Enterprise Culture in Higher Education and the Creative Arts: A Study in the Sociology of Critique

This thesis engages with Luc Boltanski and the sociology of critique to provide an account of the role of enterprise culture within the areas of Higher Education and the Creative Arts. In this regard, it makes a case for the ongoing relevance of Luc Boltanski’s work to sociological scholarship and therefore makes an original contribution in this area. In drawing on the conceptual vocabulary developed through On Justification, The New Spirit of Capitalism and On Critique, I explore the state of Higher Education before considering the way discourses of managerialism and entrepreneurialism are enacted through public policy and University mission statements. In focusing attention on a specific area of Higher Education, I work through the consequences of Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism in so far as it relates to the artistic critique. Here I explore the proliferation of an enterprise culture within the Creative Arts and how this is transforming the kinds of critique that exist within the art world, how these critiques are directed at art and art education, and how artists are formulating critiques of capitalism which constitutes a bridge between the social and artist critique.