Academic Governance: The Perspective from below

Higher education systems have seen significant changes in the last few decades. Yet, we know little about the way new modes of academic governance have influenced the everyday lives of researchers in different academic systems. This paper will present results from a comparative study on how researchers construct academic identities, values and relationships in the social sciences and humanities. The analysis probes how social orders emerge among researchers in the “spontaneous” practices of classifying and categorising each other in the production of academic texts and talk, as well as how social orders are institutionalised over time in disciplines and universities. By looking at these processes from below, I point out the researchers’ efforts in achieving coherence as unique “somebodies” in a world where researchers try to reconcile many different sites with their rules and constraints. I will outline how researchers deal with the discursive construction of academic order both synchronically (the many different practices they are engaged in every day) and diachronically (the careers they pursue and the biographies they build up). Across countries, emerging social orders – and the processes through which academic subjectivities are translated into academic careers – are institutionalised in different ways: in the US through individualised research in autonomous departments and professionalised disciplines, in France through interdisciplinary national research groups, in Germany through the institutional form of wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter (junior researchers) and Lehrstuhlinhaber (professors), in the UK through entrepreneurial departments and universities. The presentation will compare and contrast processes of institutionalization across these four systems.