Abstract
As I write this introduction to Organization’s ‘What are we do to with Higher Education’ series, students are marching on New Zealand’s Parliament in Wellington and occupying a central city street in Auckland. It’s budget day and the Government is introducing plans to cut student allowances and raise student loans repayment rates. Meanwhile half a world away the head of my school is on a 12-stop tour of Chinese universities drumming up full-fee students for next year. Last week, the university’s head librarian told me he’d just sent the journal publisher Reed Elsevier his largest ever journal subscription cheque of just over NZ$1m and yesterday, quite out of the blue, I received a personalized letter from my employer asking me to donate part of the salary I’m paid to one of the university’s research funds.
In isolation these instances seem perfectly reasonable responses to a range of pressures and circumstances. Corporate publishers clip the ticket as the landlords of global knowledge, universities simultaneously hold out their hands for charitable donations and scurry hither and thither across the planet hunting surpluses to fill budget ‘holes’ left by the retreating State. Meanwhile students, drawing on the protest genre of the day, baulk at the demand that they and their families carry more of the cost of university education. Taken together these events are symptoms of large-scale changes to the relations between the university and its surrounding institutions (e.g. the State, family, market and the corporation); changes that also reshape university teaching and research and ultimately the character of academic knowledge. The speaking out papers in this series tackle key aspects of these dynamics.
Organization has a rich catalogue of critical analyses of higher education beginning in the journal’s first edition with Ann Game’s evocative post-structural analysis of the ‘mess’ that is the administration of academic work (1994). Game’s work was followed by Amanda Sinclair’s provocative ‘Sex and the MBA’, (1995), Martin Parker and David Jary’s highly cited critique of the ‘McUniversity’’ (1996), and the magnificent millennial special issue that asked if the ‘house of knowledge’ had a future in the 21st century (Calás and Smircich, 2001). Obviously the ‘jury’ is still hearing arguments on that question as papers published in Organization since have testified. Such works include Wendy Larner and Richard Le Heron’s critique of the subjectivities produced by benchmarking universities against each other (2005), Andrew Sayers ethical analysis of departmental workload schemes (Sayer, 2008), and Gina Anderson’s use of James Scott’s ‘weapons of the weak’ framework to explore academic resistance to managerialism (2008). These works have been followed recently by Donncha Kavanagh’s institutional analysis of the university as ‘fool’ (2009). Kavanagh argues that the university’s routine of forming close and sometimes complicit relations with the most powerful institutional formations of each particular era is both its secret to longevity and the source of some of its problems.
The first four papers in Organization’s ‘What are we to do with higher education’ series take the baton from these earlier works 1 . We begin with Belinda Luke and Kate Kearins empirically engaging, yet dispassionate, analysis of university management’s complicity in the global theft of academic work. Alongside this is the serious, but hilarious, mockumentary-like exploration of ‘academic excellence’ from Sverre Spoelstra and Nick Butler. These papers are followed by two that turn attention to the currently topical academic publishing industry beginning with the meticulous and challenging investigation of publisher profits and tax avoidance from Geoff Lightfoot and colleagues and followed by Jonathan Murphy’s stark demonstration of the neo-colonialism at the core of the Anglo-American domination of academic publishing.
These first four papers offer empirically-grounded, critical investigations of distinctive issues. But the authors were also asked to go further, and present a set of actionable responses to the issue they each raised. What emerges from each paper is an agenda for renovating and reformatting the organizing processes that produce the issues identified. Readers will, we hope, join the authors in attempting to realize the suggestions made. We also hope that this additional feature demonstrates that critical analysts of organizing can offer both critical readings of the ills, inequities and inconsistencies of the world we live in and practical agendas for literally answering questions like: ‘What are we to do with higher education’.