Knowledge and its Enemies: Towards a New Case for Higher Learning ...

market-based. For example, Sweden represented one of the most unified systems located at one end of the spectrum, which then moved towards France, Britain, Canada, Japan, and the United States at the other end (Clark 1983, 138). From this foundation, a detailed comparative picture of state-university relations has emerged from a series of large international studies (Neave and van Vught 1991; Goedegebuure et al. 1994a; Henkel and Little 1999), including work along more thematic lines (Enders and Fulton 2002; Meek et al. 1996; Kogan and Hanney 2000; Amaral, Jones, and Karseth 2002; Bleiklie and Henkel 2005), addressing aspects of state-university relations. Clark's paradigm has also been revised to consider the overall shift in higher education towards declining autonomy and greater market control (Becher and Kogan 1992), including the deleterious impacts this has had on the standing of the academic profession (Altbach 1980, 2003; Clark 1987).

From the mid-1980s, a great body of evidence has accumulated to support the claims made by Clark. However, much of this literature forms loose collections of area studies rather than tightly structured analyses that, in any way, dare to challenge Clark's assumptions. The empirical findings from this corpus reveal how different systems respond to policy initiatives, how these have led to restructuring within institutions, and, particularly, how this has redefined the role of university leaders and academics in general. It provides national system profiles and management structures, gauges the impacts of globalisation, tracks trends in convergence and diversity at all levels, and monitors impacts of changing government control mechanisms, all of which provides an invaluable empirical resource that will be drawn upon in the course of this inquiry.

The criticism that can be levelled at Clark's theoretical approach is that what it offers in breadth, scope, and utility, it lacks in depth, elegance, and substance. This may relate to some flawed assumptions in the way the market is viewed with relative neutrality. Moreover, its continued validity can be questioned in the face of global transformational changes now under way. Increasingly, it has been argued that the parameters of analysis need to be radically extended to reflect the powerful two-way stretch that can be observed, in addition to national factors, towards local