Community Colleges and New Universities Under Neoliberal Pressures: Organizational Change and Stability by John S. Levin (review)

In his recent book, Community Colleges and New Universities Under Neoliberal Pressures, John Levin provides insight into how the higher education landscape has changed under the hegemonic influence of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, based on classical liberal economic theory, posits that the free market, both unencumbered by state regulation and secured by state mandate, can best ensure individual liberty (Harvey, 2005). As a theory that has evolved into an ideology, neoliberalism's influence has shaped higher education institutions by creating a corporatization narrative that has pervaded both the institutions, themselves, and the political landscapes in which they exist. Levin explores neoliberalism's influence on higher education by revisiting, from 2000–2014, the seven U.S. and Canadian community colleges he studied in his 2001 book, Globalizing the Community College. In that book, Levin investigated the organizational change that took place at these institutions between 1989–1999 in response to an increasingly globalized marketplace. The result of this extension is a longitudinal narrative field study that describes how these institutions, three of which have become new four-year universities, both reflect and resist neoliberal values, policies, and practices.

A major contribution of this book is Levin's use of the various study sites to illustrate how higher education institutions have responded to the impacts of neoliberalism. Readers will benefit from Levin's narrative approach in telling detailed individual stories of institutional evolution over the last three decades. Using data from policy and planning documents and interviews with college and university faculty and administrators, Levin successfully argues that the presence of an increasingly predominant neoliberal state has and is changing the work of the colleges and universities in this study.

In the introductory chapter, Levin uses extant literature to lay the groundwork for this argument. He argues that neoliberalism has shifted the role of higher education institutions from being entities for the public good that benefit society at-large to becoming entities for the private good that benefit market development and the knowledge economy. Levin states that neoliberal discourse, policies, and practices value "national productivity and global economic preparedness" leaving "no room at the neoliberal inn for the public good" (p. 3). He notes that community colleges and new universities are particularly impacted by neoliberalism, because they often do not have the political or organizational capital, power, and resources to buffer themselves from neoliberal pressures.

Also explained in the introductory chapter is Levin's choice to use an institutional logics framework coupled with the various contexts of the study sites to understand the ways in which institutions have responded to neoliberalism. Institutional logics are the "socially constructed, historical patterns of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize space and time, and provide meaning to their social reality" (Thornton & Ocasio, 1999, p. 804). Levin uses institutional logics as a "shared conceptual framework for the understanding of behavior in practices of participants in institutional fields" (p. 12), to help explicate the ways in which institutional members at the study sites make meaning of and respond to neoliberal pressures. Specifically, Levin contends that institutional logics act as a force of stability in the face of potential destabilization, by anchoring agency and decision making for institutional members, who are facing externally imposed organizational change.

To provide context for these arguments, that neoliberalism is impacting higher education and that institutional logics are the mechanisms through which institutions respond to neoliberal pressures, Levin devotes Chapters 2 and 3 to the stories of organizational change at the study sites. Chapter 2 focuses on community colleges in both the U.S. and Canada. Chapter 3 focuses on three former community colleges in Canada that have, since 1999, transitioned into four-year universities. The strength of these chapters lies in the narratives used to highlight the history and context of each of these institutions and the various ways in which each of the institutions...