Dr Rajani Naidoo

School of Management

Rajani Naidoo is a leading researcher in the study of comparative higher education and its relationship to wider transformations of power in the global economic and political order. She completed her PhD in 2000 at the University of Cambridge before joining the University of Bath where she is a member of the Centre for Advertising and Consumption in the School of Management. Before this she was an inaugural member of an institution that acted as a model for the development of a critical and democratic higher education system in apartheid South Africa.

Her research analyses the links between shifts in global political economy, government restructuring of higher education systems and organisational change in universities. She is particularly interested in how changing state regulation and market forces impact on academics and students, on teaching and research and on contemporary understanding of how universities contribute to the national and global public good. She argues against positioning students purely as consumers and against an unregulated market in higher education. Her research presents the case for more democratic staff - student relations, and the protection and public funding of key arenas in higher education. Currently her focus is on the rise of China as a powerful competitor in geo-political rivalries, and the opportunities and threats this presents for low income countries.

She has delivered keynotes at international conferences in various countries including Mexico, Finland, Ireland, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago and England. She undertook the evaluation of the first Peace Education Institute in South Africa and her research contributed to the work of the National Commission on Higher Education set up by Nelson Mandela in the post-apartheid era. Further funded research and consultancies have included a study of the changing nature of the academic profession, new forms of student engagement in the United Kingdom and trans-national higher education partnerships. She contributes to international executive development programmes for university leaders and was Director of the Doctor of Business Administration in Higher Education Management from 2004 to 2012.

She was Honorary Secretary and member of the Governing Council of the Society for Research in Higher Education and is a member of the research and development steering committee of the European Foundation for Management Development. Editorial Board memberships include the British Journal of Sociology of Education and the International Journal of Sociology of Education. She is co-editor of a book series on global higher education with Palgrave/Macmillan and has held visiting positions at the Social Science Research Centre (Berlin), the University of Arhaus (Denmark), the Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies (Netherlands) and the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information (UK).