The rationalization of academic work

The academic profession is often characterised as an occupation that enjoys high levels of intellectual freedom, autonomy, and collegial governance. However, means-ends rationalities—enacted in New Public Management (NPM) and taking shape in standardised performance appraisals—are externally imposed and internally incorporated in higher education. This process of rationalization has been occurring globally, although at different rates in different countries. Procedural and formal rationality is used to justify the practices of NPM. Accountability, objectivity, and justice generate criteria for evaluating the competences of academics and the legitimacy of knowledge production. I will argue that rationalized performance appraisals render academics not only controllable, but also “knowable” and, ultimately, “useful” or “deviant.” Accordingly, the foundation of academics’ professional autonomy is challenged in the rationalized and disciplined environment.  Although this may well be novel in university settings, such practices and social norms are becoming institutionalised as they are embedded and embodied in social relationships and face-to-face interactions. This creates new social classifications and thus constructs identities, desires, aspirations, beliefs and emotions. According to Ian Hacking ways of classifying became possible in industrial bureaucracies and are the result of a recent democratization of some social sciences. New ways of classifying people open up spaces for new kinds to emerge. These kinds are new ways to be, and new options to choose, this is new ways to choose who one is. Identity and autonomy are, in this sense, interrelated. Drawing on work of Foucault and Goffman, the paper will explore the ways in which Hacking’s concept of looping effect might occur in an academic environment. Therefore, it will problematize: how academics have been “made up”; how the academic profession is being remodelled by the global process of rationalization; and, the impact this rationalization has on academic professional autonomy and identity work.