects behind the creation of the
SBS was also identified as a leading entrepreneurial academic. But while he also
emphasised the importance of hiring staff with ‘entrepreneurial outlooks’, his model
of the entrepreneurial university differed from that of Kistler and the Director of
UniServices, who both emphasised the moneymaking potential of knowledge. The
former Dean, however, did not so much frame the University as a moneymaker in
and of itself, but rather saw it as ‘an essential part of the training system’ and ‘an
increasingly essential part of New Zealand if we’re going to transform our economy
away from commodities to value-added’. According to him, many people had tried to
persuade the government to that point of view, but getting government to listen ‘had

C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
 REMAKING THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY 279

been difficult’. This idea of the University as a repository of knowledge for ‘training’
good citizens who will think their way into making ‘value-added’ commodities, thereby
improving living standards for all New Zealanders, was a view frequently expressed by
entrepreneurial academics. Virtually all of our interviewees tended to frame the ‘success’
and ‘relevance’ of the University in economic and budgetary terms, reflecting a more
general ‘financialization’ of the logic by which universities – and the knowledge they
produce – are now evaluated (see Lyotard 1994; Readings 1996).

Case study 3: The University of Auckland School of

Business

In many respects, the University of Auckland’s new School of Business epitomises

the values of commercialism and entrepreneurialism that have become increasingly
hegemonic in the management of higher education. Commissioned by a previous Vice-
Chancellor, John Hood (himself a former director of Fontera and Fletcher Challenge,
two of New Zealand’s largest multinational companies), and financed through a public–
private partnership, this is the most expensive and ambitious ‘signature building’ in
Auckland University’s property portfolio. The building was named after the millionaire
philanthropist Owen G. Glenn, who contributed $7 million towards its construction. A
life-sized oil portrait of Mr Glenn adorns the wall of the building’s atrium entrance (even
his wife, Decima, has a conference room named after her). And a large plaque by the
lift commemorates in stone those who donated money for the building’s construction.
The architecture of the building symbolises the ethos of contemporary knowledge
capitalism. As Sturm and Turner observe of the new neoliberal ‘university of excellence’,

It is no longer the bricks and mortar edifice of old; it is steel and glass and the
principles of its design (‘robust’ and ‘transparent’) are values that permeate all
levels of its operation. It is generic by design, and it means business. (2011: 16)

That ethos is manifest in the Business School’s continual efforts to create – and celebrate
– entrepreneurial activities such as an ‘Institute for Leadership’, an ‘Icehouse’ business
incubator, and an annual student-led ‘Spark Ideas Entrepreneurship Challenge’ award.
It is also reflected in the backlit posters that decorate the walls of the lower-level corridor
between the main lecture theatre (the ‘Fisher and Pykel auditorium’) and the various
‘break-out’ rooms. ‘Celebrating New Zealand Business’ is the official theme of these
posters. Each one focuses on a New Zealand story of success – from the ‘Lord of the
Rings’ trilogy and the history of flight in New Zealand, to ‘Comvita’ natural health
products, AJ Hackett’s Bungee Jumping, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tait Electronics.
Each success story is carried under a single-word heading: ‘achievement’, ‘commitment’,
‘pride’, ‘ingenuity’, ‘risk’ and ‘success’ – the idea being that these attributes were framed
as being particularly ‘kiwi’ qualities.
Along the other wall are back-lit panels showcasing the ‘Fairfax Media New Zealand
Business Hall of Fame’, whose byline is: ‘The business hall of fame acknowledges the
significant economic and social contributions, through enterprise, to New Zealand – it’s
about making and giving back’. Here millionaire ‘Kiwi philanthropists’ are celebrated,
such as Princess Te Puea and Steven Tindal. Significantly, none of these business
champions is an alumnus of the Business School itself. According to Wendell Dunn, who

C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
280 CRIS SHORE AND LAURA MCLAUCHLAN

holds the University of Auckland’s Foundation Chair in ‘Entrepreneurship’, that may

be symptomatic of a wider failure among New Zealand policy makers to understand
what constitutes entrepreneurialism. A successful American businessman and innovator
with an impressive track record of raising money for the various institutions he has
worked for, Dunn was headhunted by the University of Auckland in 2003 and now
runs several highly successful postgraduate programmes in Bioscience Enterprise and
Commercializing Research. While the creation of a chair in entrepreneurship might
seem to reflect a far-sighted, enterprising initiative on the part of the University,
Dunn is more sceptical. In his view, the University ‘doesn’t really understand
what the word “entrepreneurship” means and, equally, what it doesn’t mean’. In
New Zealand, entrepreneurship is ‘frequently construed as owning your own small
business’ (and selling it once it becomes relatively successful). It is a model that sees
entrepreneurship in terms of ‘maximising revenue’ by generating returns on investment
in the shortest possible time. Dunn contrasts this with his own understanding of what
an entrepreneurial university ought to be:

A university which understands the nature of the wealth creating function and
role of entrepreneurs – incites those who are interested in academe, students
and faculty, to creatively apply their talents in solving, what I call ‘most worthy
problems’, to the mutual benefit of the institution and society.

When we point out that this sounds remarkably like a definition of the traditional
university, Dunn smiles, saying ‘Well, surprise, surprise – and why shouldn’t it be?’

Conclusions: New spaces and subjects

of the entrepreneurial university

The question raised at the outset was ‘What impact is the rise of third stream activities
having on the meaning of the university and what new kinds of academic subjects are
being created as a result of this emphasis on commercialisation?’ Our ethnographic
study from New Zealand highlights four elements that, to differing degrees, reflect
wider trends in the reform of public universities globally. These include a marked shift
away from the university’s traditional academic and ‘social good’ missions towards
an increasingly pervasive emphasis on income-generation and commercialisation; the
creation of new kinds of self-managed, enterprising subjects, new hierarchies, divisions
and tensions within and between universities, and the new moral value and kudos
attached to revenue creation and entrepreneurialism.

Redefining the mission of the university?

Our study suggests that third stream activities are redefining the mission of the
university, most notably by changing research practices and understandings of what
counts as ‘valid’ knowledge. A key trend that our study identified is the growing
encroachment of ‘Third Mission’ activities onto the other university missions. The value
of teaching and research is increasingly evaluated in terms of the financial indicators


C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
 REMAKING THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY 281

and the rationality of commerce. Alongside research output and research ‘impact factor’
weightings, the amount of external income an academic generates for their university and
the number of Masters and PhD student completions have become the key performance
indicators (‘KPIs’) for promotion and remuneration in the neoliberal university.
In New Zealand as elsewhere, the so-called ‘STEM’ subjects (Science, Technology,
Engineering and Medicine) receive much higher funding than the arts; income generated
by research and overheads is increasingly siphoned off to promote areas of knowledge
that university managers deem to be more ‘important’ – which are usually defined
in terms of their external revenue-generating potential. The net result is a general
‘financialisation’ of the university and its services. This is also reflected in the privileging
of the more applied, industry-oriented and scientific subjects. The aim of the neoliberal
university model appears to be to foster innovators and entrepreneurs who will
contribute more effectively to national wealth creation by being more attuned to
economic imperatives, and more enterprising in their use of knowledge (the imperatives
of ‘translational research’). The preference appears to be for scientists, technicians and
business people rather than social scientists or those trained in the humanities. The
traditional liberal model of the rounded citizen equipped with academic, analytical
skills and social competence is still evident, but given less priority, as has been noted
elsewhere (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004; Marginson and Considine 2000).
From the perspective of our interviewees, becoming more commercially orientated
was not an option but an ‘unavoidable reality’ – and a direction clearly set out in the
University’s Strategic Plan. For a small country like New Zealand, according to the
dominant narrative, there was no choice in the matter. But most of our entrepreneurial
informants did not see this as something negative. Several saw no real distinction
between fundamental and applied research (the ‘best researchers’ are already ‘doing
both’). As one interviewee put it:

I’m not saying money shouldn’t go into the arts and so forth, which you have to
maintain, but if you want to grow the economy and get away from depending on
the udder of a cow, you really have to start getting into higher value added . . .
there are some very successful examples where that is happening in the economy
– Fisher and Paykel HealthCare, Orion Software etc. – but more money into
these sort of mixed academic commercial models is the way to go. That means
you spend less on something else. (Interviews 2011)

That ‘something else’, however, was the arts and humanities. Yet despite their higher
profile, academic entrepreneurs often feel unappreciated and misunderstood by their
colleagues. Entrepreneurialism sets them apart from their colleagues. As a former Dean
of Science lamented:

At one stage I sat on three different councils (the museum council, the university
council and the Auckland Regional Council) as well as on three company boards:
UniServices, DNA Diagnostics and a bus company. So outside I’m regarded as
a left-wing university radical; inside the University I’m regarded as slightly right
of Genghis Khan. (Interviews 2011)

For another academic entrepreneur, running a research centre geared towards contract
research was


C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
282 CRIS SHORE AND LAURA MCLAUCHLAN

Really like running a small business . . . The Faculty take us more seriously because
we’re bringing in money they wouldn’t otherwise have . . . But the university
doesn’t know how to facilitate innovation and creativity; it’s too hardwired to the
traditional, formulaic way of academic work. (Interviews 2011)

What kinds of subject or ‘citizenship’ are being promoted by university

entrepreneurialism?

Unlike most of their colleagues, who often expressed scepticism and opposition towards
the encroachment of free-market logic and interests upon traditional academic values
and practices, many of the entrepreneurial academics cited above see the shift towards
a more commercial orientation as both necessary and inevitable – and view the more
traditional academic principles and practices as anachronistic obstacles to be overcome.
Our findings therefore suggest that commercialisation is being promoted not only as
a necessary expedient, but also increasingly as a normative goal. One effect of this is the
creation of new forms of cultural capital and new hierarchies of mana (or institutional
‘prestige’) expressed, for example, in the public celebration of entrepreneurial academics
and in the way university managers (and internal university publications and websites)
increasingly extol the great success stories of ‘research excellence’ in the fields of applied
science. By contrast, the arts and humanities are the ‘Cinderellas’ of the university
story – even though they have higher international research ratings, as measured by
consecutive research assessment exercises. The entrepreneurially oriented university
not only creates new social divisions within universities, particularly between academics
and management, but also divisions between faculties, departments and individual(ised)
academics – most notably as a result of the ‘star player’ syndrome that the new categories
of ‘excellence’ and research ranking systems create.

Frictions and ethical conundrums of commercialisation

Commercialisation is generating new problems of an ethical and practical kind. For

example, what does entrepreneurship mean in a public university? And how does the
goal of commercialising university knowledge fit with the ‘not-for-profit’ or charitable
status of the public university? As we have argued, the creation of externally-directed
commercialisation units like UniServices opens up an anomalous space that seemingly
contradicts the traditional ‘not-for-profit’ and ‘public good’ rationale of the public
university. Following Agamben (2005), we have termed the creation of such institutional
‘spaces of exception’ where financial imperatives and discourses of crisis supersede
normal rules and ethics, the ‘Guantanamo principle’.
Commercialisation and financialisation also raise other ethical tensions and
conundrums. A good illustration of this tension occurred recently when concerns
were raised in the University of Auckland’s Ethics Committee about a new course
in Bioscience Enterprise that required MA students to conduct research with
biotechnology companies. However, for reasons of commercial sensitivity, the students’
theses were being placed under embargos for up to 4 or 5 years. The Committee
learned that some 18 out of 40 MA theses (i.e. some 45%) had been embargoed and
was concerned about the implications of this trend for the University’s mission as

C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
 REMAKING THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY 283

a public institution. For some, embargos imposed because of commercial sensitivity

compromised that public mission and represented an alarming inroad of private-sector
commercial interests into the principles of public education. Others dismissed these
fears arguing that these kinds of requirements were necessary if student wished to gain
hands-on experience of working in a commercial and industrial research environment;
this was good practice as well as good experience. However, concerns were raised that
students may feel coerced. Some also noted that the University was, in effect, subsidising
private commercial research through such initiatives. This last point suggests a new
conception of knowledge that emerges from commercialisation and the wider processes
of academic capitalism in which it is embedded. Commercialisation promotes the idea
of knowledge as a commodity to be owned, exploited and tied up in confidentiality
clauses, rather than as a shared societal good.

The moral significance of ‘relevance’: making revenue as the new form

of virtue

Finally, a particularly salient research finding was the moral kudos that entrepreneurial
academics seem to have acquired along with the economic and social capital that
they have gained from their entrepreneurialism. The new heroes of the university
story increasingly appear to embody the qualities of the Schumpeterian ideal-typical
entrepreneur; individualistic operators who display a strong sense of agency, who take
management into their own hands, and who take it upon themselves to put to use
the wealth of untapped research in universities. Commercialisation of research was
framed by interviewees as being a key aspect of professional responsibility in the current
university climate – helping to grow the financial resources of both one’s department and
the university was seen as fundamental to being a good team player. Our protagonists
of this entrepreneurial model did not see commercialisation of university knowledge
as posing any contradictions to the ‘public good’ role of university education and
knowledge: for them, profit is the new ‘public good’. As the case of UniServices shows,
the term ‘value’ typically conflates research that is ‘of benefit to society’ with ‘profit’,
in much the same way as the term ‘wealth’ is used to evoke the dual meaning of the
‘wealth of untapped knowledge’ locked up in the university, and the revenue that can
be ‘unlocked’ through its commercialisation. The moral significance that now attaches
to revenue-generation and ‘relevance’ thus seems to offer a resolution to the apparent
contradiction of entrepreneurship in a public university.
University-driven pushes towards commercialisation were therefore viewed by
these academic entrepreneurs as encouraging good academic practice by ensuring
efficiency and relevancy. Through the alignment of the evaluations and actions of
such academics with the political objectives of the University, these academics seem
to epitomise the kind of ‘self-governing’ neo-liberal citizens described by Rose and
other governmentality theorists (Cruikshank 1999; Rose 1998 [1996]: 155). As Rose and
Miller argue, for self-governing subjects power is ‘not so much a matter of imposing
constraints upon citizens as of “making up” citizens capable of bearing a kind of
regulated freedom’ in which ‘. . .individuals are not merely the subjects of power but
play a part in its operations’ (1992: 174). The academic entrepreneurs in our study did
not tend to speak of the political objectives of the University as something imposed

C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
284 CRIS SHORE AND LAURA MCLAUCHLAN

upon them. Rather, they typically expressed a belief in the morality of entrepreneurial
values such as efficiency and relevance – values that are in precise accord with University
management’s strategic objectives.
In sum, commercialisation – and the wider processes of academic capitalism in
which it is embedded – is having important transformative effects on the contemporary
public university, giving rise to new opportunities for academics and new ways of
being an academic (Hoffman 2011). In giving rise to new conceptions of virtue in the
university, commercialisation has introduced a new ‘hero’ into the university story:
the academic entrepreneur. This figure does not always sit comfortably alongside the
traditional academic, often relating more easily to the role of manager. However,
the apparent contradictions of entrepreneurship in a public university are mitigated
and surpassed by new conceptions of what might constitute ‘public good’ itself. The
potential of university research to be commercially exploited and to generate revenue is
being positioned as of equal (if not greater) significance as the liberal notion of university
knowledge as a shared social good.

Acknowledgements

Much of the inspiration for this study stems from our participation in a
4-year Marie Curie IRSES project entitled ‘University Reform, Globalization,
Europeanization’ (URGE), which is led by Susan Wright (Aarhus University)
and Susan Robertson (Bristol University). We wish to thank the New Zealand
government and the European Commission for their continuing and generous sup-
port for this project (see http://www.dpu.dk/forskning/forskningsprogrammer/epoke/
forskningsprojekter/universityreformglobalizationandeuropeanizationurge/). Earlier
versions of this paper were presented at Aarhus University and at the Australian
Anthropological Society conference in Perth in 2011. We wish to acknowledge the
generous support of our URGE colleagues at Aarhus and Bristol universities and, in
particular, Nicolas Lewis, Chris Tremewan, Elizabeth Rata, Lynette Read and Melissa
Spencer at The University of Auckland. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the
positive and detailed feedback given by the two anonymous referees who reviewed this
manuscript for Social Anthropology.

Cris Shore and Laura McLauchlan Department of Anthropology

The University of Auckland
Auckland 1142
New Zealand
Email: c.shore@auckland.ac.nz
Email: mclauchlan.laura@gmail.com

References
Agamben, G. 2005. State of exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bénéı̈, V. (ed.) 2005. Manufacturing citizenship: education and nationalism in Europe, South Asia, and
China. London: Routledge.
Brenner, N., J. Peck and N. Theodore 2010. ‘Variegated neoliberalization: geographies, modalities,
pathways’, Global Networks 10: 182–222.


C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
 REMAKING THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY 285

Cruikshank, B. 1999. The will to empower: democratic citizens and other subjects. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Deem, R. 2001. ‘Globalisation, new managerialism, academic capitalism and entrepreneurialism in
universities’, Comparative Education 37: 7–20.
Etzkowitz, H. 2003. ‘Research groups as “quasi-firms”: the invention of the entrepreneurial university’,
Research Policy 32: 109–21.
Foucault, M. 1991. Governmentality, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds.), The Foucault effect:
studies in governmentality, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hacking, I. 1991. How should we do the history of statistics? in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller
(eds.), The Foucault effect: studies in governmentality, 181–96. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Gray, J. 1998. False dawn. The delusions of global capitalism. London: Granta.
Hilgers, M. 2012. ‘The historicity of the neoliberal state’, Social Anthropology 20: 80–94.
Hoffman, S. G. 2011. ‘The new tools of the (scientific) trade: contested knowledge production and the
conceptual vocabularies of academic capitalism’, Social Anthropology 19: 439–62.
InSCight 2009. InSCight Faculty of Science Alumni Magazine, September: Issue 03.
Kelsey, J. 1997. The New Zealand experiment: a world model for structural adjustment? Auckland:
Auckland University Press.
Kelsey, J. 1998. ‘Privatizing the universities’, Journal of Law and Society 25: 51–70.
Laredo, P. 2007. ‘Revisiting the third mission of universities: toward a renewed categorization of
university activities?’, Higher Education Policy 20: 441–56.
Larner, W. and R. Le Heron 2005. ‘Neo-liberalizing spaces and subjectivities: reinventing New Zealand
Universities’, Organization 12: 843–62.
Law, J. and J. Smullen, 2008. Entrepreneur, in A dictionary of finance and banking. Oxford
Reference Online. Oxford University Press (http://www.oxfordreference.com.ezproxy.auckland.
ac.nz/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t20.e1189) Accessed 12 June 2011.
Lyotard, J.-F. 1994. The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota
University Press.
Marginson, S. and M. Considine, 2000. The enterprise university: power, governance, and reinvention
in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
Molas-Gallart, J., A. Salter, P. Patel, A. Scott and X. Duran 2002. Measuring third stream activities:
final report to the Russell Group of universities, Science and Technology Policy Research Unit,
University of Sussex, April.
Olssen, M. and M. Peters 2005. ‘Neoliberalism, higher education and the knowledge economy: from
the free market to knowledge capitalism’, Journal of Education Policy 20: 313–45.
Peck, J. and A. Tickell 2002. ‘Neo-liberalizing space’, Antipode 34: 380–404.
Philpott, K., L. Dooley, C. O’Reilly and G. Lupton 2010. ‘The entrepreneurial university: examining
the underlying academic tensions’, Technovation 31: 161–70.
Readings, B. 1996. The university in ruins. Cambridge MA: Harvard. University Press.
Robertson, S. and F. Kitigawa 2009. ‘Understanding knowledge mediation strategies in university
incubators: from policy to practice, and back again’, Unpublished research paper, LLAKES,
University of Bristol.
Rose, N. 1998 [1996]. Inventing our selves: psychology, power, and personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Rose, N. and P. Miller 1992. ‘Political power beyond the state: problematics of government’, British
Journal of Sociology 43: 173–205.
Schumpeter, J. 1934. The theory of economic development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Scott, J. and G. Marshall 2009. Entrepreneur, in J. Scott and G. Marshall (eds.), A dictionary
of sociology. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press (http://www.oxfordreference.
com.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t88.e730) Accessed 12
June 2011.
Shore, C. 2010. ‘The reform of New Zealand’s university system: “After neoliberalism”’, Learning and
Teaching in the Social Sciences (LATISS) 3: 1–31.


C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists.
286 CRIS SHORE AND LAURA MCLAUCHLAN

Slaughter, S. and L. Leslie 1997. Academic capitalism: politics, policies, and the entrepreneurial university.
Baltimore, MD:Johns Hopkins.
Slaughter, S. and G. Rhoades 2004. Academic capitalism and the new economy. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Strathern, M. 2005. ‘Universities – and society!’, Anthropology in Action 12: 10–18.
Sturm, S. and S. Turner 2011. ‘The idea of the university’, Arena 111: 16–19.
The University of Auckland 2009. Annual report. Auckland: The University of Auckland.
Thrift, N. 2011. ‘Across the world: the privatisation of higher education’, The Chronicle of Higher
Education (http://chronicle.com/blogs/worldwise/author/nthrift/page/5).
Uniservices Ltd 2010. Uniservices website (http://www.uniservices.co.nz) Accessed 28 June 2011.
Vernon, J. 2010. ‘The end of the public university in England’, GlobalHigherEd (http://globalhighered.
wordpress.com/).
Viale, R. and H. Etzkowitz 2010. The capitalization of knowledge: a triple helix of university-industry-
government. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
Wacquant, L. 2012. ‘Three steps to a historical anthropology of actually existing neoliberalism’, Social
Anthropology 20: 66–79.
Wolf, E. 1966. Kinship, friendship and patron-client relations in complex societies, in M. Banton (ed.),
Social anthropology of complex societies, 1-22. London: Tavistock. ASA Monograph vol. 4.


C 2012 European Association of Social Anthropologists.