Introduction: On Times, Scapes and Chronosolidarity in Academia*

Capitalism is a fundamental part of academia, academia is a fundamental part of capitalism.¹ This is a simple and critical relational maxim recognized by many commentators (e.g. Hackett, 1990, 2014; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Fochler (2016) offers a concept of “epistemic capitalism” and argues for analytical decoupling of strictly economistic understanding of capitalism focused on use-value of knowledge from differently calibrated processes of knowledge accumulation grasped by more culturally oriented analysis, while still keep in focus political economy of knowledge production (cf. Sum & Jessop, 2014). Taking a cue from these debates this book argues that the two multifaceted, multilayered, irreducibly complex, institutionally and processually enormous entities – capitalism and academia – are not only intertwined on countless levels, but they are also co-dependent and as a result generate new social realities. And nowhere is this relational maxim and co-dependency more obvious than in tracing how, what can be called (capitalist) money time (Adkins, 2018; Martineau, 2015; Postone, 1993; Thrift, 1981) intermingle with academic (knowledge) time (Hay, 2001; Vostal, 2016). By conceiving time both as a perspective and analytical tool, this book illuminates otherwise barely noticeable, often invisible phenomena and by that uncover new relations or processes in the academy as they relate to further and tighter approximation, if not a merge, of cultures/practices of variations of capitalism in academia. Not only education and research are now big businesses (Newfield, 2016), academies actually emulate corporations in their behavior and self-understanding (de Angelis & Harvie, 2009; Martins, 2004; Mirowski, 2011), meaning that they behave as if they are capitalist enterprises by actively seeking revenues to aggrandize their equity.²Studying academic timescapes within the confines of this transformation has revelatory and somewhat underestimated intellectual purchase: it is an “enabling” pursuit, in a sense that looking at shifts and rifts in time yields new ways of thinking about both entrenched realities and emerging trends in academia as they relate to wider environments (socio-­technical, geoeconomics and geopolitical changes) and its internal, often sui generis, dynamics, that is, how universities understand themselves and how corporate arrangements and instruments become “natural reality” in academia. Inquiring into these realities by deploying time as their embedded feature sheds new light on contemporary academia as this book aims to demonstrate.