Core HR in British Higher Education: For a Technological Single Source and Version of the Truth?

ABSTRACT

This paper assesses the introduction of Core HR technologies in British higher education. The work of Adorno and Horkheimer is adopted as a starting point for understanding Core HR technologies as manifestations of instrumental rationality without losing sight of their political ambivalence and the scope for resistance. With the work of Sergio Bologna, Harry Braverman and Hugo Radice, it is then argued that Core HR technologies in universities are part of an effort that enlists employees’ legitimate concerns and frustrations over stifling bureaucracy and absent or incompetent line management. This is uncharacteristically done to project a managerial epistemology through the enhancement of workers’ control over technology rather than the other way around. It is argued that, in this way, education workers risk becoming the instruments of senior management’s surveillance of line managers. The paper ends with critical reflections on trade unions in education and concludes that their reluctance to move away from an organising model premised on the defence of academic privilege and academics’ refusal to sacrifice their careers to the benefit of collective governance are closing off some of the most promising avenues of progressive change.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• human resource management
• technology
• trade unions

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the University and College Union for allowing me the political space to discover and explore the dynamics discussed in this contribution. I also thank Alexandra Zierold and Rupert Holland for comments provided on the initial drafts. I am especially indebted to Ioana Cerasella Chis, without whom this paper – which commenced as a joint effort – would not have been possible. Although the writing is entirely my own, Ioana instigated and was thoroughly involved in all the preparatory work as well as fundamental dialogue and conversations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I am grateful to David Adler for drawing attention to the importance of this difference at the 23rd DiscourseNet conference in Giessen, Germany. Our disagreements and differences of opinion on this point (see Adler 2018), his conference paper and our subsequent exchange and conversations helped me clarify my thoughts on the matter immensely.

2. I am referring to the National Education Union (NEU) and to the College and University Union (UCU). The NEU was born in 2017 from a merger between the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL). UCU was born in 2006 from a merger between the Association of University Teachers (AUT) and the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) (Radice 2013, 414).

3. This term is translated from Italian and appears in Sergio Bologna’s The Rise of the European Self-Employed Workforce (2018). For clarity, the term simply denotes a condition opposite to that of being an employee.

4. This term is translated from Italian and appears in Sergio Bologna’s The Rise of the European Self-Employed Workforce (2018). However, I want to thank Dr Giorgio Borrelli (University of Bari Aldo Moro) for pointing out that, in the Italian literature on the present and future of work, the concept of ‘tacit knowledge’ [sapere tacito] also appears as ‘implicit knowledge’ [conoscenza implicita] and is often accompanied by ‘implicit labour’ [lavoro implicito] to emphasise the fact that knowledge is embedded and inseparable from the physical body (and mind) of the worker. To avoid depicting ‘tacit knowledge’ as a passive phenomenon, I try to respect Sergio Bologna’s active usage of the concept by adopting the term ‘implicit knowledge’ instead.

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Notes on contributors

Elio Di Muccio

Elio Di Muccio is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham and an Executive Committee member of the Conference of Socialist Economists. He has been a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Management at the Birmingham Business School.