November 2021
This month reports summarises four articles that in/directly relate to the impact of universities. The first and second are the initial and follow up paper by Shore & Wright (1999; 2015) where they launched and re-evaluated the notion of audit cultures in higher education and its wider social consequences. The third represents an essay, which scrutinises how to incorporate evidence-based research into impact practices (Jensen et al, 2021). The last represents a conceptual paper that explores the consequences of teaching only contracts in academia (Rogers & Swain, 2021).
[1]) In this original paper, they outlined the history and consequences of audit cultures, that measures ‘teaching performance’, ‘institutional effectiveness’ and ‘research quality’ of academic labour. Whilst such audit technologies are framed as a form of ‘empowerment’, ‘accountability’ and ‘quality’ that is positively related to emancipation and self-actualisation, it is questionable how much this is the case. Instead, such audit mechanisms also represent a form of coercive and authoritarian governmentality, were the only mechanism of resistance maybe to articulate the negative, reductionist and coercive dimension, as accountability per se isn’t the problem.
[2]) In this follow up paper, they acknowledge that audit cultures now are commonplace in all spheres of life, and they inquire who and what are driving such systems of global governmentality, as well as their consequences. They identify six political effects, firstly there is now a global industry of consolidated audit companies and experts whom are enacting political objectives. Secondly, auditing creates the need for more second order auditing. Thirdly, the new established managerial class also opens new avenues for corruption. Fourthly, whilst the original intention was to maintain trust (content), the focus has shifted to reputation (form) management. Fifthly, professional judgments is replaced by key-performance- indicator protocols and measurements. Lastly, the complexity reduction allows for shifting blame downwards from failures of management to that of performance.
[3]) The three key messages they conclude upon are: Firstly, by the very nature of research impact being a social phenomenon, in terms of evidencing and value aspects, taking inspiration from a social science context is useful. Secondly, stakeholders need to be empowered to voice their needs and expectations as not to marginalise them in process, and finally, capacity building for evidence-based research impact practices ought to be incorporated into both graduate and undergraduate teaching.
[4]) They unpack the rise of teaching academic (TA) (teaching only) positions, with a specific focus on Australia, the UK, USA and Canada, coming to the conclusion that these are a response to specific socio-cultural factors. In specific, whilst teaching is still important as avenue for revenue generation for universities, notions of what count as “good” research are more contested. Within such complex value and epistemological negations, it is convenient administratively to resolve such issues via TA classification. They call for resistance, in not letting discussions around research priorities become too narrowly dominated by managerial decisions only.
[1] Shore, C., & Wright, S. (1999). Audit culture and anthropology: neo-liberalism in British higher education. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 557-575.
[2] Shore, C., & Wright, S. (2015). Governing by numbers: Audit culture, rankings and the new world order. Social Anthropology, 23(1), 22-28.
[3] Jensen, E. A., Reed, M., Jensen, A. M., & Gerber, A. (2021). Evidence-based research impact praxis: Integrating scholarship and practice to ensure research benefits society. Open Research Europe, 1(137), 137.
[4] Rogers, B., & Swain, K. (2021). Teaching academics in higher education: resisting teaching at the expense of research. The Australian Educational Researcher, 1-17.
