Abstract
This chapter sets out the analytical vocabulary and conceptual framework for an ethnographic exploration of processes of enacting the university, which the co-authors develop further, and in their own ways, in the rest of the book. Academics have a long history of pointing out that ‘The University’ does not equate to an organizational unity with a tangible and unified presence in the world. Yet when policy makers work to change the university through employing reductionist images of its organizational coherence, it has great consequences. Throughout this book, we engage with the tension between the power of images of the university as a coherent, tangible and even governable entity and the ways it is made up of diverse practices and positioned ideas about its nature. The chapter sets out the theoretical and conceptual field we use to explore this. Throughout the book, our ethnographic approach holds two ideas of enactment in tension – an instrumental view of policy as enacted in law, and what we call a democratic view of policy as a site where many diverse actors and organisations can potentially be actively involved in contested processes of change. This chapter stakes out the tension between these two types of enactment, and to do so, it delves into a number of subsidiary concepts, such as ‘governance’ and ‘political technologies’. Each of these concepts provides a space for reflection on the tension between dominant images of the universities that are often codified in law and the ‘everyday’ positioned practices of reproducing and reinventing the university that we have engaged with ethnographically. We seek a double take – in which we see the policy field as a space of political contestation where analytically any actors, including the researchers themselves, have the potential to become important players, but in which ethnographically people are engaging in processes and systems of power and some exert more influence over the definition of the university than others.
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Notes
- 1.
The ‘field’ is even wider in other countries which encouraged privatisation of higher education, and saw the growth of for-profit universities and publishing companies whose new business models took them into developing materials for on-line teaching and even owning colleges (e.g. Pearson’s) or into producing citation indexes, impact factors and rankings (e.g. Thomson and Times Higher Education) as well as vastly expanded journal production (Wright 2015).
- 2.
And, consequently, the role of ethnographic research in describing, resisting or consolidating dominant understandings of and interests within the ‘field’.
- 3.
This story is recounted by John Rothfork at http://cust.educ.ubc.ca/workplace/issue6p2/rothfork.html, accessed on 11 May 2010.
- 4.
Pawnee handgames were a recreation in the 1890s; but then white rulers stripped Pawnees of their institutions and economy and the handgames fell into desuetude; the games then became central to the revivalist Ghost Dance religion, and transformed from gambling into a ritual and then into a public game again; but by the 1930s, when US domesticity influenced Pawnee life, handgames were played as parlour games.
- 5.
That is, we have moved away from the rational approach to policy, which economists and systems analysts brought to dominance in the 1960s and which finds its latest manifestation in the craze for ‘evidence-based policy making’. That approach starts from the premise that problems are self-evidently existing ‘out there’, and just need to be identified in order for policy makers to follow a hierarchical and linear process of identifying a problem, devising a course of action, and implementing a solution (Jansson in Midgley et al. 2008: 41–3). In contrast, we question how problems come to be created: it could be that the desire to act creates the problem (Jöhncke et al. 2004).
- 6.
First, in the 1980s, universities were included in arguments for a wholesale reform to improve the economy and efficiency of the Danish public sector. The solution was to turn public institutions into self-owning institutions (at that point, to include ownership and independent control of their own assets) with a new contractual and financial relation to the state. Second, in the late 1990s, the problem was the structure of the Danish economy: although the small number of large industries had excellent working relations with relevant university departments, the much larger number of small and medium sized enterprises lacked contacts and interest in knowledge transfer. Quickly this problem was blamed on universities: ‘society’ could not trust universities because they were unable to focus their research efforts on areas needed by the economy or transfer their knowledge speedily and effectively. Third, in 2006, the problem was how to protect the country’s position as one of the richest in the world, and the solution was for universities to become ‘competitive’ and ‘world class’ so that government could invest in them to drive Denmark’s efforts to forge the kind of economic activity and high-skilled employees that were needed to meet, or create, the inevitable future of a global knowledge economy.
- 7.
But as Yeatman also makes clear, whereas under classic liberalism, men (not women) who had come of age could freely choose whether and with whom to enter into and end contracts, under ‘new contractualism’ individuals and institutions do not have such freedom – for example, the 2003 University Law makes it compulsory for the university to enter into a contract with the state.
- 8.
Phillips explains that whereas agencement refers to an arrangement or fitting together of parts, assemblage in French means a blending of grape varieties or of ingredients in a recipe. In this case, agencement is more accurate to describe the elements of the steering model, as we are arguing they are never blended and never lose their distinctiveness and separate histories (Phillips 2006).
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Wright, S. (2019). Enactment of the University – Issues and Concepts. In: Enacting the University: Danish University Reform in an Ethnographic Perspective. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 53. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1921-4_2
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