Marketisation, hybrid organisations and accounting in higher education

The metaphor of the market and its practical application are very much in vogue in higher education policy. Privatisation and marketisation seem to be a global tendency which goes beyond education and research. Privatisation and marketisation have been introduced in sectors such as public transport, social welfare and security, health, and infrastructure, which in many countries for a very long time have belonged to the public domain. Marketisation can be defined as the introduction of market-type mechanisms, which is characterised by the OECD as ‘all arrangements where at least one significant characteristic of markets is present (competition, choice, pricing, dispersed decision-making, monetary incentives, and so on). It excludes the two polar cases of traditional public delivery and complete privatisation’ (OECD 1997).