This article discusses how three other articles have employed E.P. Thompson's concept of the moral economy to analyse movements of resistance to higher education (HE) marketisation processes. Two of the studies relate to the English HE sector while one is a study of the Israeli system. The articles were selected because they are indicative of one of the key challenges that scholars working within the sociology of higher education may encounter when applying Thompson's ideas: rendering a faithful sense of the temporality which is foundational to Thompson's concept, and which makes it such a powerful tool of critique regarding dominant hegemonic processes such as higher education marketisation. I conclude the article with a discussion of the challenges that arise in transferring a concept that originated in history to the sociology of higher education.