Governing the academic subject: Foucault, governmentality and the performing university

Abstract

Drawing on research conducted at National University of Ireland, Galway, this paper explores how senior managers at an Irish university are seeking to measure and facilitate academic performance in the context of national and global competitiveness and a higher education landscape that appears firmly inflected by neoliberal ideas of rankings, benchmarking and productivity. I draw upon Michel Foucault’s writings on governmentality and biopolitics, in particular, and I utilise findings from a range of in-depth interviews with central university managers, with a view to critically interrogating the envisioning of what is undoubtedly a new academic subjectivity in the Irish higher education sector—a subjectivity that is being progressively planned for and regulated.

Keywords:

• academic performance
• neoliberal university
• Foucault
• governmentality
• subjectivity

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Kelly Coate, John Furlong and two anonymous reviewers for their excellent and supportive comments. My thanks too to my various interviewees and colleagues at NUI Galway who contributed centrally to the paper.

Notes

1. The research emanating from this thesis forms the basis of two papers: this one, and another forthcoming in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, entitled ‘Regimes of performance: Practices of the normalised self in the neoliberal university’, where the focus is on the challenge for academics of authorship and articulating alternatives in engaging, resisting or seeking to shape practices of performance management.

2. As I was an ‘insider’ in the research, I did consider the attendant issues of positionality. The challenges of ‘insider research’ in educational institutions are, as Justine Mercer (2007, p. 2) observes, ‘under-researched’. She outlines how ‘small-scale case studies’ and ‘in-depth interviews’ are best ‘as a means of constructing participative knowledge’, though there is always the question of ‘what to tell colleagues, both before and after they participate in the research’ (Mercer, 2007, p. 11). My own inclination was to not unduly ‘pre-script’, as David Silverman (2000, p. 200) warns. I tend to disagree, however, with Silverman’s assessment of ‘validation’ of data with interviewees as ‘a flawed method’ (2000, p. 177). Once transcribed, I made my interview transcripts available to each of my interviewees. This was prompted largely by professional courtesy. All interviewees confirmed they were happy with the transcripts, and four made minor adjustments, including asking for some comments to be ‘off the record’. The collective outcome was that I drew on the transcript material with full confidence. In carrying out my interviews, I drew upon a range of other useful readings, including: Cohen and Morrison, 2007; Valentine, 2005; and Anderson & Jones, 2000.

3. Although the terms ‘biopower’ and also ‘biopolitics’ are variously deployed academically, a key focus of inquiry has been on the politics through which ‘life’ is constituted and governed; in other words, how life is increasingly incorporated into modern forms of governmentality (Dillon, 2007a, 2007b; Donzelot, 2008).

4. Many of these critiques fall broadly into the category of governmentality studies of higher education (Peters et al., 2009).

5. It is important to point out that although global university rankings are an important manifestation of neoliberalism in the academy and a key focus for institutional managements, they are not the only driving force for the prevailing performance culture evident in universities today. On a national policy level in Ireland, for instance, a key concern of the HEA is public expenditure efficiencies and demonstrating performance and value for money across the higher education sector.