Neo-liberalisation, universities and the values of bureaucracy

Abstract

Neo-liberalisation of universities is advancing through a bureaucratic revolution. ‘Marketising bureaucracy’ advances neo-liberalisation through audit and rankings in the name of ensuring value for money and consumer choice. However, bureaucracy in universities is not total, just as neo-liberalisation is a project which advances on an uneven terrain of values. This article argues that to exercise academic autonomy, to continue to value education, we must learn to distinguish between ‘marketising’ and ‘socialising’ bureaucracy. Socialising bureaucracy encodes the ethos of impartiality in practices that support academic judgement – both against marketisation and against abuses of collegiality.

The Invisible Civil Servant: How Female Senior Lecturers in Sweden Narrate Work

“…However, the invisibility of the role of civil servant can be seen as something else, that is, a position in academia that is not typically described as a street-level bureaucrat. Instead, the invisibility of the role relates to the growing literature regarding the structural changes in higher education, which points out that universities are more and more understood as businesses with consumers (i.e., students; Clarke & Knights 2015;Gill 2009;Nash 2019). Based on the literature on the ongoing process of transformation and the incorporation of management models into academia (Lynch & Ivancheva 2015;Watermeyer 2016), the identified storylines may be understood in relation to an academic milieu in which duties must be managed by the individual herself.…”

“…Specifically, regarding academia, there is a strong consensus among scholars that there has been an increased adoption of managerialism in recent years (Clarke & Knights 2015;Shams 2019;Sparkes 2007), which has been described as a 'bureaucratic revolution in universities' (Nash 2019, p. 178). However, as argued by Nash (2019), it is important to distinguish between marketizing and bureaucracy in terms of guaranteeing the value of education. That is, the neoliberal idea of bureaucracy focusing on value for money should be understood as existing side by side with the idea of bureaucracy supporting education and the public good (cf.…”

“…Marginson 2011). The latter is oriented towards equal treatment of students, formalizing courses and assessments and further formalizing communication between the university and the student (Nash 2019). Formal and informal leadership both play important roles in power relations within academia (Gill 2009;Gillies & Lucey 2007;Jarvis 2000;Stigmar 2008).…”

Teaching qualitative research in adverse times

“…This is a consequence of models that were developed for business administration (ultimately based on Taylorist principles of scientific management) being imported into the public sector and also into academic bureaucracies (Hood 1991). Although academic bureaucracies in themselves may contribute to impartiality (Nash 2018), new public management (NPM) implies the curtailing of academic autonomy in research and teaching and creates a separate class of professional managers, thus decoupling administrative decisions from substantive academic concerns (Krause-Jensen and Garsten 2014). A new, administrative elite has quickly established itself, surfing on a wave of political claims of achieving greater outputs while curbing public expenditure.…”

Bureaucratic encounters “after neoliberalism”: Examining the supportive turn in social housing governance

“…“Bureaucracy” is a stalwart of sociological analysis. In contemporary work, bureaucracy is a key concept through which sociologists examine the “neoliberal state” and its impacts on citizens, particularly those dependent upon welfare (Nash, ; Wacquant, ; Woolford & Nelund, ). Under a neoliberal rationality, bureaucratic clients are to be transformed from passive recipients of support to “entrepreneurial” subjects who are responsible, self‐reliant and independent from the (increasingly frayed) welfare safety‐net (Miller & Rose, ).…”