Abstract
The 2008 financial crash did not lead to a crisis for neoliberalism. To the contrary, the prevailing response to it was more of the same: privatisation, deregulation, reduction of the state and public sector and severe constriction of the welfare system. Along with this has emerged the sharing economy in which we are encouraged to become what Gary Hall, following Foucault, refers to as microentrepreneurs of the self. In this economy, we don’t share goods and services among ourselves, as we might in a voluntary organisation or group, but with giant corporations like Amazon or Uber. Hall examines the implications of this for universities at a time when academics, researchers and students are being encouraged to become microentrepreneurs despite – or perhaps because of – the remaining resistance within universities to the anti-public sector ideology of contemporary neoliberalism. For-profit forms of uberfication are a perversion of sharing; they have little to do with sharing and much to do with selling access to goods and services. The sharing economy may be promoted in a positive light, but it does little to challenge economic inequality and injustice. The book is a warning, and universities need to heed it before allowing the process of uberfication to expand any further.