China has become an increasingly attractive destination for Western social scientists, both for those doing research in and on China and for those looking to continue their careers with meaningful, long-term perspectives.

Sociology today, argues our Daniek Nehring, is defined by a fundamental contradiction between its everyday labor practices and its imaginary ethos.

Intellectual labor comes to be largely external to the objectives of the bureaucratic regimes that dominate universities, argues our Daniel Nehring, and academics whose careers were built on intellectual labor turn out to be deskilled workers in organizational settings indifferent to their concerns.

Given the ferocity of the current assault on academic freedom, argues Daniel Nehring, it seems to me that we may be close to a point of no return, past which ‘tone of voice policies’ and similar control mechanisms may become a norm into which coming generations of academics will be socialized as a matter of course.

Universities are at a crossroads. Pushed by governments who want institutions to dominate in the competitive, globalized world of higher education, they are also struggling with questions about academic freedom in the face of the pressures of marketization. Here a group of young PhD students argue for more debate about the kind of places universities are becoming.

In the the concluding piece of his three-article look at academic labor in the UK in the wake of Marina Warner’s departure from Essex, Daniel Nehring asks if the conservative turn in education is driven by students or policy makers.

As some of the ferment that marked university life for an earlier generation seems to dissipate, has a new realism crept in among subsequent generations of academics to accept what they feel they cannot change?

The unsettling truth about the Academic job market.