The bureaucratic distortion of academic work: a transdisciplinary analysis of the UK Research Excellence Framework in the age of neoliberalism

ABSTRACT

In the years since the second Thatcher government (1983–87), and continuing until the present, universities in the UK have been subjected to a series of neoliberal reforms which have had a deleterious effect on academics’ working conditions and on the kind of research they are required to produce. 1986 saw the introduction of regular sector wide audits of research and scholarly activity designed to make academics more ‘productive’ and the institutions in which they worked more ‘competitive’. This article takes as the object of its investigation the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the most recent iteration of the UK government sponsored assessment exercise. It adopts a transdisciplinary approach which draws on political economy, social theory and critical discourse analysis. The analysis exposes the ways in which the Research Excellence Framework constructs an illusion of intellectual excellence and innovation whose true purpose is the neutralization of the university as a centre of independent knowledge creation and learning, and hence as a potential locus of intellectual opposition to the neoliberal hegemony. The article concludes by calling on academics to refuse the narrow model of research valorized by the REF and to reclaim the idea of the university as a public good.

Desde los años del segundo gobierno de Thatcher (1983–87), y en continuación hasta el presente, las universidades británicas han sido sujetas a una serie de reformas neoliberales que han tenido un efecto perjudicial en las condiciones laborales de los profesores y en el tipo de investigación que tienen que producir. En 1986 se introdujo un proceso de evaluación gubernamental de la investigación en todo el sector universitario con el propósito de crear profesores universitarios más ‘productivos’ e instituciones más ‘competitivas’. En este artículo tomamos como objeto de nuestra investigación el Ejercicio de la Excelencia de la Investigación que es el más reciente de las evaluaciones gubernamentales. Adoptamos un análisis transdisciplinario con raíces en la economía política, la teoría social y el análisis crítico del discurso. Nuestro análisis demuestra la manera en que este ejercicio construye una ilusión de la excelencia intelectual y de la innovación, el verdadero propósito del cual es la neutralización de la universidad como centro de creación del pensamiento independiente y el aprendizaje, y por lo tanto como un centro de oposición intelectual a la hegemonía neoliberal. El artículo concluye con una llamada a los profesores universitarios a rechazar el modelo de investigación valorizado por este ejercicio gubernamental y a reclamar la idea de la universidad como un bien público.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• UK higher education
• Research Excellence Framework
• critical realism
• critical discourse analysis
• semiosis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

John P. O’Regan is Reader in Applied Linguistics at UCL Institute of Education, University College London. He specializes in English as a global language, intercultural communication, and critical discourse analysis, and is the author of articles on a wide range of topics in cultural studies and applied linguistics. He has published in several journals, including the Journal of Applied Linguistics, Language and Intercultural Communication, Critical Discourse Studies, and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong. He was a co-editor of Intercultural Dialogue: Questions of Research, Theory and Practice, Routledge (2016), and of Travelling Languages: Culture, Communication and Translation in a Mobile World, Routledge (2014). He is the author of the article ‘English as a Lingua Franca: An Immanent Critique,’ Applied Linguistics, 35(5), (2014), and with William Simpson, of ‘Fetishism and the Language Commodity: A Materialist Critique,’ Language Sciences (2018). He is currently completing a book on Global English and Political Economy, also for Routledge.

John Gray is Reader in Languages in Education at UCL Institute of Education, University College London. He has published in Applied Linguistics, ELT Journal, Language Teaching Research and the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. He is the co-author of Neoliberalism and Applied Linguistics (2012), written with David Block and Marnie Holborow, and of Social Interaction and English Language Teacher Identity (2018), co-authored with Tom Morton. From 2013 to 2015 he was a grant holder for the ESRC-funded seminar series Queering ESOL: towards a cultural politics of LGBT issues in the ESOL classroom (ES/L001012). He is currently editing a special issue of Gender and Language with Melanie Cooke on ‘Intersectionality, Language and Queer Lives’.

ORCID

John P. O'Regan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1335-820X

John Gray http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3373-9453