The purpose of [university service center Footnote 1 ]’s efforts in relation to students is: […] to make students an attractive resource for businesses even while they are still studying (University Service Center, 2018)

Investigating representations of a changed higher education scenery

Structural reforms in higher education (from here: HE) have not only altered the organization and governance of universities (Diefenbach, 2009; Lueg & Lueg, 2015), but, arguably, also the purpose of HE as mediated by universities. Knowledge applicability and student employability are juxtaposed with other rationales of HE as a public social good, an inherent value, or a means to social integration. This has been criticized as turning towards a commodified (Polanyi, 1944) space of “academic capitalism” (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997). While HE studies have paid attention to the consequences of the changing purpose of education (e.g., Biberhofer, 2019; Marginson, 2010; Nixon et al., 2010; Olssen & Peters, 2005), little is published about the narrative of education that is being mediated in everyday university life and how this “new understanding” is organizationally conveyed to students. Most structural changes and managerial decisions take place behind the scenes of teaching and learning routines. Students, upon starting their studies, enter a predefined university environment, being (mostly) oblivious to the field’s historical and political changes. Against this background, we focus on the contents of communication made accessible to university students. Organizational communication can construct a powerful narrative, that “tells (and in some measure performs) how the organization and its members should be” (Law, 1994, p. 250). Such narratives can be embodied in various forms of “sociomaterial practices” (Orlikowski, 2007), meaning sense-making between human presence, space, physical representations, and technology. We investigate selected elements of sociomateriality in the immediate vicinity of students (e.g., a video, a student event, signage) to understand what students might perceive as the legitimate narrative of their university journey. We assume that sociomateriality grinds the students’ “special ‘glasses’ through which they see certain things and not others, and through which they see the things they see in the special way they see them” (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 247). Similar arguments have been advanced by agenda-setting theory (McCombs & Shaw, 1972; McCombs et al., 2014): stimuli (objects, spaces, news, advertising, political campaigning, social media trends) do not necessarily change what people think, but they can provide a frame of thought and impact on what they think about (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). For a better understanding of what shapes the current notion of HE beyond a rather enclosed academic debate, it seems worthwhile to investigate the narrative that students are being confronted with. We ask: What narrative of HE is being conveyed to students through the organizational sociomateriality of a university?

We investigate one Danish university, as the Danish HE system seems to be a particularly instructive case for European universities moving towards a “marketized university” and a changed purpose attached to HE (Barnett, 2011; Bleiklie, 1998; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997). Denmark’s eight research universities have undergone stark governance changes over the last decades, labelled as being “extreme” (Degn & Sørensen, 2015; Wright & Ørberg, 2011) and fast-paced in their change towards financial orientation, in comparison to other Scandinavian (Bleiklie & Michelsen, 2019) and European countries (Degn & Sørensen, 2015). Strong reforms towards managerialism (e.g., Degn & Sørensen, 2015; Ejersbo et al., 2020) have been implemented from 2003 onwards (Foss Hansen, 2000). Danish universities used to be student–teacher-communities with democratic self-regulation (Kjærgaard & Kristensen, 2003), but, after 2003, they became “autonomous” institutions. Governance boards with a majority of external stakeholders were established, and senate and faculty councils were dissolved (Degn & Sørensen, 2015). Unit managers were appointed (Ejersbo et al., 2020; Wright & Ørberg, 2011), and Danish universities quickly changed from “a bottom-up to a top-down governance model” (Degn & Sørensen, 2015, p. 936). Additionally, this “autonomous” university is in an “authority and control dilemma” (Degn & Sørensen, 2015, p. 937) as the government often sets market-oriented goals. Since 2014, the Ministry of Higher Education and Science has started to discontinue study programs that have “systematic and notably higher unemployment among its graduates” (UFM, 2015). Thus, the Danish setting allows understanding of a condensed general trend, the changed purpose of HE as communicated by a marketized organization.

To grasp the sociomateriality narrative of our sample university, we combine two theories: narrative theory and Bourdieusian practice theory. Both theories consider norms to be dominant in certain contexts as practices by agents, but also consider materiality. While narrative theory allows for investigating what story is told within the field, Bourdieu’s practice theory provides clues for how objectified structure and individual behavior are interrelated. In the following, we depict core ideas of narratological theory, sociomateriality, and Bourdieusian practice theory, and we bring these three into the conversation. From here, we delineate our research design, before presenting analysis and findings. Finally, we discuss our results in terms of theory and HE practice.

Theoretical framework

Narratives and sociomateriality

Narratives can be described as “powerful mental models impacting on various dimensions and levels of human interaction” (Lueg & Lundholt, 2021, p. 2), in particular on human sense-making. Several features of narratives are commonly specified: first, an ideal typical narrative has temporal order. Second, the story has a “teller” (Ewick & Silbey, 1995, p. 200). Third, interconnected episodes lead to coherent emplotment. Fourth, they allow for moral interpretation (White, 1990). Narratives are often official, and dominant, tools of organizations to frame past and present in a way that benefits the organization. They provide a powerful structure that agents often unconsciously relate to. Boje has added another layer by proposing the notion of “ante-narratives” (Boje, 2001). Ante-narratives are oriented towards the future. They are a prediction of what will make sense in the future as a coherent narrative; thus, they are narratives-to-be (Molly & Jørgensen, 2016) and function as an anticipated structure. Generally speaking, narratives can occur through sociomateriality. Sociomateriality (Orlikowski, 2000) means material artefacts becoming entangled with social meaning and action. Presence and design of material (e.g., colors, furniture) have a social meaning that is being (re)produced in discursive practices with humans. Humans are equally co-constructed: Hultin et al. (Hultin, 2019; Hultin & Introna, 2019; Hultin & Mähring, 2017) describe subject positions as being co-constructed by the material and the discursive. They propose that material-discursive interactions scaffold a “normatively governed storyline […] that cites certain subject positions […] which are then taken up by those involved” (Hultin & Introna, 2019, p. 1364). Consequently, material conditions (e.g., glass or solid doors, instructive signage) “cite certain subject positions as obvious and legitimate ways to be and act” (Hultin & Introna, 2019, p. 1366). Therefore, we consider materiality constitutive for the narratives that subjects are able to construct in an HE setting (Fenwick et al., 2011; Keating, 2015; Lueg, 2018a).

Core notions in practice theory: habitus, fields, capital, and university nomos

Bourdieusian practice theory interrelates several core notions relevant to our study: habitus is an incorporated “scheme of perception, thought, appreciation and action” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990, p. 35). It mediates between structure and agency as it is “not only a structuring structure, which organizes practices and the perception of practices, but also a structured structure” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 170). Individuals, with their habitus, are connected to relative autonomous social fields (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). A field is constituted by a specific nomos, a shared belief in specific rules of the game and of what is deemed valuable. The idea of relative autonomy suggests that fields operate within their own rules but are usually co-shaped by the powerful political and economic field (Maton, 2005). A field’s structure unfolds through the distribution of three forms of capital which individuals can possess: economic (money), cultural (knowledge in its internalized, objectified, and certified form), and social (networks) (Bourdieu, 1986). An additional layer is added by symbolic capital: this is any form of capital upon being socially recognized as legitimate. In the HE field, incorporated and institutionalized cultural capital (e.g., knowledge, certificates, and degrees) have long been constitutive (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). The field had sanctioned knowledge as symbolic capital, i.e., as its shared “principle of vision and division” (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 143). In order to acknowledge the specifics of individual schools, scholars have developed the notion of “institutional habitus” (Ingram, 2009; McDonough, 1997; Reay et al., 2010), the “impact of a cultural group or social class on an individual’s behavior, through an intermediate organization” (McDonough, 1997, p. 107). In response to this attempt of extending Bourdieusian theory, Atkinson (2011) has emphasized “habitus” being conceptually tied to individuals and to existing, theory-inherent concepts to capture institutional uniqueness: nomos is a concept that can relate to a single place. Inspired both by research into schools as unique institutions and by arguments for staying within original Bourdieusian thought, we employ the notion university nomos for normative messages by our case university.

Narratives as university nomos: bringing together practice and narrative theory

We connect Bourdieusian theory to contemporary narrative theory (Lueg, Graf, et al., 2021; Lueg, Lundholt, et al. (2021)). Narratives have a duplex connectivity: they are a structured “opus operatum,” influenced by their context. They are also a “modus operandi” (Viehöver, 2001, p. 179), a means of structuring perceptions. This view ties the concept of narratives directly and verbatim to the Bourdieusian structuralist constructivist perspective (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). We understand nomos as a field’s dominant narrative. A university nomos is the dominant narrative tied to a specific university in that field. With Bruner (1991), we view narrative as a means of reality construction: cultural products, like language and other symbols, impact on forming representations of reality. Just like the idea of habitus, the idea of narrative as constructing reality is supposed to bridge the dichotomy of agency and structure. We propose that a university’s narrative, conveyed to students, has an impact on students’ perception of the purpose of education.

Research design and methods

We document data at three university sites: one on-campus event for prospective students (photos of signage during the event and observation notes of interaction during the event), a video for prospective students by the university, and on-campus university signage (photos). We subject this data to a sociomaterial analysis of subject-object positioning (Hultin & Introna, 2019).

Pre-testing: categories of sociomaterial representation

As our research question centers on identifying the narrative being presented to students, we select sociomaterial data within the students’ vicinity. With an open question, we prompted four students to tell us about their initial contact with university and their experiences upon enrollment. Early bachelor level was selected to increase the probability of students remembering the communicative artefacts that they engaged with. Students named online content (especially student videos and blogs), on-site events, and printed matter as impactful, e.g., an event offering guidance and information to high schoolers (“information day for potential students”).

Data collection

Our case university maintains several large buildings. In the building in which our investigation is conducted 21 lines of study are offered. Seventeen of these belong to the faculty of humanities (e.g., library studies), and four belong to the faculty of social sciences, particularly the business school (e.g., business management). In line with the student accounts, we select three sites: the first is an event, the info day for high school students; the second is a video by the university featuring student testimonials; and the third is the campus building with its relatively permanent signage. The first and the second sites address future students. The third site captures an environment students experience after enrolling. Author 1 and author 2 collected data between August 2018 and June 2019. All authors were in dialogue about selecting, viewing, ordering, and analyzing data. As most photos show a logo, or distinct features, due to anonymization, we do not display any of these.

Site 1: Information day for high schoolers

The information day for high schoolers is an event that takes place annually. The event targets high schoolers who are uncertain about what they wish to study and provides information on different study programs and administrative issues. While our case university is heavily represented with booths, posters, pennants, and organizational representatives, other institutions are present, too. The event occupies the building’s entrance hall: people must maneuver through arrangements of high tables with marketing giveaways and person-high banners in close proximity to each other. We select three stand-up banners advertising a line of study or institution in their interplay with their immediate surroundings for a sociomaterial analysis of subject-object positioning (see Table 1). We photograph these banners and take several bird’s eye shots of the event throughout the day. We also take notes of human and human-material interaction.

Table 1 Subject-object positioning at information day for high schoolers (three arrangements)
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Site 2: University video of student testimonial campus tour

The university offers online contents dedicated to prospective students. From here, paths and hypertexts lead to university-managed and university-produced contents with student testimonials (blogs, videos) under a section “See what our students say.” We select one 2:30-min video featuring two student testimonials organizing a virtual “guided tour” on campus. We select this video since content featuring students is mentioned as vital by our pre-test sample. As we are interested in the entanglement of human subjects and material objects, we note materiality and subjects shown or referred to in the video along with the transcription of the spoken text (see Table 2). All official university material is homogenized with a view to text and graphics, and the same material is installed in all university buildings regardless of discipline or faculty presence.

Table 2 Subject-object positioning in a student testimonial video, university homepage [selection]
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Site 3: Signage on campus

We document signage based on the following criteria: (a) it had to have been posted for more than 4 months; (b) it had to be official university material; and (c) it had to be placed in the vicinity of students. As the only way into the campus building is the entrance hall, we select material displayed there or visible from there. Author 1 captured the signage during identical monthly walks, documenting the changes. After sorting the pictures in terms of criteria and separating redundancies, we identified 11 central signage motifs. Displays on a large stand-up banner were often repeated on posters in other areas and on other floors. Most motifs are text only, carrying the university’s brand colors (e.g., “Your career starts here” on a large single-colored banner carrying the logo) (see Table 3).

Table 3 Central signage motifs on campus and object-subject positioning. The motifs center on student jobs, post-graduate jobs, and students’ careers, with a university logo or brand colors. All motifs are located in the entrance area or are visible from there
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Data analysis and findings

Subject positions as cited by the material

We are interested in identifying the human subject in the moment of encountering material objects (Hultin, 2019). Sociomaterial theory assumes that material objects assign certain positions to humans. Consequently, numerous social positions pre-exist as material suggestions. The human being, by interacting with the material (e.g., by reading a sign) is assigned one of these positions. Vice versa, humans co-construct a social position for the material (Moura & Bispo, 2020), often by legitimizing its presence. Sociomaterial methods for capturing this material-discursive process are being developed (Fenwick & Nimmo, 2015; Moura & Bispo, 2020). Hultin and Introna (2019) developed a method derived from Althusser’s (2006) idea of interpellation where social status is assigned by everyday practices (a police officer shouting—“hailing”—and a subject turning towards them, thus becoming a authority-obeying subject). Hultin and Introna further operationalize Butler’s (1997) suggestion that both subjects are unaware of their ongoing social construction. In converting these ideas to sociomaterial methodology, including objects (material and technical artefacts), they approach their data asking: “What practices and behaviors are being assumed or suggested as appropriate or legitimate […]?” (Hultin & Introna, 2019, p. 1368). Human subjects, in their interaction with material are being “hailed” (Hultin & Introna, 2019, p. 1368) in a legitimate social position. By way of example, a manager’s open office door suggests permission to approach. An entering employee thus claims a “hailed” and pre-existing subject position that can be interpreted as that of a respected worker in a flat-hierarchy environment. Employing this approach for our research question “What narrative of HE is being conveyed to students through the organizational sociomateriality of a university?”, we also ask, “What is the subject when encountering the material?” and “What is the object (or other subject) when encountering the subject?”.

Site 1: Information day for high schoolers

We regard the information day as a material-discursive practice. We sorted our data into the categories “human subjects” and “material objects” and grouped our observations into three “arrangements” (see Table 1) in which students, as subjects, are encountering human subjects (organizational representatives) and material objects (printed matter advertising the respective stands). In keeping with our guiding questions, “What is the subject when encountering the material?” and “What is the object when encountering the subject?”, we identify the social position that is legitimized by the material-human encounter. The general setting and overall arrangement position prospective students as subjects who are invited to legitimately choose from a large offering of competing programs and institutions. Representatives, on the other hand, are positioned as flexible helpful experts who will be able to answer various inquiries. We analyze the written texts on three roll-up banners proclaiming (or asking): “What do you dream of?”, “Denmark’s most satisfied students”, and “Ways to your top position”. Future students, encountering the sign “What do you dream of?”, are positioned as visionaries, who can legitimately expect to have organizations strive to realize their dreams. The material positions the representative as a helpful consultant who wants to help the visitor. Vice versa, the visitors, by responding to the sign’s interpellation, enact the banner as an authority that legitimizes this understanding. Similar processes can be observed for “Denmark’s most satisfied students” and “Ways to your top position” where the university is enacted as a service provider and the student as already succeeding, financially, upon choosing an education (see Table 1).

Site 2: University website video: student testimonial campus tour

In the virtual campus tour moderated by two students (S1 and S2), further positioning occurs. Our point of departure is once again the questions “What is the subject when encountering the material?” and “What is the object when encountering the subject?”. We order our video transcription along six places shown as offering material-human interaction. We do not pay attention to uncommented camera pans and tilts bridging these six sequences (see Table 2 for an illustration of the analysis of the first three places). The six sites shown are an auditorium, the library, the hallway in front of the study service, the student bookstore, a seating arrangement for student work, and the student bar. S1 and S2 are presented as the persons who select sites for the guided tour, i.e., they are being enacted as experts on quality study life. The sites selected and interacted with during the video co-construct the meaning of the university. In the beginning, the auditorium is introduced as a space for “learning,” while S1 takes on the lecturer role in front of a whiteboard. At the library, future students are enacted as subjects who will have to take care of their “syllabus” and who will have to respect the quiet zone for reading (S1 lowers their voice). The syllabus, simultaneously, is being enacted as an authority that guides the students’ daily planning. By introducing the study service, S1 enacts the employees (a name tag at an office door is shown) as expert consultants who can “always” be contacted. In turn, future students are enacted as individuals who can rightfully expect consultation in manifold issues relating to their studies (including personal and individual issues such as learning techniques, motivation problems, and mental health). The signs shown in the video offer consulting services on individual matters such as “study techniques” or “choice of electives” and are enacted as an authority granting these services. A seating arrangement for students is enacted as a place for group work: S1 uses a whiteboard at the round table to move some magnets around while addressing “group work.” Future students are being co-constructed, by the arrangement and S1, as subjects who will engage in study-focused group work on campus. At the student bookstore, onlookers meet an employee who will “help to get that [books] ordered.” This step also suggests the campus as a one-stop solution where the syllabus can be followed up on in the campus library and the necessary books can be ordered in the campus bookstore. Students are enacted as individuals who can expect a routine to run their study-related errands. Finally, S1 and S2 reach the student bar, where they and future students are enacted as fellow students meeting both during their studies and after hours. The university is enacted as a place centered on learning and students’ social life: what is requested (“learning” and a “syllabus”) can be dealt with on campus (buying books at the bookstore, reading at the library, engaging in group work, receiving study counseling). The university building, with its own facilities, is being enacted as a social field of its own which supports students in coping with learning and their social life. Absent is any mention of jobbing or a career outside of the university (one exception is the bullet point “career consulting” on study service signage).

Site 3: Signage on campus

The enactment of the university as a site for knowledge acquisition and social student life in the video differs from how the university is enacted through on-campus-signage. We transcribe all central motifs in Table 3. When approached with our guiding questions for analysis (see sites 1 and 2), the social positions condense as shown under “object position” and “subject position” (Table 3). Central motifs focus on students’ professional careers as well as on entrepreneurship and student jobs (see Table 3). The position “student” in the sense of an individual who is acquiring knowledge as their occupation is overwritten by career-oriented positioning and by the extent of extracurricular involvement demanded from students. Salient signage nudges students to get a job and to self-optimize their CVs. While sign design (university logo and colors) and position render the signage as official authorities on legitimate practices, students are rendered into subjects who receive instruction in what legitimate practice is, i.e., being a business asset. Further, a clear hierarchy of activities is implied: students are prompted to get “a study job,” as this might lead to their “first job” (“A relevant student job can […] pave the way to your first job”, signage). The purpose of studying, and the purpose of taking on a study job, seems to be menial to the future professional position. Students are positioned as subjects working towards something in the future, instead of doing something in the present.

Material-discursive positioning before and after enrollment

Our observations can be structured along the two moments before enrollment and after enrollment. Sociomaterial pre-enrollment sites are the information day for high schoolers and the student video; after enrollment, we focus on everyday signage. From here, two different narratives of the purpose of the university can be co-constructed. Both narratives have in common, that student employability and future jobs do play a role. One important difference is that the pre-enrollment narrative attracts students by promising a secure pathway to lucrative positions, leaving room for students’ self-actualization. The post-enrollment narrative modifies these promises and demands continuous extracurricular self-optimization from the students.

Prior to enrollment, prospective students are addressed as valuable individuals whose needs the university professes to meet. The material is the emphasizing of personality and knowledge-centric statements, emphasizing the potential student as a unique visionary individual (“What do you dream of?”; info day). HE is introduced to future students as a space where students have resources, freedom, and ease to learn, embedded in a social group of fellow students (“group work” in the seating arrangement, “many students,” and “lots of learning” in the auditorium; student testimonial video). The university is co-constructed as a sheltered system where students find the support necessary to focus on their studies and can spend their leisure time. This narrative emphasizes the university as a space for self-actualization. Professional outlooks and careers have discursive presence, but prospective careers are treated as “done deals” upon enrolling in a study program (“Ways to a top position”; info days). Students face a materiality which promises that they can rest in the here and now of the university.

After enrollment we observe that the framing of career and employability changes, with material referring to the students’ potential success. HE is depicted as the formal pathway to a career and a steppingstone to business success. Still, students are expected to work towards their subsequent position by engaging in study jobs, internships, career consulting, and entrepreneurial activities. This is best characterized by the motif “Your career starts here,” along with a reference to the university’s job bank, but also by posters nudging students to get a “job” on the grounds that this will bring them closer to their “first job”. The idea of employability being foregrounded is ubiquitous. While the material is being hailed in a position of the official authority that sets the agenda of legitimate practices, students are being hailed into having to re-think their priorities and their previous understanding of the university.

Discussion and conclusion

Two narrative futures and no closure

Looking at narratives as a represented social discourse being materialized and suggesting a story makes way for interpreting texts as already discursive and recipients (students) as already structured and positioned. Narrative is a monologic, organizational means of closing discourse, whereas ante-narrative is its predecessor, a story to be, and an essential tool in making sense and being made sense of (Boje, 2001; Graf & Lueg, 2019). Notably, the sociomaterial encounters of (prospective) students before and after enrollment co-construct both forms of narrative: the material launched by the university is a dominant narrative in that it is clearly authorized for strategic communication (Boje, 2001, p. 36, 2013). At the same time, and in that both narratives refer to an unknown future, they are ante-narratives to the students, leaving them in a stage without closure.

Before enrollment, students are able to co-construct an ante-narrative that is sanctioned by the very authority to whom they are applying. Consequently, this type of communication is likely to elicit strong expectations from the students as being the main character in a co-constructed story about learning, self-actualization, and personal development after enrollment. In this context, students as subjects are not only making sense of this organizational surrounding but are being made sense of, through signs and other visual elements (see also Hultin & Mähring, 2017). They are addressed as being in a position to make choices as they tread a secure path towards a career. The subject position of students implicit in the visuals is co-constructed by the material-discursive practice of the signage.

After enrollment, the narrative changes, with the plot being dedicated to a future of business success. By way of example, the banner “Your career starts here” positions students as subjects who want a career. In other words, already before the interaction and discourse have begun, students are positioned to be a certain type of student (for a similar example, see Hultin, 2019), a type that is different from the one in which they were positioned earlier. The presence of the physical, employability-centered landscape is accompanied by the absence of visual displays of a competing rationale: all official printed matter promotes career and job orientation. The perception that could be co-constructed from the material previous to enrollment—being a student with a task in the present—is now challenged by signs nudging students to work towards a future. This future is no longer depicted as relatively certain, as students are expected to polish their CVs and engage in employability-related activities. The two diverging narratives suggest differing subject and object positions, thereby redefining the purpose of the university and what it means to be a student.

Both narratives remain at the ante-narrative stage by referring to different futures without giving the students closure. While the first narrative of a sheltered site of knowledge acquisition vanishes, studying, after enrollment, is constructed so it merges into a successful transition of the protagonist into the job market. Education is constructed as a passing stage towards a more important plot and as a functional biographical framework for student self-optimization. While these insights align with studies on commodification of learning (Biberhofer, 2019; Diefenbach, 2009) and on organizational narratives vis-à-vis student identity (Drori et al., 2016; Leong, 2020; Nixon et al., 2010), we are surprised to find that a “traditional” plot of education as an end in itself is still being employed as a co-existing narrative.

Changing nomos

On a macro-sociological level, we suggest that the sociomaterial narratives of the university are connected to a changing nomos of the HE field. We draw attention to the possibility that the field is forfeiting its relative autonomy (Bourdieu, 1998; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) by further eroding its knowledge-related principles of vision and division. Tendencies such as the shift in the university narrative could signify a disruption of the balance between the field’s purpose and the influence of the political and economic fields (Maton, 2005). The influence of the field might outweigh the independent purpose construction of the educational field and change the core of the field itself. While no field operates purely on uniquely field-specific capital (here: knowledge acquisition) and while attempts to gear capital towards economic success are common, this outward orientation may change the power balance to the detriment of the field itself. In terms of capital, post-enrollment signage suggests that university graduation is seen merely as institutionalized cultural capital providing a certificate instead of incorporated cultural capital: students are expected to get study jobs and work towards their professional career before a knowledge acquisition journey. We draw on Maton’s distinction between positional field autonomy and relational field autonomy (Maton, 2005) to interpret the university’s commercially oriented ante-narrative. “Positional field autonomy” describes the independence of the field measured against professional positions. If numerous positions “originate from or are primarily located in other fields” (Maton, 2005, p. 697), this marks low positional autonomy. “Relational field autonomy” refers to work practices. If these are strongly influenced by other fields, this indicates lower relational autonomy. In our case, parameters for what counts as desirable are drawn from the economic field and directly impact how education is presented to students. Such weakened relational autonomy could pave way to weakened positional field autonomy. The logic of employability and knowledge applicability would require different experts than those hitherto employed (e.g., CEOs in governing bodies, business executives in professorial appointment committees). Practices subscribing to commercially dominated narratives might erode academic freedom and educational autonomy. If the educational field operates on commercial parameters, one might question its constitution as a field per se.

Pertaining to the micro-level, we suspect that the recently decried consumer mentality of students seems to be created by the market compliance of modern-day universities. The role of sociomaterial representations may be underrated. We emphasize that the recurring theme of student anxiety might be related to the unresolvable plots directed towards somewhat contradictory futures: purpose is conveyed to students as something that will happen in the future, never in the present. The sudden change from the preplot of self-actualization to yet another preplot of employability reduces the characters to naïve agents in the game: they are in the field but subject to a powerful narrator, i.e., the job market. This knowledge and control gap between narrator and character shows that the “narrator knows the story and decides what it is. The characters do not” (Kvernbekk, 2003, p. 276). The focus on learning as a purposeful process in itself is found only in the pre-enrollment narrative, which is an alarming insight given that research conducted into work and profession has long emphasized the role of purpose for both mental health and achievements (Allan et al., 2018; Devivere, 2018; Duncan et al., 2015; Veltman, 2016). As cultural, organizational, and personal narratives are interwoven, students may be hindered in their narrative sense-making and identity formation (Loseke, 2007). The long-term consequence could change the student habitus (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) into being a customer and a business asset.

Limitations

Our study is bound to the structure of (a) this specific case university and (b) a Danish context. In recent years, our case university has made efforts to strengthen employability, which has impacted its strategic communication. Though communicative practices may differ among European universities due to different power structures and laws (Graf, 2019; Graf & Lueg, 2019; Lueg, 2018b), the Danish setting serves to indicate the emerging narrative of educational purpose resulting from organizational changes towards a market-centered university. A second limitation lies in the focus of our study: we identify the narrative that can be co-constructed as legitimate by looking at material artefacts at one university. It could be fruitful to extend this perspective to the entire Danish HE system. Linking student or faculty-produced material (labs, leisure rooms, signage for cultural activities, etc.) both to the official narrative and to scholarly disciplines could provide valuable insight into power structures, subject agency, and discipline traditions. Further, data collection was contingent on the perception of the researchers. One of the reasons for the lagging development of research methods into an ontological understanding of the entanglement of the social and the material is the difficult role of the researcher as both having agency and being entangled with their surroundings (Hultin, 2019). Initially, we took pictures and screenshots as documentation, but did not employ it as a static depiction of reality. Instead, we used it as our point of departure for determining possible subject-object encounters and identifying implicit practices (and narratives) that are deemed legitimate to students (see also Hultin & Introna, 2019, p. 1368). Moreover, we did not include sociomaterial units beyond the university website and campus as corroborated by our student interviews. Finally, the impact of sociomateriality on student cognition remains debatable. Students might differ in their sociomaterial sensitivity and their ability to construct narratives. We assume that the narratives and their inherent moral (self-realization, career-preparation, business success anticipation) influence how students perceive the university, but do not measure student attitudes over time. Future studies might address this issue by combining organizational case studies with student surveys.

Theoretical and methodological implications: connecting narrative, sociomateriality, and practice theory

We show that practice theory, narrative theory, and sociomaterial considerations can be fruitfully combined. The compatibility lies in the initial Bourdieusian idea of a constructivist structuralism: narratives, as well as human practice and habitus, comprise a structured “opus operatum,” influenced by their context, and “modus operandi” (Viehöver, 2001, p. 179), a means of structuring perceptions. This view can be extended to materiality that, in interaction with human beings, becomes sociomaterial. The (re)discovery of Bourdieu’s structuralist constructivist meta-theory might aid sociomaterial scholars in identifying issues of agency and structure in discussing social constructivism and post-structuralism (for a discussion, see Hultin & Introna, 2019). The notion of the narrative as sociomaterial sense-making might promote an understanding of the complexity and far-reaching impact of sociomaterial cues: instead of regarding them as singular encounters, we consider their role in constructing a narrative that may hold sway over a subject’s perception of identity.

In HE, such a (dominant) narrative has famously been shown to be the idea of a class-blind meritocracy (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). The consequences were class reproduction and the self-exclusion of lower-class descendants in and beyond the HE system (Bourdieu, 1999). While such studies in class-structured European societies had to consider powerful chairholders and an excluding academic language, contemporary narratives of Danish HE, in a society with relatively minor class divisions, could be constructed by subtle sociomateriality instead. While the notion that sociomateriality is impactful particularly in HE settings has been advanced by several scholars (Acton, 2017; Cattaruzza et al., 2019; Fenwick & Nimmo, 2015), the development of methodology remains nascent (Decuypere, 2020; Hultin, 2019). We build on the works of Hultin and Introna (2019) who have conceptualized the idea of analyzing subject-object hailing to observe what the object does to the subject and vice versa. We propose using this method to retrace subject-object positioning on the basis of photographs, videos, and on-site observations.

Finally, subversive organizational sociomateriality might be underrated in practice: HE executives, scholars, and other stakeholders might consider crafting sociomaterial parallel or counter-narratives (Lueg & Lundholt, 2021) in order to offer alternatives to education being a promising business plot.