This thing called marketisation

Abstract

This thing called marketisationMarketing and marketisation are not the same.However, it is not a simple task to disentangle one from the other.At one end of the distribution of meaning, marketing may be taken to be about the provision of information to help people make decisions while at the other end of this distribution, marketisation challenges stakeholders with radical change encompassing issues of power, funding, labour, markets and complexity.Nor is this a comprehensive list (see for example Hemsley-Brown & Oplatka, 2006).Indeed, the idea of a definitive list is misleading.Meanings and lists tend to chop and change according to the particular perspective slicing the dialogue.While it is difficult to get an intellectual handle on what is happening with regard to marketing higher educationnever mind what to do about it -the reader might like to think that that is rather the point: the complexity keeps the stakeholder guessing at what is difficult, if not impossible, to predict and so this keeps us on our academic toes.Nevertheless, there are three very important characteristics evident in the literature to describe the situation and help us to develop an intellectual understanding of