Giving the invisible hand a helping hand: How ‘Grants Offices’ work to nourish neoliberal researchers

Abstract

Neoliberalism has become a highly dominating and taken-for-granted way of organising the university sector around the world. In the critical educational literature, this market-based rationality has been scrutinised in detail over the past decades. However, rather scant attention has been directed to how university managers and administrators, apart from setting up quasi-markets, may intervene more directly to give the invisible hand of the market a helping hand. Aiming to address this lacuna, the purpose of the current article is to develop an empirically grounded taxonomy of different types of such interventions, and to theorise them in terms of the different facets of the neoliberal milieu that they reproduce and the various forms of subjectivising work among academics that they seek to engender. We do so by means of a qualitative study of so-called 'Grants Offices' at three Swedish universities. The findings arguably add to and problematise our understanding of how neoliberal markets work in academia in three different ways. First, while extant research has noted that university managers and administrators may intervene beyond the setting up of neoliberal markets per se, our study is to our knowledge the first one that identifies and systematises a broad array of such interventions. Second, it problematises the view of neoliberal markets as a form of monolithic entity that produces a uniform competitive pressure on academics. Third, and related, it furthers our understanding of the type of subjectivity that competitive milieus are assumed to bring about.

A Novel Definition of Professional Staff

“…In particular, the proposed definition resonates with the concept of 'institutional work', which refers to 'the purposive action aimed at creating, maintaining, and disrupting institutions', and facilitates understanding how micro-level actions relate to institutional change (Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006, p. 215). Sapir (2020) and Beime et al (2021), both included in the reviewed dataset, provide examples of such work. The first study shows how technology transfer professionals maintain social infrastructures for knowledge exchange by securing the freedom to publish in collaboration with industry, whereas the second demonstrates how grant advisers change social infrastructures by stimulating competition among academics.…”

“…The work on research managers and administrators (e.g. Allen-Collinson, 2006;Beime et al, 2021;Ito & Watanabe, 2021) and technology transfer (Harman & Stone, 2006;Sapir, 2020) highlighted the enabling of primary processes as central to the work of PS. Although librarians are not defined in any of the included documents, a closer reading of these documents (e.g.…”

Logics in situations of lower or higher “perceived control exposure”: the case of researchers

“…As shown by the same sources, an academic performer logic rather allows for the idea of having one’s research altered in these respects in light of how assessments of research now transition toward funders and important others from broader society such as governments and businesses (e.g. Vakkuri and Johanson, 2020; Beime et al. , 2021).…”

Researchers’ hate-love relationship to performance measurement systems in academia – a Foucauldian perspective

“…Or, as suggested by Foucault (2008), they help construct a productive/destructive relationship with freedom, as they not only provide the battleground on which competition is to be played out but also inevitably establish its limitations. As a result, the type of freedom or autonomy that the centrifugal mechanism aims to produce – and which can be expected to be associated with positive feelings among academics – constitutes somewhat of an illusion (Beime et al , 2021; Morrissey, 2015) or a cultural myth (Grealy and Laurie, 2017).…”