The Social Structures of Global Academia

Fabian Cannizzo, Nick Osbaldiston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429879876
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Higher education and research are now at the centre of economic and social policy in advanced information societies. Global networks of researchers, finance, students and policymakers invoke collaborative sociological perspectives. What it means to be an academic and to work in a technologically advanced knowledge industry has undergone transformations that cross national borders. The future of knowledge production, social development, prosperity and the freedom of ideas are caught in the swelling of global tides.

The Social Structures of Global Academia exposes readers to a variety of issues that are impacting academics across the globe. The volume includes contributions by leading social scientists and innovative research from emerging scholars. Its anchoring themes include academic ethics, the affective cultures of scholarship, changing funding structures and social control of the currents of scholarly life.

Giving readers an overview of the growing field of critical studies of academia, The Social Structures of Global Academia will appeal to students and scholars seeking to understand more of the burgeoning field of critical sociologies of higher education, and general readers interested in contemporary knowledge about universities, science and the people who make it their passion. It will also appeal to policymakers who are invested in trying to make universities more viable places to work.

Chapter 1

An introduction to the social structures of global academia

Fabian Cannizzo and Nick Osbaldiston

Academia as a field of study

The form of social organisation that we call academia and the legal bodies that house it, such as universities and colleges, are today nearly mythological icons in wealthy nations. They are framed in public discourse not only as foundries of knowledge but also as economic resources, moral classrooms and facilitators of socio-economic mobility. As Steven Ward (2012, p. 131) notes, within popular Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) rhetoric, which heralds the emergence of a ‘knowledge society’:

Universities occupy a particularly special place in this new economic configuration and the creation of these new national, regional and city-based “information systems.” Knowledge society proponents envision universities as engines of economic growth… They are to do this by providing the new epistemic materials for post-industrial production, by becoming the setting for entrepreneurial innovation, business incubation and technology transfer and by providing a well-trained and flexible labor force that can continuously be retrained with useful skills as economic conditions and the needs of corporations change.

Although they are legislated at the pinnacle of nationally accredited education systems globally, universities are not reducible to the infrastructure and bureaucracies that give them materiality. Beyond the present focus on ‘innovation, vocationalism, knowledge transfer, marketability, workforce needs and adherence to the cost-saving and moralizing discipline imposed by the bottom line’ (Ward, 2012, p. 145), the university is vitalised by the idea that the rationalisation of knowledge is a public good, which also requires an appropriate form of social organisation. Debates about how such an organisation might manifest constitute the study of academia. This type of study is necessarily as concerned with systems of meaning (culture) as it is with systems of coordination (organisations) as the recognition and reproduction of academia are closely entangled with the identity of human agents.

This edited collection is framed through the reference point of ‘global’ academia to problematise contemporary studies of the academic in two ways. First, the understanding of academia that has emerged in English-speaking contexts has been shaped by a global political economy that has centred some perspectives and excluded others. Scientific and academic practice have always shared a relationship with political economy, which Raewyn Connell (2007) has shown to be well illustrated in sociology’s own history. Early sociology naturalised intellectual distinctions between European empires and colonised societies through an optimistic narrative of social Darwinism that placed European culture at the height of social development (Connell, 2007, p. 17). Although this narrative has lost currency with contemporary social theorists, the structures of power that commingled with these ideas continue to shape global knowledge production. The ‘Eurocentric curriculum’ that has developed from this history is not limited to sociology but has come to reproduce the centrality of British, European and American academic scholarship across the globe (Connell, 2017). A focus on ‘global’ academia centres the history of political economy in narratives of knowledge production and the reproduction of inequalities in academia.

Second, by encouraging contributors to reflect on the global production of academia, this collection hopes to begin redressing the regionalism that has characterised much sociological research surrounding the academic. By juxtaposing different experiences and studies from across different contexts and regions, this volume invites thinking beyond national boundaries. While the complexity of a global political economy may mean that we may never cover as much terrain as might be required to achieve this aim, exploring different narratives across nations allows us to reimagine the university beyond the usual ‘core’ United Kingdom/North American focus. Furthermore, by examining places as diverse as Finland and Australia, we can perhaps start to witness and track the trickle down of policies, politics and rhetoric into peripheral developed nations within global academic labour.

Contemporary critical academic scholarship is, however, still largely drawn from the social theoretical and scientific giants of Europe and North America. We will now outline what we see as some of the ways in which these important contributions shape our discussions of academia. These all suggest possible pathways towards a more global study of the social structures of academia, even within regional contexts. We will begin by exploring the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Mary Henkel, and then examine the discipline focusses of Tony Becher and Paul Trowler. Following this the chapter will introduce the themes of the book and the individual contributions within it.

National academic systems

Pierre Bourdieu’s (1988) sociology of French academia in Homo Academicus is an exemplar of the study of national academic systems. He mobilises his conceptual categories of capital to conduct a ‘field’ analysis of the Parisian-centred system of offices and associations, drawing a clear distinction between the cultural economy of the sciences and of academic posts. Bourdieu (1988, p. 48) claims that:

the university field is organized according to two antagonistic principles of hierarchization: the social hierarchy, corresponding to the capital inherited and the economic and political capital actually held, is in opposition to the specific, properly cultural hierarchy, corresponding to the capital of scientific authority or intellectual renown.

These two economies reveal distinct social logics upon which ‘academic’ and ‘scientific’ value are realised among scholars. While these logics impact different areas of the university (i.e. distinct disciplines) in varied ways, both ‘scientific competence and social [academic] competence’ (1988, p. 59) must be demonstrated to manipulate power. The flow of power within the French academic system is nationally specific in that ‘academic capital is obtained and maintained by holding a position enabling domination of other positions and their holders’, the highest positions of which rest in the Universities Consultative Committee – the board of examiners to the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Bourdieu, 1988, p. 84; also see Altman & Bournois, 2004). Bourdieu is critical of the French academic succession examinations, claiming that the choice of academic ‘head’ (doctoral supervisor) and thesis are ‘to some extent a relation of capital to capital’ (1988, p. 94), that is, by demonstrating the ‘correct’ dispositions and citations, mutually produce value for both the supervisor and the pupil. He claims that this encourages a ‘special form of anti-intellectualism… and which most often has no connection with the technical necessities of a true apprenticeship’ (1988, p. 95). For Bourdieu, the socially codified power within French academia acts to reproduce the academic field, institutional hierarchies and capital.

Another approach to the national study of academia has emerged from Mary Henkel’s (2000) study of academic identity in the changing UK policy landscape. Henkel focusses on how academics develop identities that are both ‘distinctive and socially embedded’ among disciplinary, institutional and work-based groups (Henkel, 2005, p. 156). While the framework adopted allows for a supra-national analysis of academic life, Henkel focusses on the importance of the policy context in which academic bureaucracies, organisations and funding mechanisms operate (Henkel, 2000). Because of the specificity of national higher education and research policy frameworks, Henkel (2005, p. 156) emphasises the need to ‘be cautious about drawing broader conclusions’ from her study of the United Kingdom, which has been transformed by regionally specific policies. Notably, while phenomena such as the massification of higher education and tighter budgetary constraints are widespread issues in higher education across national borders, Henkel (2000) describes the shift of organisational power in the United Kingdom as ‘centralised decentralisation’ (p. 57). Premised on the view that ‘creative peripheries need strong central values and strategies’ (p. 57), budgetary responsibility was devolved to departmental and other ‘middle’ managers without equal power to decide budgetary goals (p. 58).

For Henkel, research policies being pursued ‘at national and institutional levels were raising fundamental questions for what it means to be an academic’ (2005, p. 165). The ‘academic manager’ emerged in this period as an identity around which scholars could anchor their future planning and sense of organisational self. Managers in Henkel’s study, who took their identities ‘extremely seriously’, experienced very loose role ‘scripts’ and ‘no systematic training’ for their newfound careers (Henkel, 2000, p. 237). Academic managers were hence taking on positions they were unfamiliar with while becoming encoded in an antagonistic dichotomy – ‘between Them (managers) and Us (the workers)’ (anonymous academic, in Henkel, 2000, p. 238). As Musselin (2008) notes, focussing on (regionally specific) policy developments allows for an investigation of new boundaries, such as those between the beneficiaries of new funding mechanisms and others, and a rethinking of assumptions about academic life, such as the tendency to treat academia as a ‘special’ domain of social life in which the transformation of academics into knowledge workers might be overlooked (p. 53). Both Bourdieu and Henkel encourage a focus on the transformation of regional systems that are themselves dependent on their relationships to state bureaucracies and institutional cultures.

The cultures of academic disciplines

A second means for approaching academia as a global entity has emerged from scholars who place professional cultures at the centre of academic identity and organisational life. In ‘Science as a vocation’, Weber (1919/1946) drew a contrast between what he described as ‘the organization of science as a vocation’ and the condition of science in Weber’s time, which had ‘entered a phase of specialization previously unknown’ (p. 134). Far from being consumed by a breadth of scientific work, the modern scholar is a specialist who must bear certain qualities suited to their role in history, notably, ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘passionate devotion’ to discovery in the presence of a deep uncertainty about the ultimate result of one’s efforts (Weber, 1919/1946, p. 136). Weber’s polemic outlines character traits associated with an ethics of office (du Gay et al., 2018) which he deems appropriate to the role of the modern scientist. Leaders within different academic communities have attempted to either restate or reinvent a performative polemic such as Weber’s; perhaps the most notable within the discipline of sociology are Robert Merton’s (1942/1973) widely discussed ethos of science, which include the principles of Communism, Universalism, Disinterestedness and Organised Scepticism (abbreviated as CUDOS), and Edward Shils’s (1984/1997) ‘The academic ethic’, which describes the moral duties of scholars within the context of the early 1980s United States. As Stephen Turner (this volume) notes, this genre of writing is likely a response to a communal crisis, when the values and morals being described are no longer able to operate as tacit, assumed knowledge and mores but rather are felt to be in need of codification and formal communication. While these performative texts offer insight into how different elite groups within academia conceptualise and contest professional boundaries and norms, they tend to be premised on exceptionalist arguments about what constitutes their professional or disciplinary grounding. That is, they are focussed on narratives and concerns internal to the group as the authors themselves admittedly have a vested interest in the future of their scholarly groups.

Another body of works focussed on professional norms presents professional comparisons or inter-disciplinary interactions that are helpful in exploring not only the internal consistency of disciplines but also how disciplines reinforce their interiors by reference to other social groups. Tony Becher and Paul Trowler’s Academic tribes and territories (2001) is one of the most well-cited studies of disciplinary cultures and boundary-making between these ‘tribes’. Employing their colourful metaphor, Becher and Trowler (2001, p. 47) argue:

The tribes of academe, one might argue, define their own identities and defend their own patches of intellectual ground by employing a variety of devices geared to the exclusion of illegal migrants… To be admitted to membership of a particular sector of the academic profession involves not only a sufficient level of technical proficiency in one’s intellectual trade but also a sufficient level of loyalty to one’s collegial group and of adherence to its norms.

Disciplinary socialisation is hence central to this model of tribe-like affiliation as disciplinary ideologies and ‘heroic myths’ form a core of tacit knowledge, values and norms shared in common by ‘tribal’ members (pp. 48–49). However, if territories are the product of organisational boundary-making, rather than epistemic differences, then the specialisation that Weber argued was characteristic of his time may actually be, following Ruscio, ‘an iron law [that] controls the progress of science and similarly the academic profession’ (in Becher & Trowler, 2001, p. 66), which some argue have been especially detrimental to disciplines with porous boundaries, such as sociology (Holmwood, 2010). Steve Fuller (2016), taking this logic of territorial guarding into the competitive political economy of academic capitalism, describes the underlying knowledge incentives within academia as a form of ‘rentier capitalism’ (pp. 40–46). The proliferation of sub-disciplinary networks within national and international scholarly associations attests to the value of exploring this intersection of cultural and political economies. The role of leadership in professional tribes is an ongoing field of interest to organisational scholars in higher education. Michèle Lamont’s (2009) study of grant review panels suggests that senior scholars from different ‘tribes’ not only engage in boundary-work when required to work with scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds but also draw on ‘a lot of shared norms’ that stem from common experiences as disciplinary leaders (p. 44). Disciplinary and professional norms are intertwined with the power structures through which territorial boundaries are contested and reproduced. As Lamont (2009) argues, the boundary-work at play here is embedded then into institutional practice. However, those within the conflict rather than consensus disciplines, such as the social sciences vs the harder sciences, tend to reinforce and perform their boundaries strongly (Hearn & Anderson, 2012). Disciplines across the globe are worthwhile entities to examine not simply because of this institutional battleground but also for their meaning-making for individual academics (Becher & Trowler, 2001) that can extend into understanding in everyday life.

Economic rationalisation, acceleration and the technopolitics of audit

Academic working conditions and career expectations have shifted significantly since Logan Wilson conducted his study of the United States’ elite universities during the Second World War. In The Academic Man, Wilson (1942/2017) sought to investigate ‘the special folkways and mores of the profession’, whose function he defined as ‘the conservation, dissemination, and innovation of knowledge’ (p. 3). The elite US universities in 1942 supported a relatively informal job market (in comparison to the 1990s), which Altbach describes as resembling a ‘medieval guild’ where masters cared for their apprentices through access to ‘semi-closed’ marketplaces (Altbach, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 An introduction to the social structures of global academia
• Part I Academic ethics
• Part II Affective cultures
• Part III Funding and metrics
• Part IV Agency and control
• Index