Markets, metrics, and modernisation: Higher Education strategy makers’ conceptualisations of digital empowerment

Abstract

Digital empowerment is a recurrent theme in the discourse of educational technology in post-pandemic Higher Education and a leitmotif of organisational strategy. Yet, despite its prevalence, digital empowerment is a poorly understood concept. As organisations reimagine themselves as the digital Universities of the future, attention must turn to strategy and its role in defining the digitally empowered student, teacher, and organisation, and how such definitions manifest through policy. This study combines a synthesis of institution-level digital strategies from UK Higher Education with the voices of the strategy-maker, including senior leaders. This study reveals that conceptualisations of digital empowerment are underpinned by an assemblage of neoliberal narratives, including those associated with marketisation, metrics, and modernisation. The findings of this study are illustrative of the role that strategy plays in the alignment of Higher Education with neoliberalism and why notions of digital empowerment therein are inherently problematic.