Plug into ‘the modernizing machine’! Danish university reform and its transformable academic subjectivities

Abstract

‘The modernizing machine’ codes individual bodies, things, and symbols with images from New Public Management, neo-liberal, and Knowledge Economy discourses. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of machines, this article explores how ‘the modernizing machine’ produces neo-liberal modernization of the public sector. Taking its point of departure in Danish university reform, the article explores how the university is transformed by this desiring-producing machine. ‘The modernizing machine’ wrestles with the so-called ‘democratic-Humboldtian machine.’ The University Act of 2003 and the host of reforms before and after this law are productions of those struggles that change what it means to work as an academic subject at a university. This is staged through a host of new social technologies such as development contracts, appraisal interviews, individual performance reviews, and so forth. Individual bodies and minds simultaneously produce academic subjectivities by plugging into these transformative machinic forces and are produced as they are traversed by them. What is experienced as stressful closures vis-à-vis new opportunities depends to a great extent upon how these producing/produced individual nodes respond to particular configurations of machinic forces in particular university, faculty, and department contexts. Empirically, the article is based on ethnographic field work (interviews, observations, and written documents) concerning a humanities department and a health and sciences department.

Keywords:

• Deleuze
• university reform
• academic subjectivities
• modernizing machine
• desiring production

Acknowledgements

This article draws on a sub-project that I conducted in collaboration with Professor Susan Wright within the larger research project ‘Stress – Boundless work in public organizations’ (funded by the Danish Working Environment Research Fund). It highlights how academic working conditions are changing, and explores how this occurs in the interaction between organizational change in the public sector and individual strategies to handle these changes. The article is based on ethnographic research (mainly carried out from 2007 to 2009) at a humanities and a health and sciences department (anonymized in this article). These departments were originally located at two different universities, but were merged into the same university during the project. The empirical material consists of qualitative research interviews of mainly academic staff and managers, observations, and written material in the form of ministerial and management documents, minutes, professional magazines, and so forth.

Notes

1. In Danish: Samarbejdsudvalget (SU): a mandatory committee in public organizations that allows representatives for employer and employees to meet regularly to discuss work-related issues.