Neoliberal Regimes of Knowledge: The 1980s and 1990s Phenomenon of Establishing Universities within the Corporation

What modes of knowledge production did neoliberal ideology and globalization engender in the 1980s and 1990s? There is a significant body of scholarship on the surge of corporate monies re-directing research agendas and practices at traditional universities, from the Ivy League on down. But an equally important period development largely has gone unnoticed: the establishment by corporations of universities within the corporation, what historical actors themselves called a “corporate university movement”. Both developments highlight an insight of business historian Alfred Chandler: that in different historical eras large corporations make judgments as to the boundary between their internal and external capacities—in this case, around the problem of how to develop knowledge relevant to the corporation in a neoliberal, global era.

This presentation will focus on an iconic case: the creation, in 1989, of Motorola University, by Motorola, Inc., then a US Fortune 500 company, with plants and office in dozens of countries. Motorola University was a direct outgrowth of the challenges of globalization as perceived by corporate leaders in the late 1970s and 1980s. The university followed the corporate diaspora, setting up a half-dozen physical campuses and offering a catalog of more than 1000 courses.

Behind all this was a deep question: “what knowledge is needed to succeed in deregulating, global markets?” The answer was that, across a range of issues from work on the factory floor to managing cultural accommodation and conflict at distant locales, the corporation needed a university-like entity to create and school employees in knowledge specific to a neoliberal regime. At stake was a perceived need to effectively relate on a transnational scale corporate objectives, material practices, and the status of individuals as actors within and outside the corporation—in a world still defined by postcolonial structures of power.