The view from below: transformations on the local level.

To say that universities are changing in response to new pressures and contextual factors is not to diminish their role in transforming these pressures in multiple ways and with very significant differences. Thus, universities respond differently to globalisation (or Europeanisation) in different countries (Currie and Newson, 1998); universities within one country do not uniformly follow a pattern of policy-induced change (Trowler, 2002). We can witness a diversification of effects and models between different types of institutions and

within individual institutions. This is precisely why Marginson and Rhoades (2002: 286) point out to the local element of the ‘glonacal agency heuristic’ where local refers to institutions and agents (human and organisational). This is also why Deem asks the question: ‘is the local dimension still important’ in relation to the reported change processes such as managerialism, globalisation, academic capitalism and entrepreneurialism (Deem, 2001). How local institutions and agents become entrepreneurial or global players is not adequately explored in the literature and the studies that do exist, often ‘remain suspended on the national level, overlooking local responses and variations’ (Marginson and Rhoades, 2002: 286). There have been a few institutional case studies of internationalisation in recent years, for example the practitioner-authored studies of ‘internationalisation at home’ in selected Western European universities (De Jong and Teekens, 2003; Nilsson, 2003). This focus allows for different sets of questions to be raised and potentially explored related to the effectiveness of policy and its implementation by institutions (Trowler, 2002: 3-7; Kogan, 2002: 56).

For researchers of institutions, trends that are part and parcel of globalisation or Europeanisation take on specific meanings in particular higher education contexts. Apart from internationalisation discussed earlier, the policy trends which affect institutions include the demands of massification, the question of system steering and universities’ answer to it by specific management practices (new managerialism). These trends are leading to the rise in the executive-professional staff leading university decisions, a focus on excellence and accountability and a more instrumental view of the curriculum, and a change of perceived

value and volume of research production (Teichler, 2003; Kogan and Hanney, 2000; Scott, 1998, 2005).

To some extent, these changes can be understood as part of growing academic capitalism in the context of post-Fordist industrial relations, where economic reasoning and managerial tendencies take over the previously public service understanding of education (Scott, 1995: 91). Whether or not academic capitalism and managerialism are the same process or distinct regimes (Bleiklie, 2005: 51), the essential outcome is the ‘encroachment of the profit motive into the academy’ (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997: 9). This leads to the popularity or entrepreneurial models (Clark 1998; discussed in Deem 2001; Clark 2005) and serious changes in university structures and governance (Rhoades and Slaughter, 1997), such as the focus on performance indicators and outputs and various forms of strategic management (Becher and Trowler, 2001: 10; Blackmore and Sachs, 2001: 46). The result could also be an increasingly part-time and managed profession of university lecturer, and an increasingly capitalistic and commodified relationship between educators and students (Rhoades and Slaughter, 1997).

These pressures are usually summarised as a rise of the ‘entrepreneurial university’ or ‘the managed university’ in which the executive power of academic and professional managers has risen and the power of collegial governance has decreased. In the European context universities have been given more autonomy but have been expected to transform themselves into more professionally and strategically managed educational enterprises engaging in the generation of wealth (Meek, 2003; Williams and Kitaev, 2005).

Academic capitalism and entrepreneurialism, not to mention globalisation, translate themselves into different opportunities and costs when we go below the level of the institution and consider academic departments as locations for different disciplinary programs: even within the same institution different departments gain and lose their resources as a result of reorganisation and strategic planning (Rhoades and Slaughter, 1997). In relation to internationalisation among faculty members in one country, Smedby and Trondal (2005) were able to see clear disciplinary differences, even if the overall level of internationalisation has increased across the universities. Teaching oriented faculties and graduate research centres in the same discipline may also see very different effects.

The most ‘local’ level of analysis concerning change in contemporary higher education would be to look primarily at the individual academic level and to study the changing aspects of academic work. As Rhoades and Slaughter (1997: 9) point out: ‘Academic capitalism, the increased management of professionals, and supply-side higher education policies are not disembodied systems and structures, they are lived experiences, deeply embedded in peoples’ daily worlds in colleges and universities’. This is clearly stated by Marginson and Rhoades who point out that ‘policy analyses should attend to policy implementation at various levels, down to the professionals who enact and formulate policies in the ways that ration their time and organise their activity (Marginson and Rhoades, 2002: 286).

Importantly, researchers who themselves are part of the profession have not uniformly accepted these directions or the models developed as either uncontested or neutral models of

policy (Deem, 2001). The managerial turn, labelled ‘new managerialism’ (Johnson, 2002: 81; Deem, 2001; Currie and Thiele, 2001), the practices of ever increasing accountability demands or ‘quality assurance’ and the ‘culture of audit’ (Morley, 2002) are not accepted as compatible either with academic working cultures and values (Blackmore and Sachs, 2001: 47; Johnson, 2002: 102) or with agendas for gender equality and access (Blackmore, 2000: 143; Blackmore, 2002). The impact on pedagogy is not uniformly accepted either as competencies may have not much to do with developing critical knowledge aimed at empowering the students to become critical beings (Barnett, 1997). For instance, one practitioner strongly challenges the new, market-oriented model of teaching: ‘the all- prevailing model of the university as a roll-on-roll-off skilling factory and of anybody challenging that model as rather amateur, rather blinkered clingers to a past Golden Age’. (Parker, 2003: 529) He goes on to conclude: ‘I do not know why university teachers never said- ‘that is not what we do’ when all this started. (…) Well, we have certainly reaped the whirlwind and had our vestiges of independent professionalism stripped from us (Parker 2003: 530)’. There is a very strong and ongoing debate among academics about the negative effects of these transformations upon university’s function in society as a producer of general or specialised knowledge and education. The general institutional direction (in otherwise still very varied European systems) is definitely towards ‘managerialism’ ‘marketisation’ or ‘corporatisation’ of the university, all leading to practices of academic capitalism (Roseman, 2010; Boyer, 2010; Olssen and Peters, 2005). Roseman summarises the trends:

These pressures have included an emphasis on: the commercialisation of research, the search for corporate donations and private–public “partnerships” to fund basic university infrastructure as well as specific programs and research projects, the expansion of tiers of

universities and units for student tuition money, and attempts to promote self-interested individualism and competition among workers (Roseman, 2010: 6)

The new managerial university striving towards the principles of neo-liberal market capitalism in its internal and external functions has been called the ‘the schizophrenic university’ by Shore who comments on the advanced stages of this process in the case of New Zealand. He has pointed out that paradigm shift in higher education is almost always started by the double threat of massification of student numbers and reduced funding from the state, and a paradoxical demand from the state for more university autonomy, flexibility and innovation coupled with ever increasing ‘regimes of measurement and monitoring’ (Shore, 2010:15). Several academic and student commentators have argued that the trends of managerialism and marketisation are destroying the fundamental public good and academic functions of European (and UK) universities preparing the university for the task of serving the market (Bague et al., 2010). What is even more interesting, the same trends seem to be operational across historically different university systems in Western and Eastern Europe as well as in other developed and developing countries (Boyer, 2010).

Most importantly it has been argued that the new neo-liberal dominant paradigm of university governance and of academic work is producing newer, flexible but also deeply fragmented, contradictory, performative academic identities (Shore, 2010). Even more importantly, individuals and academic unit leaders themselves have taken an active part in shaping this new form of university by accepting some of the technologies into their work practice or by taking part in the managerial shift in their own work expectations and benefiting from them materially and in terms of the power awarded to them if they become part of the new

managerial elites of the university (Roseman, 2010; Bague et al., 2010). On the other hand, the transformations occurring through such policy shift can also be perceived as creative and genuinely reforming in terms of allowing for the construction of new degree programs and new academic and professional identities (for academics and students) whilst at the same time, complicating the classical dimensions of academic and institutional autonomy (Romano, 2010).

Academics respond to the pressures of reform in many, often contradictory ways and different groups respond differently, making it important to investigate in a qualitative manner ‘how academics perceive, experience and negotiate changes brought by those reforms and the issues that most affect their everyday lives (Shore, 2010). The professional is not seen as only implementer of policy but as an agent of the change process, as the agency heuristic developed by Marginson and Rhoades (2002) would suggest. The effects of global and international dimensions make this study even more interesting, as Deem points out: ‘The local–global axis is an important concept both for those interested in the cross-cultural development of higher education and for those more concerned with researching the organisational characteristics of universities in one country only’ (Deem, 2001: 8).

In this thesis I will focus on linking the global processes with the practitioners undergoing university transformation, in particular through their experiences of internationalisation. The change academics experience may be productive or destructive for themselves as individuals, for their practices, contexts and for the profession. As Dillabough and Acker (2002: 231) put it in relation to teacher educators: ‘a central research issue in the sociology of education has

become the impact of international neo-liberal reforms upon classifications such as “academic work” and “professional identity”’. More work on these two concepts in relation to the concrete academic professional in particular contexts rather than whole profession is needed. This brings me to my research questions which can now be placed in the context of global/institutional policy context:

R.Q.1 How is the internationalisation process becoming embedded in academic identities?