rethinking academic work

International Studies in Sociology of Education, Volume 13, Number 1, 2003

Professional Renewal as a Condition of Institutional Change: rethinking academic work JON NIXON University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT This article adopts a polemical stance in arguing that the new public management of higher education has failed to address the changing social conditions within which universities are located. The solutions offered by the new public management are thus part of the problem, not part of the solution. What is required is a sense of professional renewal whereby academic workers re-orientate themselves to a changing world of increased individualisation and uncertainty and adopt a pro-active stance to institutional change. The article highlights the implications of such a stance in terms of a professional reorientation towards alternative forms of association, a renewal of moral agency, and an emphasis on the centrality of learning.

Introduction A vast literature exists on the multiple ‘crises’ currently facing universities. Some of this literature locates these perceived ‘crises’ within a wider context of fiscal policies (and their managerialist spin-offs) relating to the public and non-profit-making sectors and to the deep intertwining of these policies and the ever-encroaching demands of the private sector. The discussion occasionally touches on broader questions of inclusion and equity, for example when it focuses on issues of access and participation. (For diverse readings of the debate on the ‘crisis’ of higher education, see Berube & Nelson, 1995; Hart, 2001; Readings, 1996) Only rarely, however, does the literature seek to trace the perceived ‘crises’ of the university back to their roots in what I take to be the real crisis facing civil society: that of democracy and of how the university finds ways of (as Jurgen Habermas puts it) ‘asserting itself within the democratic process’ (Habermas, 1971). This

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article sets about this largely neglected but vitally important task by focusing on professional renewal as a key component of institutional change. Universities in ‘a Runaway World’ The metaphor of ‘a runaway world’ is taken from Ulrich Beck’s and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim’s analysis of what they call ‘institutionalised individualism’ (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002.) The world is experienced as ‘runaway’, they argue, because of the ‘decline of narratives of given sociability’ in the face of ‘a non-linear, open-ended, highly ambivalent, ongoing process of individualization’ (p. xxii). Within such a world the social form of one’s own life ‘becomes filled with incompatibilities, the ruins of traditions, the junk of side-effects’ (p. 23). It also becomes restless and migrant: ‘a travelling life, both literally and metaphorically, a nomadic life, a life spent in cars, aeroplanes and trains, on the telephone or the internet, supported by the mass media, a transnational life stretching across frontiers’ (p. 25). ‘Individualization’, ‘detraditionalization’ and ‘globalization’ must, therefore, be analysed together as the conditions which determine emergent modes of institutional formation and association. Some decry what they see as the decline of cultural values implicit in these new conditions. They point to the breakdown of relationships and connectivity, the erosion of civic purposefulness and engagement, and the loss of boundary and identity as inevitable consequences of the ‘runaway world’ within which we find ourselves. Others are more likely to highlight the new freedoms – of identity, lifestyle, choice and orientation – that such a world would seem to open up: a world of infinite possibility within which any notion of ‘limit’ is rendered off-limits. Yet others remind us of the dark side of this ‘runaway world’: its emergent underclass, its deep inequalities and its concentrations of multiple disadvantage. Each of these perspectives provides a different value orientation to the processes of ‘detraditionalization’ and ‘globalization’ captured in the phrase ‘runaway world’. These different perspectives, however, have in common two shared assumptions: that this ‘runaway world’ is characterised by a rapid acceleration in the pace of individualisation, and that this process highlights the importance of institutions while posing a severe threat to their continuity and integrity. Traditionally, our sense of institutional ‘membership’ and ‘belongingness’ has been structured around notions of commonality and sameness. The ‘runaway world’ of accelerating individualisation renders those notions less secure and at the very least forces us at the level of practice and organisational structure to confront the ever-increasing intrusions of cultural and ideological difference. Institutions that were founded on the assumption of homogeneity have to come to terms with the heterogeneity that now characterises our ‘runaway world’. In a world of increasing individualisation, detraditionalisation and globalisation, institutions gain

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renewed significance as public spaces within which the competing impulses of differentiation and cohesion can be mediated. These changing conditions go some way towards explaining why institutions of higher education have become increasingly complex, not only in their organisational structures but also in their contested ends and purposes. There is no longer a clear consensus (if, indeed, there ever was) about what universities are for, in spite of vice-chancellors’ and principals’ pride in their institutional ‘mission statements’ and increasingly intrusive ‘corporate planning’ regimes. In spite of the new freedoms that some associate with ‘a runaway world’, its institutional consequences within the university sector are far from benign. The new freedoms have brought with them new hierarchies and new exclusion zones that, as recent scholarship shows, have stratified, fractionalised, and atomised the higher education workplace. Systemic Stratification Zelda F. Gamson highlights ‘tremendous inequalities in the academy on almost any measure we might want to use’. She points to the fact that, within the USA, ‘among four-year institutions, only 8 per cent of private colleges and universities and 3 per cent of public universities are very selective. All the rest, both public and private, are less selective or totally unselective, with the largest percentage concentrated at the bottom’. Within the small proportion of ‘very selective schools’ the average income of students ‘is three to four times that of students in the least selective schools’. Moreover, ‘faculty in private research universities earn almost twice as much as faculty in liberal arts colleges’. When total income, including consulting income, royalties, and other institutional income, is factored in, ‘faculty in private research universities are by far the highest paid, earning two and a half times more than liberal arts college faculty’ (Gamson, 1998, pp. 103-104). A similar ratio applies with regard to expenditure: ‘expenditures per student in private universities are more than twice those in liberal arts colleges and more than three times those in community colleges’. Within the United Kingdom the disparities are less pronounced, but the increasing demand by the older, elite universities to set their own fees is likely in the future to reproduce the multiple inequalities highlighted by Gamson. Moreover, the existing mechanisms whereby research funds are allocated through a rigorous process of selection (such that medium and low ‘rated’ institutions receive little or no research funding) further increase the disparities between institutions. Institutional Fractionalisation The fifth edition of Clark Kerr’s classic text, The Uses of the University, contains a new chapter in which he reflects upon the university of the 21st century (Kerr, 2001). Less sure than in the original 1963 edition, in which he 5

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outlined the development of the American university in the second half of the 20th century, Kerr restricts himself to possible ‘scenarios’ and acknowledges his own uncertainties regarding the future. Nevertheless, one of those ‘scenarios’, which he terms ‘the fractionalization of the academic guild’, would already seem to be shifting from the realms of possibility to those of actuality. The key characteristics of this ‘scenario’, he argues, are that ‘subject matter specialization increases, breaking knowledge into tinier and tinier topics’; that fractionalisation also increases in the battle over academic merit versus social justice in treatment of students, ‘whether it should be treated as equality of opportunity or as equality of results’; and, finally, that ‘conflict may occur over models of the university itself’ (Kerr, 2001, p. 26). In the United Kingdom, Ronald Barnett paints a similar picture of what he terms ‘the Western University’ faced with ‘supercomplexity’, in which institutions risk fractionalisation as their frames of understanding, action and self-identity are continually challenged (Barnett, 2000). Both Kerr and Barnett make the point that the university with its traditional moorings in philosophy has been cast adrift both morally and epistemologically. This moral and epistemological uncertainty, as Kerr points out, drastically foreshortens the time horizon for planning: ‘in the 1960s we were confident of progress in higher education. We made plans for twenty, thirty, forty years ahead, certain of their realization. Now the time horizon for planning is three or five or ten years.’ (Kerr, 2001, p. 206). Fractionalisation is both synchronic and diachronic in its impact. Professional Atomisation Taking place alongside the increasing stratification and fractionalisation of the university are profound changes in the conditions of academic work. As early as the mid-1990s a report sponsored by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) argued that ‘it is no longer sensible to speak of a single academic profession’ and that ‘a caste distinction is emerging between “have” and “have-not” groups’. The latter, it went on to argue, constitute ‘an underclass ... with limited prospects for advancement or employment stability’. At the same time increased differentials and tensions are apparent among what the report calls ‘top-level academics’, who are under pressure to produce high-profile research and to develop and market new and appealing courses (Kogan et al, 1994, pp. 62-65.) Gary Rhoades and Sheila Slaughter argue a similar case for the situation within the USA, where, they claim, ‘the number of part-time faculty has increased to 43 percent of the total faculty workforce’. The percentages vary by subject, with those subjects (and subject-specific institutions) teaching the largest numbers of undergraduates having the highest percentages of part-time academic staff. ‘The inequalities in people’s material existence in higher education are’, they argue, ‘vast and expanding’. (Rhoades & Slaughter, 1998, p. 36.) The result is an atomised profession, which is not only increasingly part-time but also

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increasingly managed by new cadres of administrators and non-academic managers. This is a bleak picture from which it is tempting to extract a highly pessimistic view of the ‘runaway’ changes that institutions in general, and universities in particular, are having to confront. However, as academic workers we need to ask ourselves whether the problem is the changes themselves or the dominant responses to those changes. At a pragmatic level, we also need to acknowledge that while we can do little about the broader societal changes that characterise ‘a runaway world’, we can arguably do a great deal by analysing those changes, challenging the dominant responses to them, and developing alternative analyses and responses of our own. In addressing this urgent professional and political agenda, we need first to explore the ideological roots of what has come to be known as the new public management. This constitutes the dominant and hugely simplistic response to the complex changes that make up, at the institutional level, a ‘runaway world’. The (Mis)management of Change The new public management was driven by the resurgence of neo-liberal market ideologies that dominated the last quarter of the last century and continue to exert a major influence on how universities are managed. It was largely based on the assumption of a general breakdown of trust in the public and non-profit-making sectors and on the further assumption that public trust is best regained through systems of accountability that support competition across these sectors. If only the public and non-profit-making sectors could learn from, and behave as if they were part of, the private sector, all would be well. From that forlorn hope came the endless targetsetting, league tables, inspection regimes, and centrally controlled funding mechanisms that now characterise the university sector and dominate the working lives of those within it. As Onora O’Neill pointed out in the BBC Reith Lectures, this widely endorsed mode of institutional (mis)management is itself part of the problem, not part of the solution (O’Neill, 2002). Far from reinstating public trust in public institutions, it has encouraged a ‘culture of suspicion’ which is then used to justify the centralised control of those institutions: In theory the new culture of accountability and audit makes professionals and institutions more accountable to the public. This is supossedly done by publishing targets and levels of attainment in league tables and by establishing complaint procedures by which members of the public can seek redress for professional or institutional failures. But underlying this ostensible aim of accountability to the public is the real requirement of accountability to regulators, to departments of government, to funders, to legal standards. The new forms of accountability impose forms of central control; quite often, indeed, a range of different and 7

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mutually inconsistent forms of central control. (O’Neill’s emphases; O’Neill, 2002, pp. 52-53) This statement constitutes a serious indictment of the new public management of higher education. The charge against that management regime is its lack of either transparency or internal consistency. It fails, according to O’Neill, to declare its underlying purposes and to render those purposes coherent in organisational practice. It is a fudge: a muddle masquerading as a serious response to a problem it fails to address, let alone analyse. Far from encouraging institutions within the public and non-profitmaking sectors to engage with their publics, the new public management of higher education has served to render them defensive and inward-looking: ‘we are heading towards defensive medicine, defensive teaching and defensive policing’ (O’Neill, 2002, p. 50). The moral trajectory of professional practice towards public service through the exercise of professional judgement brought to bear on highly complex, indeterminate problems has thereby been deflected. Both the professionals and their publics are thereby the poorer. The accountability regimes which characterise the new public management of education have scored an embarrassing own goal. At issue are the underlying purposes of professional practice and the capacity of professionals to reach out to their publics. The complex societal forces operating in the late modern age require a radical reappraisal of those purposes and a radical redefinition of what we understand by the increasingly differentiated and stratified public sphere. However, the ways in which we have set about that reappraisal and redefinition, through the mechanisms of new public management and the ideologies of neo-liberalism, are a dead end. The endemic problem of the redistribution of power across new force-fields of difference cannot be resolved through retrenchment and centralisation. Somehow, as academic workers, we have to find ways of redefining our professional purposes to be commensurate with the ‘runaway world’ within which, for better or worse, we find ourselves. The managerialist response to such an analysis is a recourse to solutions premised upon the supposed primacy of organisational restructuring. While acknowledging that organisational structure is important, this article argues that moral agency is a neglected component of any effective restructuring: how we as academic workers define our academic identity is central to the creation of the conditions necessary for a renewed sense of professional and civic purpose within higher education. O’Neill’s analysis highlights the repeated failure of central government policy, and of senior managers in the public and non-profit-making sectors, to trust to ‘the goods’ of institutions located within that sector. At stake in this failure is the possibility of sustaining institutions of higher education that can offer the intellectual and moral leadership necessary to reconcile increasingly diverse public and professional interests.

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Change from the Inside Out Some signposts show how we as academic workers might move towards a reconfiguration of professional and public interests. The metaphor of signposts takes us to precise points and specific sectors. Signposts are located in sometimes difficult terrain to enable travellers to find a way. They point to specificities that then have to be located upon a map. What follows is not a worked-through alternative to the new management of education, but some re-routings that relate to the central theme of what constitutes academic professionalism. The Centrality of Association Institutions are ways of organising association. The notion of ‘association’ includes a wide range of relationships. Anthropologists remind us that institutions can be distinguished in terms of the polarities around which their various discourses are organised (see, for example, Douglas, 1987). From that perspective, it is perhaps significant that ‘professional’ relationships are often set in sharp distinction to ‘intimate’ relationships, the implication being that intimacy and professionalism are at opposite ends of some hypothetical continuum. But what if, in the interests of deepening democracy and hollowing out the hegemony of professionalism, we were to rethink association in terms of its touching upon our deepest values and affiliations? Would not our professionalism then require of us a capacity for disciplined intimacy governed by wisdom, judgement and self-knowledge? And would not that capacity be the basis for a new kind of relationship between professionals and their publics? I think these are the questions upon which most finely tuned teaching and collegial relationships turn. Anthony Giddens pushes this line of questioning to its extreme in his notion of ‘intimacy as democracy’ (Giddens, 1993). He points to conditions implicit in the meaning of democracy in its orthodox sense, and argues that these now pertain within what have hitherto been dichotomised as the public and private spheres. Interpersonal relationship thereby becomes one of the key sites within which the struggle for democracy is played out. In particular, he argues that democracy means discussion: ‘the relationship is its own forum’ (p. 194). Deep relationships like deep democracies require a ‘rolling contract’ to which ‘appeal may be made by either partner when situations arise [which are] felt to be unfair or oppressive’ (p. 192). Strong relationships, like strong democracies, hold us to account. The public site, conceived as the privileged site of democratic participation, must now include relationships that are both intimate and private. There is no hiding place from what Giddens terms ‘the reflexive project of self – the condition of relating to others in an egalitarian way’ (p. 189). This endless elaboration and proliferation of the public sphere carries with it an intensification of anxiety and risk. There are fewer and fewer spaces within which we can set the ‘the reflexive project of self’ to one side 9

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and gain uncomplicated assurance. Intimacy is no longer a safe haven. The side effects of this aspect of our ‘runaway world’ are all too apparent in the ingenious escapisms that such a world generates: through, for example, its subcultures of drug-dependency, addictive behaviour and criminality. These are, of course, real problems that must be addressed. What must also be acknowledged, however, is that this ‘runaway world’, for all its unpredictable fall-out, is driven by a kind of moral impetus. It is in part, at least, a consequence of the deepening reflexivity of late modern society, from which there is no escape and with which we must all as public professionals and citizens engage. The Centrality of Moral Agency Nevertheless, there is a deep, troubling ambivalence implicit in that engagement. ‘The moral act itself’, claims Zygmunt Bauman, ‘is endemically ambivalent, forever threading precariously the thin lines dividing care from domination and tolerance from indifference’. In the complex network of mutual dependencies, he argues, ‘no act, no matter how noble and unselfish and beneficial for some, can be truly insured against hurting those who may find themselves, inadvertently, on its receiving end’ (Bauman, 1993, p. 181). Our actions, regardless of their moral frame, are bound to be ambivalent in their consequences. Agency necessarily carries with it ambivalent consequences. That is what it means to live in ‘a runaway world’: the experience, certainly, of chronic uncertainty, but the hope, also, of reconciling that uncertainty with a sense of moral purposefulness that necessitates an ongoing search for resolutions that recognise differences of outlook and belief, background and expectation, purpose and condition. Institutions are at the sharp edge of this ambivalence. While cultural pessimists bemoan and cultural optimists celebrate what each sees as the ‘breakdown’ of traditional institutional structures, cultural realists (who must argue counterfactually, i.e. hopefully) point to the ambivalence of institutions: their capacity for meltdown and fracture, but also their opportunities for realignment and reconfiguration around a morally purposeful agenda. The task is to stay with the problem and work towards an opening-up of the public sphere to new forms of institutional engagement and old forms of moral commitment. The ambivalence of moral agency does not detract from its salience. Action matters and the moral import of our actions matters supremely. The alienation of moral reasoning from the prevailing discourse of the new management of education has rendered us, at worst, not only reactive but also reactionary. It is, after all, easier to think within the given frameworks than to think, as Hannah Arendt put it, without banisters: to think without the prearranged handholds of common assent (Arendt, 1968). Thought is always a matter of thinking within and against the grain; it is the form action takes at its moments of fragile and unpredictable reflexivity. The university

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exists in no small part to celebrate and protect those moments, and, sometimes, to hold them in frame and thus place them within the broader perspective of the public gaze. The Centrality of Learning Against the prevailing neo-liberal market ideology, it is important to affirm that universities are not only institutions, but also symbols of a particular kind of civic association: one grounded in argument, reason and the recognition of difference. The key principle of the university is not academic freedom, but academic duty: the duty of accuracy in one’s beliefs, sincerity in proclaiming those beliefs, authenticity in living according to one’s sincere beliefs, and a recognition of others’ rights to do likewise. The principle of academic freedom only makes sense in the context of a community that acknowledges these duties (see Nixon, 2001, for a fuller development of this claim). Of course, we are sometimes inaccurate, insincere, inauthentic and self-regarding, but the idea holds: universities exist in order that society might have an image of what associations based upon accuracy (in relation to belief), sincerity (in relation to the proclamation of belief), authenticity (in relation to the living-out of sincerely held belief), and the recognition of difference (in relation to the interpretation of each of the previous categories) might look like (see Williams, 2002). That difficult agenda is what we mean by learning. We start with the examination of received belief through the trial of accuracy: is what I believe true given the evidence available to me? We proceed through the trial of sincerity: can I put to the test my truly held views within whatever public forums are available to me? And, finally, the test of authenticity: can I live out my life according to the beliefs that I believe to be true? Such, for what it is worth, is the vocation of learning as I understand it and as it is handed down to us through the traditions of scholarship that have shaped our understanding of what universities aspire to and what academic leadership means. These are not arcane questions, but highly germane to the revivification of higher education and the re-edification of academic professionals. The relation between belief, knowledge and truth is highly contested. Learning is about taking that contest seriously. The relation between belief and knowledge has, as all serious learners know, to do with moving beyond wish-fulfilment or the aggrandisement of our own predilections. We may be uneasy with the notion of ‘truth’, but as learners we acknowledge the need to ground our beliefs upon a firmer footing than prejudicial and self-interested reasoning. Learning necessarily turns to the other. We cannot, as learners, avoid the ‘runaway world’ of which we are a part: its alien and disparate territories, its strangeness, its disparities.

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Towards a Learning Profession The radical decentring of the self occasioned by the changing conditions of knowledge presents an enormous challenge to the traditional tenets of educational progressivism: the notion of the knowing self as the foundation of a unified and ordered life, and of individuality unfolding within a community conversant with the continuity and complex overlappings of experience. It calls into question the very notion of a unified personality. At best ‘it points to a more complex range of unities, syncretic blends and differentiations’ (Featherstone, 1995, p. 51); at worst, to ‘chaos and chronic indeterminacy, a territory subjected to rival and contradictory meaning-bestowing claims and hence perpetually ambivalent’ (Bauman, 1992, p. 193). Within this new cultural context, identity is never given; nor can it ever be achieved once and for all. It is always in the making: It has to be construed, yet no design for the construction can be taken as prescribed or foolproof. The construction of identity consists of successive trials and errors. It lacks a benchmark against which its progress could be measured, and so it cannot be meaningfully described as ‘progressing’. It is now the incessant (and non-linear) activity of selfconstitution that makes the identity of the agent. In other words, the self-organisation of the agents in terms of life-project (a concept that assumes a long-term stability; a lasting identity of the habitat, in its duration transcending, or at least commensurate with, the longevity of human life) is displaced by the process of self-constitution. (Bauman, 1992, pp. 193-194) These changing conditions require a different kind of professional commitment: a commitment to learning as necessarily unpredictable and provisional, to the learner as self-organising agent and, crucially, to the professional as learner. Any attempt to develop an academic identity from that commitment must treat the learner as pivotal, since only through the agency of the learner can learning have any significance and coherence. From within such an academic identity, professionalism manifests itself as a particular value-orientation, together with the skills and understandings that are required by that orientation: the skills of enabling and empowering, and the understanding of understanding itself and of the ways in which understandings can be shared. Those values, skills and understandings are conditional, however, upon professionals recognising their own needs as learners, and that recognition is, in turn, shaped by institutional factors. Professionals not only excel in the goods of their own professional practice, but participate in a community that holds these goods to be of importance. Alisdair MacIntyre puts it this way: ‘Every practice requires a certain kind of relationship between those who participate in it. Now the virtues are those goods by reference to which, whether we like it or not, we define our relationship to those people with whom we share the kind of purposes and standards which inform practice’ 12

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(MacIntyre, 1985 p.194). Practices, however, are not to be confused with institutions: ‘chess, physics and medicine are practices; chess clubs, laboratories, universities and hospitals are institutions’ (p. 194). Institutions are concerned with external goods, which ‘are structured in terms of power and status, and they distribute money, power and status as rewards’; practices, although located within institutional settings, are concerned with internal goods, which ‘are indeed the outcome of competition to excel, but it is characteristic of them that their achievement is a good for the whole community who participate in the practice’ (p. 190). The relationship between institution and practice is, therefore, intimate and crucial: the practice cannot be sustained without the institution, but is always vulnerable to the acquisitiveness and competitiveness of the institution. Insofar as professionalism constitutes a commitment to the internal goods of learning, it provides a critical distance between the practitioner and the institutional contexts within which the practitioner operates. The practitioner lays claim to professionalism by virtue of that critical distance. Academic professionalism might, then, be defined in terms of a commitment to the intrinsic goods of learning and the maintenance of a critical distance between that practice and the extrinsic goods of institutional organisation. Indeed, academic workers might be seen as having a professional duty to adopt an explicitly oppositional stance to policies that prioritise the external goods of the institution or militate against the internal goods of learning; for example, policies that are aimed at increasing competition, generating acquisitiveness or reproducing inequality. Such a view of academic professionalism is at odds with the dominant view implicit in the centralist assumptions of a system within which the academic worker is increasingly treated ‘as an operative rather than as a decision-maker, as someone whose role is merely to implement the judgements of others and not to act on his or her own’ (Kelly, 1989, p. 130). It is, however, central to the idea of a learning profession committed to the recognition of difference. What this means in practice has to be thought and worked through by those whose professional responsibilities involve that kind of thought and work. A starting point must be a reconfiguration of professional academic practice such that academic labour centres not on inflexible and corporatist modes of audit and accountability, but on flexible and associative modes of reflexivity and dialogue. Many dilemmas of academic work hinge on that dichotomy, whose articulation is not (as is often claimed) a nostalgic hankering after the past. Rather, it is an invitation to view the conditions of the present with an eye to the future and an insistence that such a view can only be adopted in good faith by those who are willing to reclaim our universities from the clutches of an increasingly mindless ideology of managerialist determinism. In short, as academic workers we would do well to develop a new professional agenda focusing on the need to:

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o work through the organisational implications of our own commitment to the academic practices of collegiality, teaching, research and scholarship; o make explicit the moral bases of that commitment, the values that sustain it, and the discourses that might frame it; o practice those values and discourses across a wide range of communities, forums and networks. Conclusion Academic professionalism is at best Janus-faced. It turns, in one direction, to self-interest, monopolistic thinking, and resistance to change; but, in another direction, it points to the possibilities inherent in a very different kind of professional outlook: one oriented towards public interest, shared understanding, and a willingness to confront the implications of social, economic and cultural change. It is the latter outlook that has been badly let down by the new public management of higher education and that must be sustained and supported if the university is to engage fully with the public sphere and (to return to Habermas) thereby succeed in ‘asserting itself within the democratic process’. Correspondence Professor Jon Nixon, School of Education, University of Sheffield, 388 Glossop Road, Sheffield S10 2JA, United Kingdom ([email protected]). References Arendt, H. (1968) Men in Dark Times. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Barnett, R. (2000) Realizing the University in an Age of Supercomplexity. Buckingham: SRHE/Open University Press. Bauman, Z. (1992) Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge. Bauman, Z. (1993) Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. Beck, U. & Beck-Gernsheim, E (2002) Individualization: institutionalized individualism and its social and political consequences. London: Sage. Berube, M. & Nelson, C. (eds) (1995) Higher Education under Fire: politics, economics, and the crisis of the humanities. London: Routledge. Douglas, M. (1987) How Institutions Think. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Featherstone, M. (1995) Undoing Culture: globalisation, postmodernism and identity. London: Sage. Gamson, Z. F. (1998) The Stratification of the Academy, in R. Martin (ed.) Chalk Lines: the politics of work in the managed university. Durham: Duke University Press. Giddens, A. (1993) The Transformation of Intimacy: sexuality, love and eroticism in modern societies. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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RETHINKING ACADEMIC WORK Habermas, J. (1971) Toward a Rational Society: student protest, science and politics. Translated by J. J. Shapiro. London: Heinemann. Hart, J. (2001) Smiling through Cultural Catastrophe: toward the revival of higher education. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kelly, A. V. (1989) The Curriculum: theory and practice, 3rd edition. London: Paul Chapman, p. 130. Kerr, C. (2001) The Uses of the University, 5th edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kogan, M., Moses, I. & El-Khawas, E. (1994) Staffing Higher Education: meeting new challenges. London: Jessica Kingsley. MacIntyre, A. (1985) After Virtue: a study in moral theory, 2nd edition. London: Duckworth. Nixon, J. (2001) Not without Dust and Heat: the moral bases of the new academic professionalism, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 22, pp. 227-244. O’Neill, O. (2002) A Question of Trust (BBC Reith Lectures). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Readings, B. (1996) The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rhoades, G. & Slaughter, S. (1998) Academic Capitalism, Managed Professionals, and Supplyside Higher Education, in R. Martin (Ed.) Chalk Lines: the politics of work in the managed university. Durham: Duke University Press. Williams, B. (2002) Truth and Truthfulness: an essay in genealogy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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