The emergence of academic resistance platforms against new public management: towards "new" forms of movement organizing?

In the past several decades, the academic profession, as other public sectors, has undergone major transformations in its governance and working conditions. Scholars have paid great attention to the multiple paths and processes of changes in the academia. The aim of this chapter is to contribute to such analysis by unveiling an underexplored dimension of higher education transformation: the emerging collective resistance platforms as responses neoliberal policies so as to understand how academics mobilize for and against changes in higher education management, funding, and global orientation. We compare four academic resistance platforms in United Kingdom (UK), France, the Netherlands, and the Flanders region of Belgium, in order to understand the rise and organization of professional activism in a comparative systematic way. We examine to what extent do disciplinary and socio-political capital of academics, on the one hand; and the organization of higher education and the scope of the reforms, on the other hand, matter to understand the configurations of academic resistance in the four countries.