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1.
Based on empirical research conducted with academic staff working on fixed-term contracts, the article explores the subjective experience of anxiety in the UK’s ‘neoliberalising’ higher education (HE) sector. As HE undergoes a process of marketisation, and the teaching and research activities of academics are increasingly measured and scrutinised, the contemporary academy appears to be suffused with anxiety. Coupled with pressures facing all staff, 34% of academic employees are currently working on a fixed-term contract and so must contend with the multiple forms of uncertainty associated with their so-called ‘casualised’ positions. While anxiety is often perceived as an individualised affliction for which employees are encouraged to take personal responsibility, the article argues that it should be conceptualised in two ways: firstly, as a symptom of wider processes at work in the neoliberalising sector; and secondly, as a ‘tactic’ of what Isin [(2004). The neurotic citizen. Citizenship Studies, 8 (3), 217–235] refers to as ‘neuroliberal’ governance. The article concludes by proposing that the figure of the ‘neurotic academic’ is emblematic of the contradictions facing the contemporary academy.  相似文献   

2.
What happens when management consultants enter the academic arena and offer their services to universities? In the following article, we examine this question by drawing on findings from a qualitative study based on a series of 30 interviews with senior management consultants and academic managers in Germany. The aim of this explorative study is, first of all, to provide theoretically informed observations about the working mechanisms of management consulting in academia. A second, and related objective, is to contribute to the ongoing debate on the changing nature, role, and implications of managerial expertise and authority in higher education institutions. We begin our study by providing an overview of the literature on the changing nature of university management. Although these studies show a shift in the power constellation of universities from professional to managerial authority, we argue that they remain suspiciously vague as concerns the way academics and managers actually deal with this conflicting situation. By drawing on the insights of consulting studies, we then explore the stakes of consultancy in academic change projects and determine the analytical factors that will guide our qualitative analysis. Finally, we present and discuss the findings before concluding with more general remarks on the nature of academic management in German universities.  相似文献   

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4.
Consultants have emerged as significant actors in the assembling of culture after neoliberalism. This paper considers their role in the assemblage of the British subsidised cultural sector as part of the assembling of culture more generally. In particular, it is concerned with the status of consultants as private sector actors, which differentiates them from other forms of expertise that tend to be located in the state apparatus, in that they must earn money to resource their work and remain solvent. By placing their work of assemblage in relation to this imperative, we can understand the difference it makes. Based on a close study of a London cultural consultancy, it is argued that specific governmental and managerial trends send trajectories of value through the assemblage which the networked consultants attempt to control and capture. These economies have seen consultants contribute to the broad shift in the assemblage of culture from something that occupied a distinctive sphere requiring protection from the ravages of the market to a potential contributor to economic and social development.  相似文献   

5.
This paper investigates the impact of changing science policy doctrines on the development of an academic field, working life research. Working life research is an interdisciplinary field of study in which researchers and stakeholders collaborated to produce relevant knowledge. The development of the field, we argue, was both facilitated and justified by the, at the time dominant, science policy orthodoxy in Sweden, sector research. Sector research science policy doctrine favoured stakeholder-driven research agendas in the fields relevant to the sector. This approach to agenda setting was highly contested by Swedish universities and left scientists vulnerable to the fallout from any conflicts arising among the stakeholder groupings that were part of the governance arrangement. Our case shows that working life research was in part a victim of the struggle between science and policy over who sets the agenda for science in Sweden. In this struggle, each side chose to use ‘scientific quality’ as a proxy for furth ing its respective interests and visions for how science should be governed. The paper argues that this case is of interest to the continued elaboration of the Mode 2 thesis and the debate about ‘relevant science’. We find that the close association with stakeholders and the concomitant dependence it created left working life research unable to defend itself against its critics and that this state of affairs was particularly problematic for social science research on working life.  相似文献   

6.
This paper deals with the relations between the sociality of cultural economies and the cultural objects traded in them. It argues that the study of cultural economies must work up new methodologies that can account for both. The paper suggests the concept of the ‘mediator’ as a way of highlighting how cultural objects and sociality are co-constituted. The ‘mediator’ is formulated as a methodological tool for by-passing the academic divide between cultural-aesthetic objects and their social contexts.  相似文献   

7.
This paper examines the potential pitfalls for academic research associated with goal displacements in the implementation of goals and indicators of research commercialization. We ask why patenting has come to serve as the key policy indicator of innovative capacity and what consequences this has for the organization of academic research. To address these questions, the paper presents a case study from Denmark on, firstly, why and how the 1999 Danish ‘Act on Inventions’ introduced patenting as a central instrument to Danish science policy and, secondly, the effects the Act has had on Danish university organization and research practices. We trace why and how commercialization was introduced as an important objective in Danish science policy since the 1980s. The increased focus on patents is explained as an isomorphic adjustment to an international ‘science policy field,’ manifested in particular through OECD statistics, where patenting has come to serve as a key metric in international rankings. In a second step, we examine what effects the patenting requirements have had on organization and research practice at a Danish university. We show that in practice ‘number of patents’ changed from serving as an indicator of innovative capacity to being a policy goal in itself, thus in effect producing a goal displacement that is potentially damaging for both academic research and innovation capacity of the surrounding society. As a consequence of this goal displacement, active scientists now increasingly engage in patenting primarily as a means to fulfill organizational targets and to increase their ‘fundability,’ rather than to promote commercial applications of their research. In conclusion, we discuss how these unfulfilled policy ambitions have led to a retrospective redefinition of policy goals rather than an adjustment of the actual policy tools.  相似文献   

8.
The role of competitive funds as a source of funding for academic research has increased in many countries. For the individual researcher, the receipt of a grant can influence both scientific production and career paths. This paper focuses on the importance of the receipt of a research grant for researchers’ academic career paths utilizing a mixed methods approach that combines econometric analysis with in-depth qualitative interviews. The analysis has novel elements both in terms of its subject (impact of funding grants on individuals’ academic career paths) and approach. The results of this study indicate that while research grants have a positive impact on the research performed under the grant itself, there are very important secondary effects on research performance through positive effects on academic career advancement. The probability of obtaining a full professorship for grant recipients is almost double that for rejected applicants, 16 percent compared to 9 percent. The probability for career advancement in general is about 9 percentage points higher for grant recipients. Qualitative interviews support these quantitative results by providing insights into how grants impact research careers, through heightened status, recognition, networking and other factors.  相似文献   

9.
A performance-based funding system like the United Kingdom’s ‘Research Excellence Framework’ (REF) symbolizes the re-rationalization of higher education according to neoliberal ideology and New Public Management technologies. The REF is also significant for disclosing the kinds of behaviour that characterize universities’ response to government demands for research auditability. In this paper, we consider the casualties of what Henry Giroux (2014) calls “neoliberalism’s war on higher education” or more precisely the deleterious consequences of non-participation in the REF. We also discuss the ways with which higher education’s competition fetish, embodied within the REF, affects the instrumentalization of academic research and the diminution of academic freedom, autonomy and criticality.  相似文献   

10.
Theorisation of culture is often absent from research on production in the creative and cultural sector. Further, cultural production has been largely untouched by the insights of the cultural economy approach. Culturalisation is a means of addressing the question of what constitutes culture and thus a cultural (economy) approach. It is the process by which culture and cultural production combine in the ‘operationalisation of the real.’ Culturalisation underpins much scholarship in this journal by posing the (economic) real as a problem of definition in order to illustrate the operations involved in its temporary resolution. The implications of this position need further addressing. There is a feedback between culture as a problem of definition and a cultural approach. Devices can interrogate the relationship between processes of cultural definition and the conceptual parameters of a cultural economy approach. Workshopping, projects and events are put forward as cultural devices emerging from a 10-month ethnography of literary performance in Bristol, England. This illustration shows firstly, how culturalisation occurs in a designated cultural sector to contingently realise culture; and secondly, the implicit logic of cultural economy as culturalisation, typified by the device as method, so as to open a debate concerning its implications.  相似文献   

11.
12.
The central argument in this paper is that actor-network theory (ANT) does not do ‘cultural economy’ symmetrically: it has had a lot to say about economy but much less to say about culture. This rejection of culture is ontological and epistemological: culture appears in ANT largely as an artefact of modernist thought rather than as an empirical aspect of agents' performances. And yet if ‘economy’ can be critiqued and reinstated as performative, so too can ‘culture’. To explore this, we focus on objects of concern that – unlike the financial markets that have formed the core of ANT-inspired thinking about the economy – are assembled by actors in and through what they themselves understand to be cultural materials, cultural calculations, cultural processes, cultural institutions. In such examples, ‘culture’ is continuously invoked and enacted by actors in constructing their actions, whatever critical sociologists might have to say about its ontological status. It seems paradoxical that a theoretical approach that makes sacrosanct the associations constructed by agents who assemble their own world, generally discusses ‘culture’ only from the point of view of critical epistemology. Bearing all this in mind, we argue that it is time for us to ‘reassemble’ the cultural.  相似文献   

13.
The technological shift of museums is extensively documented, even if research on the impact of technologies on cultural practices and social patterns at large is still lacking. As part of a research programme conducted by the Louvre and HEC Paris, the article proposes a conceptual analysis of ‘real’ (visiting the museum) and ‘virtual’ (visiting its website) experiences of museums. It contributes to the understanding of whether the two experiences are substitutes or complements using a newly created measurement scale. In addition, the article also aims at enriching the contemporary discussion on the artworks’ aura and the authenticity of the cultural experience in the digital age.  相似文献   

14.
This paper proposes and mobilizes a cultural economic framework to study the dynamic formation of digital markets for cultural goods. Adapting Hayek's theory of price to recent developments in the field of cultural sociology, it proposes the idea that an effective price system condenses information dispersed in society, and then enters into a performative process of symbolic communication that is perceived as ‘authentic’ by the consumers. After analyzing ‘artificial’ and ‘authentic’ current strategies aimed at producing digital markets for cultural goods, which are especially sensitive to the symbolic dimension of price, the article suggests the hypothesis that the digital market has been constructed as a zero- or quasi-zero-price economic space, and that it is the offline and material market of cultural products the one that collects the higher revenues derived from the ‘authentic’ generation of value taking place in the digital marketplace.  相似文献   

15.
Peer lending and the subsumption of the informal   总被引:2,自引:0,他引:2  
The informal financial practices of financially ‘excluded’ groups in the United States are being enrolled in a regulatory project to make new markets and produce financially self-sufficient subjects on the edges of the financial system. Drawing on mixed-methods qualitative research working with nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area, this paper explores how informal rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) are being repurposed and formalized to make the risks of financially excluded groups legible, tractable and priceable for ‘mainstream’ financial service providers. In so doing, the paper explores how the credit score orders practices and relations that are ‘outside’ of the ‘financial mainstream’. While others have documented how the efforts of NGOs to marketize and commodify the social networks and cultural practices of the poor result in forms of dispossession, this is not what my research finds. Instead, I show how formalized ROSCAs are redistributing calculative agency, and enabling financially underserved groups to exert strategic control over the calculation of their credit scores.  相似文献   

16.
The aim of this paper is to locate academics within the sights of critical labour studies, and, in particular, the contemporary interest in cultural workers. Despite a growing literature about – and in response to – the transformation of the University there have been few attempts to study academics as workers. This paper argues that there are a number of parallels between academic work and the much more well-documented experiences of work in the cultural and creative industries. The paper examines the increasing experience of precariousness among academics, the intensification and extensification of work, and the new modes of surveillance in the academy and their affective impacts. The aim of the article is to build on the critical lexicon of studies of cultural labour in order to think about academic work as labour and to generate new ways of thinking about power, privilege and exploitation. It argues for the need for a psychosocial perspective that can understand the new labouring subjectivities in academia.  相似文献   

17.
In the present paper, we analyse the allocation process for cultural services in Norwegian municipalities. The cultural sector at this administrative level is decomposed into the following eight subcategories: children’s and youth activities, libraries, cinemas, museums, arts dissemination, cultural heritage, cultural schools, and other cultural services. By means of budget shares for these eight cultural services and a residual sector consisting of all other municipal services, we estimate a system of demand relations which are interdependently linked to each other by a budget restriction. Our analyses are based on data from 409 out of 429 Norwegian municipalities during the period 2002–2010. In the empirical analyses, we mainly focus on the effects of income variation for the cultural services. We estimate effects of free income, matching grants to each sector, and user fees and other sector-specific income for each sector. We also estimate crowding-out effects for the cultural sectors of demographic variables indicating higher demand for services such as education, childcare, and health services. Our results confirm previous results. There are interesting differences within the group of cultural services, and these are partly related to different levels of national standardisation and regulation among the cultural services.  相似文献   

18.
Responsible innovation (RI) is gathering momentum as an academic and policy debate linking science and society. Advocates of RI in research policy argue that scientific research should be opened up at an early stage so that many actors and issues can steer innovation trajectories. If this is done, they suggest, new technologies will be more responsible in different ways, better aligned with what society wants, and mistakes of the past will be avoided. This paper analyses the dynamics of RI in policy and practice and makes recommendations for future development. More specifically, we draw on the theory of ‘trading zones’ developed by Peter Galison and use it to analyse two related processes: (i) the development and inclusion of RI in research policy at the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC); (ii) the implementation of RI in relation to the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) project. Our analysis reveals an RI trading zone comprised of three quasi-autonomous traditions of the research domain – applied science, social science and research policy. It also shows how language and expertise are linking and coordinating these traditions in ways shaped by local conditions and the wider context of research. Building on such insights, we argue that a sensible goal for RI policy and practice at this stage is better local coordination of those involved and we suggest ways how this might be achieved.  相似文献   

19.
Drawing on empirical data, this article identifies the emergence of the ‘PR University’ as an assemblage. Using a case study of university press officers’ work, I analyse how this form of media relations PR stages competition between UK universities through the media. A key form of this competition centres on the accumulation and circulation of what I term ‘reputational capital’. I focus on one core element of reputational capital – media stories about HE research and the circulation of research metrics. I argue that the assemblage of the public relations (PR) University pulls the HE sector into dialogue with PR principles and practices in the context of recent shifts towards market rationalities. But this relationship is not a simple cause and effect model in which increasing HE ‘marketisation’ creates a boom in universities’ PR practices, or intensifying investment in PR by universities merely amplifies or legitimises existing market tendencies in the sector. I argue that the PR University as assemblage starts generating its own logics around which actors in the field must orient themselves. More broadly, the PR University operates not only to promote an individual university’s market position, but also acts upon public debates about the social role, legitimacy and financing of UK Higher Education.  相似文献   

20.
Bioinformatics – the so-called shotgun marriage between biology and computer science – is an interdiscipline. Despite interdisciplinarity being seen as a virtue, for having the capacity to solve complex problems and foster innovation, it has the potential to place projects and people in anomalous categories. For example, valorised ‘outputs’ in academia are often defined and rewarded by discipline. Bioinformatics, as an interdisciplinary bricolage, incorporates experts from various disciplinary cultures with their own distinct ways of working. Perceived problems of interdisciplinarity include difficulties of making explicit knowledge that is practical, theoretical, or cognitive. But successful interdisciplinary research also depends on an understanding of disciplinary cultures and value systems, often only tacitly understood by members of the communities in question. In bioinformatics, the ‘parent’ disciplines have different value systems; for example, what is considered worthwhile research by computer scientists can be thought of as trivial by biologists, and vice versa. This paper concentrates on the problems of reward and recognition described by scientists working in academic bioinformatics in the United Kingdom. We highlight problems that are a consequence of its cross-cultural make-up, recognising that the mismatches in knowledge in this borderland take place not just at the level of the practical, theoretical, or epistemological, but also at the cultural level too. The trend in big, interdisciplinary science is towards multiple authors on a single paper; in bioinformatics this has created hybrid or fractional scientists who find they are being positioned not just in-between established disciplines but also in-between as middle authors or, worse still, left off papers altogether.  相似文献   

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