United Kingdom: an increasingly differentiated profession

One of a selection of twelve country reports written as a contribution to the international Changing Academic Profession study that features over 20 countries. Each chapter addresses the issues of relevance, internationalisation and management and their implications for the academic profession in a particular country. These are: Australia, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Norway, Portugal and South Africa, as well as the UK

The rise and work of new professionals in higher education

This chapter discusses research on the emergence of a relatively new staff category in higher education that does no longer fit the traditional academic-administrative divide: new professionals who support processes in research, teaching, public engagement, and management. We argue that their rise is tied to the overall rise of management in higher education and to changes in contexts and conditions for universities over recent decades. In consequence, national variations as regards the quantitative and qualitative development of this new staff groups can be observed. We discuss their roles as hybrid professionals serving in a wide variety of specialised expert roles, their sources of professional legitimacy and power as well as their contestation. As situated professionals, this new staff group is not only embedded in but also dependent on local organisational orders that influence their professional boundary work with academics: reflecting rather traditional academic-administrative divides, third spaces of fluid collaborations, or managerialist disruptions of academic values and powers.</p

Audit-market Intermediaries:Doing Institutional Work in British Research Intensive Universities

Our paper examines the rise of a new category of professional support staff whom we refer to as ‘audit-market intermediaries’ in the context of a rapidly changing regulatory and funding environment in British higher education. We explore the roles they play in articulating environmental changes in research intensive universities related to the auditing of teaching via demands for quality assurance and the marketisation of higher education via the rise of the student as a fee paying consumer. The qualitative data reveals the internal and external sources of legitimacy and power of the audit-market intermediaries as well their contestation. We show how these actors serve as mediators of audit and market forces undertaking institutional work by translating, amplifying or bufferingrelated pressures within the university; and point at the relevance of the specific organisational context for understanding differing patterns of their institutional work

The Teaching Excellence Framework: Symbolic Violence and the Measured Market in Higher Education

In English higher education, the Teaching Excellence Framework represents a very significant recent policy lever in the continued operation of a measured market in the sector. Conceived as a policy to enhance and make further transparent the quality of teaching, it utilises a variety of key measurements to establish sets of related outcomes upon which effective teaching can be assessed. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence and adopting policy framing as an analytical approach, we illustrate how the Teaching Excellence Framework and its related discursive techniques are significant in (re)producing the institutional conditions which enable market policy to operate effectively. The article focuses specifically on three core pillars of the marketisation project of English higher education that are strongly affirmed: the further enactment of students as consumers and universities as producers, the related pre-occupation with graduates’ employability and future returns; and the uncritical application of metrics to signify institutions’ performance value. We show how misrecognition operates by a market policy cloaking itself under the guise of student empowerment and quality, and call for academic and political practices that forge acts of resistance

Challenging university complicity and majoritarian narratives:counter-storytelling from black working-class students

Low completion rates amongst students from Black working-class backgrounds remain a persistent challenge to post-apartheid university transformation in South Africa. Notions of universities as colour-blind, meritocratic, and post-racial have developed around a deficit and victim-blaming majoritarian narrative that individualises educational under-achievement, blaming victims and downplaying the complicity of universities in reproducing inequity. This article analyses the narratives of a group of Black working-class students, and academics on their in-depth experiences of educational success and failure in post-apartheid South African universities. Counter-storytelling is employed to foreground and promote the voice and lived experiences of those who often go unheard; and to highlight their narratives as valuable and critical in understanding persistent inequity in higher education. This article looks beyond the fixation on what students from marginalised communities are perceived to lack to reassert a place for institutional context in studying their experiences, to minimise the de-contextualisation of such experiences; and to illuminate areas of universities’ complicity in reproducing untenable educational experiences and outcomes for those already in the margins. Participants’ counter-stories are presented to deepen our understanding and theorisation of Black working-class students’ lived experiences in a manner that enriches the work of researchers, policy makers and practitioners.</p

The Teaching Excellence Framework: Symbolic Violence and the Measured Market in Higher Education

In English higher education, the Teaching Excellence Framework represents a very significant recent policy lever in the continued operation of a measured market in the sector. Conceived as a policy to enhance and make further transparent the quality of teaching, it utilises a variety of key measurements to establish sets of related outcomes upon which effective teaching can be assessed. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence and adopting policy framing as an analytical approach, we illustrate how the Teaching Excellence Framework and its related discursive techniques are significant in (re)producing the institutional conditions which enable market policy to operate effectively. The article focuses specifically on three core pillars of the marketisation project of English higher education that are strongly affirmed: the further enactment of students as consumers and universities as producers, the related pre-occupation with graduates’ employability and future returns; and the uncritical application of metrics to signify institutions’ performance value. We show how misrecognition operates by a market policy cloaking itself under the guise of student empowerment and quality, and call for academic and political practices that forge acts of resistance

Audit-market Intermediaries:Doing Institutional Work in British Research Intensive Universities

Our paper examines the rise of a new category of professional support staff whom we refer to as ‘audit-market intermediaries’ in the context of a rapidly changing regulatory and funding environment in British higher education. We explore the roles they play in articulating environmental changes in research intensive universities related to the auditing of teaching via demands for quality assurance and the marketisation of higher education via the rise of the student as a fee paying consumer. The qualitative data reveals the internal and external sources of legitimacy and power of the audit-market intermediaries as well their contestation. We show how these actors serve as mediators of audit and market forces undertaking institutional work by translating, amplifying or bufferingrelated pressures within the university; and point at the relevance of the specific organisational context for understanding differing patterns of their institutional work

Higher education looking forward: relations between higher education and society

This report includes the five thematic overview reports which were prepared for the European Science Foundation ‘Forward Look’ on ‘Higher education in Europe beyond 2010: resolving conflicting social and economic expectations. The five reports are: • Higher education and the knowledge society discourse (Jussi Välimaa and David Hoffman); • Higher education and the achievement (or prevention) of equity and society justice (John Brennan and Rajani Naidoo); • Higher education and its communities: interconnections and interdependencies (Ben Jongbloed, Jürgen Enders and Carlo Salerno); • The ‘steering’ of higher education systems: a public management perspective (Ewan Ferlie, Christine Musselin and Gianluca Andresani); • The changing patterns of the higher education systems in Europe and the future tasks of higher education research (Ulrich Teichler)