Capitalismo académico, oligarquía académica y los “profesores taxi” en Chile, Colombia, Alemania y Estados Unidos

The third chapter, by Colombian researcher Pedro Pineda, "Academic capitalism, academic oligarchy and the 'taxi professors' in Chile, Colombia, Germany and the United States", examines in comparative perspective the consequences of academic capitalism on the employment of university researchers in different countries in Latin America, Western Europe and North America. To this end, he uses elements of neo-institutionalist theory and the academic capitalism approach, a crossover that allows him to identify the existence of convergent processes of precariousness of academic work associated with the expansion of higher education and the implementation of new management doctrines. Based on the analysis of academic work regulations in the cases of the countries studied, the author indicates that the creation of unstable jobs is a majority trend at the university level, exacerbating the social marginalisation characteristic of capitalist regimes and driving the creation of a new social group, the academic precariat. In fact, the creation or growth in the proportion of unstable positions has become institutionalised in three of the four countries studied - Germany, Chile and Colombia - and now constitutes the majority of academics working in universities. At the same time, universities continue to grow in terms of the number of students and the size of the administration, in proportion to the number of students and the size of the administration, in proportions other than stable work for their academics, the only one that has been decreasing in recent years (except in Chile in recent years). If there is a relationship between the increase in administration and the trend towards academic capitalism, the author concludes, then it would also be possible to support the thesis on the relationship between academic capitalism, the maintenance of academic oligarchies and the creation of the so-called taxi professors (or their equivalent in the countries studied).