The Non-Death of American Manufacturing and Its Role in University Decision-Making

Last year, I spoke with a range of university executives for my dissertation. Because of the nature of my project, we frequently spoke about the state of the U.S. economy and what it means for their decision-making. One theme in these conversations was that the economy had shifted from production line manufacturing to information processing. We were, as one executive put it, in the midst of a new industrial revolution with information technology. Some called this the knowledge-based economy.

In the knowledge-based economy, the jobs for which universities prepare students are quite different. Many of the manufacturing jobs, they argued, have been sent overseas. Increasingly, students need to train for jobs of the future, like cybersecurity and data management. This shift in the economy was cited as a reason for training students to become entrepreneurs. The goals were to teach students how to make a job, not take a job. To think creatively and not be afraid to change jobs or start anew. And to embrace a “free agency kind of employment.”

When I heard these statements, I didn’t reflect on them much. On some level, I must have agreed that the American economy is knowledge-based, signaling the death knell of manufacturing. However, I have come to realize that university executives were not reading regular updates on the manufacturing sector. They really had no substantive experience with the labor market outside of the university. Most of them had spent their lives in academe. In other words, I came to suspect that these executives were making decisions based upon a priori understandings. They operated according to assumptions about “the economy” that they either self-generated or, more likely, recycled from a grand narrative related to innovation, prosperity, and higher learning.

Let’s take a look at the status of American manufacturing. It is the case that America’s share of global manufacturing has declined, and China’s share has increased. Data also shows that the number of manufacturing jobs overall has fallen, and the contribution of manufacturing to GDP has declined. However, as many observers have noted, these metrics are not sufficient to argue that American manufacturing is dead. Many would instead argue that the manufacturing sector is in transition. Some industries are faring well, while others are struggling. There is a small revival of manufacturing, and the sector continues to produce at high rates. Nevertheless, current trends do not suggest that the number of jobs created in this revival will replace the millions lost in the economic crises of the past 15 years. 

President Obama has been quick to capitalize on the notion that advanced manufacturing can be nurtured to create new middle-class jobs. In fact, his administration has announced that it will create three manufacturing institutes that bring together resources from corporations, universities, and the government. One of these institutes is currently being created in the research triangle of North Carolina and will focus upon the creation of energy-efficient, high-power electronic chips. The Department of Energy is investing $70 million in the initiative. Overall, we can say that manufacturing is alive in America, but it is likely the case that good jobs in manufacturing sector will never fully recover.

The university executives with whom I spoke weren’t entirely wrong in believing that manufacturing jobs are gone. They may not have nuanced knowledge of the place of manufacturing in the American economy, but they seem to be reacting to a real trend. However, there is something to be said for the fact that many higher education institutions, at least those oriented to research and prestige-maximization, have not been training students for manufacturing jobs in a very long time. So, we can question the relevance of manufacturing jobs in their assessment of the economy and its impact on their decision-making.

Briefly, let’s turn to this idea of “free agency employment.” Again, university executives were not closely following mobility or flexibility trends in the labor market. Otherwise, they probably would have realized that they are among the worst perpetrators of inequitable, contingency labor practices. I’m talking about the adjunctification of academic labor. Setting this issue aside, university executives clearly believe that students should be prepared for a volatile labor market. It is frequently said that Americans now change careers as many as seven times over the course of a lifetime. As it turns out, this widely cited number appears to have little basis in research. The Bureau of Labor Statistics even says on its website that this is a thorny empirical question because no consensus exists as to what constitutes a career change.

What I’m proposing here is that assumptions, beliefs, and perceptions about the status of the economy are vitally important in university decision-making. This proposal throws a bit of a wrench in higher education research, particularly a popular branch of organizational theory that attributes institutional behavior to external factors. Many "open-systems" researchers today see a rather direct relationship between how institutions operate and the nature of economic change. While I don’t dispute the influence of the economy in higher education restructuring, I think we need to reveal the a priori knowledge about the economy that drives some decision-making.

It is possible that closer scrutiny of this a priori knowledge shows that there are certain economic tropes onto which university executives latch. Such tropes may originate in a set of powerful institutions, such as the OECD, and may help higher education institutions demonstrate their value to an economy structured around knowledge production. By repeating these tropes, and making decisions upon them as if they are fact, universities serve an important role. They don’t just reflect some discrete, external economic reality. They bring that type of economy into existence. This point bears repeating because it is woefully under-represented in research: higher education institutions are not merely responding to the economy, they are making the economy what it is.

We can extend this line of thought into multiple arenas. We can look at how the creation of degree programs effectively validates certain types of knowledge and leads to the establishment of new industries. We can look at how universities don’t just “place” graduates in the labor market. They co-create the labor market. We can look at how universities institutionalize and normalize contingent labor and encourage mobility. The possibilities are multiple and critically important, I think, in understanding the relationship between higher education institutions and “the economy.”