Contesting academic expertise: Industry-focused funding regimes

Abstract

Government/Public funding is central to the organisation and structure of universities, and therefore the status of experts and expertise within universities. This paper critically assesses how academic expertise is contested in and through the Australian Government’s National Priorities Industry Linkage Fund (NPILF), as part of the Job-ready Graduate Package. The NPILF distributes public funding for higher education based on industry-aligned activities, emphasising the development of the job-ready graduate and the role of industry in universities. This is consistent with global trends that indicate an increasingly narrow and commercially oriented mission of universities. Drawing on Bourdieu’s conceptualisations of ‘field’ and ‘symbolic violence’ the paper offers insights around the implications of public funding for how academic expertise is generated (by whom, for whom). The NPILF, we argue, represents a significant contestation of ‘expertise’ with consequences for academics, students, and society. Of particular concern is how the NPILF, and similar funding arrangements, limit the provision of expertise to narrow, commercial interests.

Introduction

Universities, in their organisation and social status, afford legitimacy to experts and expertise. Academic scholarship – underpinned, for example, by principles of academic freedom, the importance of pure research and the role of higher degree research training – is central to the social status of universities and constitutes the expertise codified in universities. The examination of expertise in organisations is well established, traditionally focusing on the Faustian pact between expert authority and “sovereign power” (Reed, 2012: 2), while recent examinations of expertise point to an increasingly fragmented relationship between expert authority and sovereign power (Reed and Reed, 2023). Our examination focuses on architectures of public funding and how they delineate the role of universities, and therefore the construction of academic experts and expertise. This is well connected to the literature on the neoliberalisation of higher education institutions, which points to the perverse incentives within higher education which encourage institutions and academics to increasingly churn degrees and chase grant funding (Alvesson and Benner, 2016: 87; Musselin, 2013: 1170). Of particular concern in this literature is how higher education is increasingly constructed as a private, commercial good rather than a public good. Marginson (2009: 16) highlights that governments are central to the imposition of narrow economic measures of success, which emphasise private goods and neglect the role of the public good of higher education (p. 16). This shift matters as it represents an erasure of the collective and public role of universities and vests their future on the vexed assumption that universities and economic growth are intimately connected (Alvesson and Benner, 2016: 85).

Our paper extends the literature critiquing this shift towards private and commercial goods in higher education by considering the effect this has on expertise as constructed and reproduced in universities. In doing so, we analyse a substantial funding and policy intervention in Australia, the National Priorities Industry Linkage Fund (NPILF), as part of the Job-ready Graduate Package of higher education reforms (Australian Government, 2022). The NPILF is designed to ‘incentivise universities to support enhanced university engagement with industry to produce job-ready graduates’ (Australian Government, 2021a: 6). Whilst our analysis focuses on an Australian policy/funding reform, its enactment and associated discourse reflects the politicisation of higher education across the globe (Alvesson and Benner, 2016). As Bacchi (2009) has argued the privileging of a labour market–education nexus positions universities as producers of citizen-workers, emphasising a private good provided to individuals who invest in their employment prospects through education (Bacchi, 2009). Research is similarly oriented to private interests, with universities increasingly needing to generate ‘value’ for ‘customers’; as emphasised by Kallio et al. (2016), academics increasingly need to ‘make themselves useful to external stakeholders such as business and industry’ (p. 688). The NPILF, we argue, is a fundamental expression of the above repositioning of higher education. Central to the NPILF’s power is its authority to delineate the role of universities, and by extension academic expertise. Our analysis examines this delineation as a form of normative control through Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence. Significantly, this analysis makes explicit the control asserted through the discourse and implementation of public funding regimes. Central to the paper’s contribution is how the functions and missions of public organisations can be fundamentally shifted through the enactment of normative control. As indicated above, the reconfiguring of academic expertise – central as it is to the public good produced by universities – has global relevance as part of the broader shift towards private goods.

We commence with a discussion of the neoliberalisation of higher education focusing on how this has shaped academic institutions and expertise as private rather than public goods. We then introduce our analytical case: the NPILF. Following an outline of our use of Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of social fields with attention to doxa, symbolic capital and symbolic violence, the paper moves on to demonstrate how the NPILF exerts control over academic expertise. We close with a discussion of how this control results in a narrow, more limited construction and use of academic expertise with consequences for public debate, scientific and creative discovery and broader issues of social justice.

Global reshaping of higher education

Globally, the neoliberalisation of universities is intimately connected to a shift in emphasis, and therefore reshaping of higher education, from a public to private good (Alvesson and Benner, 2016). This reshaping is evident in the size and structure of universities, that increasingly compete and operate under the logics of marketisation (Marginson, 2009). This has primarily been achieved by overt and normative power relations between the state and universities. In the USA, for example, the negotiation of new patent laws between higher education institutions and government in the 1980s saw the introduction of technology transfer offices within universities that focused on commercialising research findings (Etzkowitz et al., 2000: 318). Similarly, in the UK public funding for higher education is contingent on demonstrating a direct contribution to the economy, restricting the types of research undertaken in public institutions (Etzkowitz et al., 2000: 319). These organisational restrictions flow on to academic scholarship; Kallio et al. (2016), have noted the ‘balancing act’ of market differentiation and global standards that increasingly requires individual academics to publish in high-ranking journals and engage in ‘multi-disciplinary’ activities. This is intimately connected to the fragmentation of academic identities, with staff workload intensification and an emphasis on metrics to measure academic performance creating a ‘game’ to get ahead rather than a focus on quality and rigour (Rowlands and Wright, 2021). Etzkowitz et al. (2000: 319) document the (global) emergence of the ‘entrepreneurial’ academic who focusses on securing individual intellectual property rights with the aim of commercialisation. In the social sciences this type of identity work is adopted by the ‘academic guru’, often located in management studies, who blurs the lines between academia and industry by drawing legitimacy for their expertise through the institution whilst deriving personal gain through popular books and private consultancies (Engwall, 2012: 374). The scholarship exploring the above is focused on the actions of individual academics and institutions. Our contribution instead emphasises the relationship between the state and universities in a broader sense and thus recognises how public funding and discourse operate as an architecture of control and dominance over universities.

Introducing the National Priorities Industry Linkage Fund

Australian public universities have complex, bureaucratic connections to the various levels of government and are controlled through a range of public funding arrangements and legislation, with teaching income accounting for 61% of university income (Norton, 2023). This income is concentrated in student tuition fees and government teaching grants that are tied to increasing student enrolments. The effect is demonstrated in a tripling of student enrolments between 1989 and 2020 (Croucher, 2023; Norton, 2023). A pivotal moment in Australia higher education was the introduction of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Bacchi, 2009: 215–217). The partial, albeit deferred, student payment of higher education costs was rationalised by the same market logics that sit behind the NPILF and many other higher education policies: namely, that higher education will result in better employment outcomes, and therefore higher individual social capital and thus, potentially, income (Bacchi, 2009: 216). Connected to global trends, the Australian higher education sector is increasingly tied to production of job-ready graduates for the labour market. This is exemplified by the Job-ready Graduate Package which came into effect in Australia in 2022 (Australian Government, 2022). This package and associated reforms seek to delineate the role of higher education. According to the NPILF Final Report:

“Now more than ever, public universities must critically prepare and support our graduates to succeed in the future workplace, to drive innovation and new businesses, to support open and rigorous public debate and to ensure excellent research solves pressing real-world challenges” (Australian Government, 2021a: 3).

The sequence of these missions, along with the qualification around ‘pressing real-world challenges’ orientate universities primarily to the create short-term and narrow assumptions about the perceived value of higher education.

Bourdieu’s social theories: Field, symbolic capital and violence

The use of Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of social fields is well established in the higher education literature (Abreu-Pederzini and Suárez-Barraza, 2020; Bathmaker, 2015; Marginson, 2008; Naidoo, 2004). His conceptualisation of ‘field’ focuses on social relations and hierarchies in which agents assume different positions based on forms of field-specific capital (Bathmaker, 2015: 65; Roumbanis, 2019: 203). The concept’s usefulness is in exploring power, control, rules and conflict in social relations. As Bourdieu states, a field is a ‘kind of arena in which people play a game which has certain rules, rules which are different from those of the game that is played in the adjacent space’ (Bourdieu, 1991: 215). Higher education is an established field with observable actors (academics, government agencies) and involving a struggle for power that is both economic (public funding, research grants) and symbolic (e.g. status).

Our application of Bourdieu’s notion of field engages with associated concepts of ‘doxa’, ‘symbolic capital’ and ‘symbolic violence’ as expressions of how power is exerted in a social field. ‘Doxa’ relates to the way language and discourse are connected to authority, and therefore power, within a set of social relations: ‘language that can command attention is an “authorized language”, invested with the authority of a group, the things it designates are not simply expressed but also authorized and legitimated’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 170). The NPILF’s Final Report’s authorship authorises and legitimates the policy and funding regime it advances. ‘Symbolic capital’ refers to a form of capital that does not overtly carry economic interests but rather confers power that is (mostly) attached to status, and which is conferred through institutions and bodies of authority (Bourdieu, 1977). Universities, as public education institutions, are conferred symbolic capital by the state and society, and are afforded social legitimacies not available elsewhere. This symbolic capital is connected to the knowledge produced by universities and therefore academic expertise. In this instance, our application of symbolic capital has similarities with Alexander’s (2018) examination of the cultural field of arts organisations. We too focus on institutions as producers of capital in their own right, in order to examine the way coercive pressures around state funding regulates certain behaviours in the field. We contend that the state, and increasingly industry, constitute the dominant class of actors and academics constitute a dominated class of actors. These categories enable analysis of the symbolic violence at the heart of the contestation of field of higher education.

Bourdieu (1977) makes it clear that power and domination within a field exists in two primary, and co-existing, forms of violence: overt and symbolic. Our analysis focuses on symbolic violence: an ‘invisible and gentle’ violence that relies on the complicity of the dominated class. That is, symbolic violence is covert and relies on the dominated class to ‘misrecognise’ it, understanding it not as violence but as something else (Bourdieu, 1977: 192). This allows symbolic violence to be accepted as socially legitimate and ensures dominance through the complicity of the dominated class. Symbolic violence also depends on a misrecognition of overt domination as is well-established by Bourdieu (1986) and as has been examined in higher education more recently by Ratle et al. (2020). Misrecognition depends on the concealment of power in ‘normative’ and ‘taken for granted’ actions. As Kamoche et al. (2014) point out: ‘the real purposes of appropriating knowledge’ and shaping the ‘structure of power relations are misrecognized for what they really are’ (p. 1003). Bourdieu’s work has recently been applied by Roumbanis (2019) to elucidate the direct and indirect symbolic violence that professors exert on junior scholars. Akin to our study, Roumbanis is concerned with how social actors (i.e. academics) participate in and, often complicitly, reproduce power in organisational settings.

A significant analytical benefit of Bourdieu’s construction of symbolic violence is that power is attributable to ‘identifiable social agents with distinct positions and dispositions in a hierarchized field’ (p. 202). While Roumbanis (2019) examines different positions and dispositions within universities, in our application of symbolic violence the state and industry are central social agents and thus encompass a broader ‘field’ of higher education. We therefore emphasise that symbolic violence is not simply exerted in a purely institutional setting (i.e. within universities) but in the mechanisms that regulate public funding (e.g. government metrics and required reporting) and in the relations espoused by the NPILF, and other industry-focused funding regimes. Our analysis centres on how the NPILF, and the Job-ready Graduate Package, initiates/constitutes a contestation of expertise in the field of higher education.

Expertise as symbolic capital

Before discussing expertise as a form of symbolic capital in the context of academia, we briefly outline how expertise is historically grounded in an inherently social construction. Expertise, broadly, can be understood as an objective and verified knowledge connected to a diligent and objective [individual] expert (Rabier, 2007). This understanding of ‘expertise’ and ‘expert’, however, is not often considered in connection to broader social and economic power relations and the inequalities that these relations reproduce. Expertise as a form of power, is legitimised through internal and external socially constructed validators (Boyer, 2005: 248–249). Grundmann’s (2017) critical points of expertise emphasise the relational: often expert advice is solicited through, and therefore connected to/informed by, the relationship between the expert and the person/organisation seeking expert advice and/or knowledge.

Academics, as knowledge-workers and teachers, are conferred legitimacy as ‘experts’ through their employment/affiliation with universities and their verifiable knowledge (i.e. published research). Both are socially constructed; the former demonstrates a more relational validation of expertise whereby the academic’s relationship with the institution is central, whereas the latter is commonly predicated on the tenets of scientific reproducibility and rigour. Academic expertise is central to the symbolic capital universities are afforded. Importantly, much of the knowledge produced by and within higher education institutions is legitimised as offering an objective and unproblematic ‘truth’.

What remains largely invisible in a normative understanding of academic expertise is how public (and private) university funding creates a locus of control over who and what constitutes valid (and valued) academic knowledge. While acknowledging that ‘academic’ expertise is not a homogenous nor uncontested category both within and beyond the academy, we aim to demonstrate how the NPILF and the Job-Ready Graduate Package use symbolic violence to control academic expertise. Academic expertise, we argue below, is contested by the NPILF within the field of higher education, just as the NPILF seeks to exert normative and overt control/domination over academic expertise.

Method

Our analysis centres on the two key official documents: the NPILF Final Report (Australian Government, 2021a) and the NPILF Guidance Document (Australian Government, 2021b). The NPILF Final Report outlines the core priorities of the NPILF and how the NPILF functions as an Australian government policy and funding regime. The Final Report was co-authored by a working party of Australian university executives/senior professors. The Guidance Document outlines the NPILF implementation, including funding and reporting obligations against core metrics (work integrated learning (WIL); STEM-skilled graduates; and industry partnerships). Each metric has a set of ‘targets’ that speak broadly to the types of ‘evidence’ required to demonstrate success, and thus secure funding. For example, targets under the theme/objective of ‘Industry partnerships’ include ‘co-designed courses’ and active recruitment of the academic workforce from industry (Australian Government, 2021a: 12). Along with quantitative measures, case-studies that ‘demonstrate best practice’ and ‘innovation’ form part of the assessment matrix. Ultimately, level of performance against nine metrics will directly determine whether or not a university receives its full (previous) allocation of funding. For this to happen an institution requires a score of 8/9 or 9/9. A lower score will result in decreased funding: unassigned funds will be distributed amongst institutions achieving scores of 8 and 9.

We developed our analysis through iterative close reading of the Final Report and Guidance Document focused on the central discourse of the ‘job ready graduate’ and the related normative claims and assumptions about the role of universities. Grounded in an understanding that systems of representation (discourses) inform how the framework will be implemented and how it will regulate conduct (Hall, 1997; Hardy and Maguire, 2010), we sought to trace how these authoritative documents position and control expertise. Central to this, as noted above, is that these two documents have the pre-requisite ‘recognised authority’ to be ‘effective in inculcating symbolic violence’ (Kerr et al., 2024). The Final Report and Guidance Document command attention as they are authored by the Australian Government and University Executives, and therefore constitute the authorised language that Bourdieu’s speaks about in relation to doxa (Bourdieu, 1977).

As asserted above, the NPILF relies on misrecognition to exert symbolic violence on academics and higher education institutions. This misrecognition is constructed around a clear delineation of the role of higher education and is operationalised in both the NPILF’s construction of (1) the mission of universities and (2) institutional autonomy within the reporting required by the NPILF. The ensuing analysis addresses these two core aspects.

The mission: Developing the job-ready graduate

The NPILF Final Report advances the primary mission of higher education institutions as the development of the job ready graduate (Australian Government, 2021a: 3). The language of the Final Report – ‘developing’ and ‘building job-ready graduates’ – (Australian Government, 2021a: 3, 7) emphasises the industrial project at the centre of the NPILF. This project relies on the NPILF enactment of symbolic violence enabled by an explicit positioning of the ‘development’ of job-ready graduates as the long-established and unproblematic role of higher education: ‘The development of a job-ready graduate is more complex than ever before’ (Australian Government, 2021a: 7). Further, this is constructed as an unproblematic goal which has simply become ‘more complex than ever before’ (Australian Government, 2021a: 7). This authorised claim both obviates the need for justification and positions the NPILF emphasis on job ready graduates as ‘normative’ and ‘taken for granted’. The NPILF is presented as simply a progression of a long-standing, uncontested role undertaken by universities – a progression, moreover, endorsed by university sector senior management, some of whom co-author the NPILF Final Report (Australian Government, 2021a: 3). The NPILF positions its reforms as following a predetermined and necessary path in which universities must respond to changes in the labour market and engage ‘industry’ as (validating) collaborators.

Our institutions play an important role in driving the settings to enable this change. It is therefore important to provide a space for universities to be innovative and creative in their approach to engagement and building job-ready graduates. Innovation is an important driver of economic growth and can be supported by a strong culture of collaboration between universities, industry, business (including small to medium size enterprises), government and the wider community (Australian Government, 2021a: 7)

The NPILF, as a government policy and funding regime, is an enactment of the government as the dominant class in the field of higher education. The foregrounding (and construction) of national priorities is central to this, as a form of normative control. The use of ‘national good’ of public funding in education and research is well established globally (see, Alvesson and Benner, 2016). This reproduces a vexed assumption that economic prosperity is, or must be, intimately interconnected to the expansion of higher education. The NPILF positions these priorities as necessary components of higher education’s production of the job-ready graduate:

This report, and the proposed framework, addresses the core priorities of work-integrated learning, STEM-skilled graduates and industry partnerships in a way that generates impact, is transparent and collaborative, measurable and provides for flexibility – the key principles of NPILF (Australian Government, 2021a: 3).

The government asserts its control of the field as it sets the conditions under which universities must demonstrably enact the goals of the NPILF; it is the enactment, rather than the core mission, that is offered/misrepresented as ‘transparent’ and ‘collaborative’. Further, the notions of ‘measurable’ and ‘flexible’ reinforce normative control as a form of symbolic violence (Kamoche et al., 2014). Such functions, designed to encourage innovation, risks making universities mere facilitators of commercial objectives (Deželan et al., 2016). Relatedly, the consumer narrative of higher education centres a transaction (the student getting a degree rather than learning) that is further encoded by the aim of meeting student expectations (Skea, 2017: 373). This misrecognition is centred on the understanding that the NPILF is necessary to ensure universities achieve an unproblematic mission of industry relevance. A misrecognition that is threaded throughout the report and is central to the NPILF’s narrative that the NPILF is a necessary continuation of a long-established emphasis on the job-ready graduate, and the need for research aligned with industry priorities. Further, from the outset the NPILF seeks to render invisible its violence by positioning its composition not only as a long-standing trajectory, but also as an ‘opportunity’: ‘. . .it was important to define the NPILF as an opportunity to support universities in the evolution they are already undertaking’ (Australian Government, 2021a: 3; italics added).

Institutional reform and autonomy

At the heart of the NPILF, and explicit within its discourse, is the control of universities and their missions. The NPILF mobilises the “assumption that academics need to be controlled from the outside” (Kallio et al., 2016) by emphasising the necessity for change (to behaviours, to mindsets) that will be measured, tracked and reported by institutions. This radical change however is misrecognised as simply guiding academics and universities in their ‘well-established’ (if not consensual) missions of industry-relevance, alignment with national priorities and a focus on the job-ready graduate (Australian Government, 2021a: 6).

Higher education institutions and academic work are characterised by high levels of autonomy and academic markers of success: the NPILF mandates a reporting architecture that in effect overwrites these conventions. The Final Report and Guidance Document articulate these reporting structures while at the same time making reference to institutional autonomy. Significantly, the evidence sought in these reporting structures is of a non-academic nature. Universities are specifically asked to report on SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound) goals and achievements in relation to the specified criteria, in turn shaping what constitutes ‘success’ (Australian Government, 2021b: 5). This has direct consequences for both the production and valuing of knowledge in universities along with reshaping of internal structures. This is a form of normative control in which the practices of academics and institutions are altered to ensure their compliance.

The NPILF Final Report and Guidance documents further work to encourage misrecognition through positioning the changes sought as achieving a neutral ‘space’ in which universities and academics can be ‘innovative and creative’. However, the necessity of compliance is reinforced by the idea it is universities that ‘must critically prepare’, ‘be responsive’ and ‘increase collaboration’ with industry (Australian Government, 2021a: 2. italics added).

Consequences for academic expertise

At the same time, the NPILF seeks to reconfigure the field of higher education through constraining institutional and academic day-to-day autonomy and expertise in order to serve the needs of industry. The NPILF’s contestation of the expertise of academics is encoded in statements about the role and function of university-industry engagement:

Improving university-industry engagement in teaching, knowledge transfer and research is critical to ensuring graduates leave the higher education system with the capabilities, skills and experience needed to succeed in the workforce; and innovation across industry based on cutting-edge knowledge. This requires universities and industry to embed mutual engagement in their day-to-day operation (Government, 2021a: 9–10).

This statement makes clear the expectations and extent of the NPILF project and policy intervention in higher education. Distinctly, it is teaching, learning and research that are the necessary commodities in the mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge and resources (Australian Government, 2021a: 10). This is relevant to academic expertise as the NPILF inserts industry-relevance/benefit across all aspects of academia: teaching, knowledge transfer, and research. Co-opting normative, everyday academic activities such as teaching and research allows these reforms to be enacted matter-of-factly, appearing as connected to an unproblematic extension of the ‘necessary role of public universities’. The validation of expertise is transferred from institutions to industry: industry is given a position of dominance whilst universities and academics are situated as (a broad) dominated class. This reinforces industry-relevance and benefit as necessary legitimator of academic expertise. Further, the extent and depth of the NPILF’s normative control is evident in the focus on the ‘day-to-day operation’ of universities aligned with a vision of industry engagement embedded in all aspects of academic work.

Relevant knowledge is restricted to that which is cutting-edge and linked to/useful for industry and innovation, whereas the specificities of ‘mutual benefit’ in relation to universities are lacking, inviting further misrecognition of the effects of this structural change. Changes to the workforce are also emphasised by the NPILF, shown in the directive to actively draw the academic workforce from the ranks of business and to create co-designed courses (Australian Government, 2021a: 12). This decentring of academic/higher education professionals seeks to diminish specialist knowledge attained through intensive research training and experience, just as it elevates ‘industry experience’ as desirable for the academic workforce and equivalises teaching expertise across academic and industry actors.

Importantly, misrecognition remains at the centre of the NPILFs symbolic violence not least in terms of how ‘industry’ is defined. Community and government sectors are explicitly definitionally absorbed in the documentation under the descriptor ‘industry’. The grouping of these sectors supports the NPILF assertion that they are all (equally) concerned with the taken for granted importance of job-readiness of graduates. It assumes that job-readiness is the concerted and commonsense mission of government, community and business, rendering invisible other (social good) missions or value-sets.

Discussion

What constitutes academic expertise under the NPILF

The NPILF mandates, and seeks to orchestrate, a highly specific and confined role for universities and academics. The production of the job-ready graduate, as the central mission of the university under the NPILF is primarily focused on higher education as private, commercial good rather than a public good. This in turn positions academic expertise in service to industry, and therefore limits its capacity for broader social and (critical) economic knowledge missions of universities. That is, the emphasis on job-readiness diminishes critical and creative knowledges of value not only to future graduates (and industry) in their employment, but also of significant value in other aspects of individual and collective social life.

Our critique of the NPILF highlights the control exercised over expertise operationalised in the field of higher education by a set of actors often separate from the creation of this expertise. Further, this operationalisation constructs knowledge as information, or a product, rather than as connected to the labour and mind of the expert/knowledge-worker. The field’s enactment of symbolic violence creates specific ideas about what academic expertise is necessary for universities to achieve their missions. In this naturalised construction academics are positioned as the dominated class and, in meeting the expectations of the NPILF and thus securing government funding, suffering some loss of agency in the production of symbolic capital. That is, power to define and legitimise academic expertise is no longer vested in academic traditions of scholarship or the university but rather resides in how industry can engage with and apply expertise.

As indicated above, in positioning employment as a necessary goal and outcome of higher education, the NPILF overlooks the broader social contributions of both public education and citizens not in full-paid employment (Kikabhai, 2022: 4–5). The increasing emphasis on the nexus between education and employment further perpetuates the notion that education is a functional, private good with a limited public good (Kikabhai, 2022: 4–5). The construction of the job-ready graduate also diminishes graduates’ capabilities beyond job-readiness and the other critical tenets that they may bring to work and life through their education. What is markedly absent from this claim of development is the importance students might place on ‘job-readiness’; as Jones et al. (2020) note, the centrality of pragmatic value (e.g. ‘value for money’) is not as straightforward as it might seem and it is often policymakers, not students themselves, that construct students as economically rational and informed (p. 386). Indeed, the fee-paying model has been examined as a form of symbolic violence itself (Harris et al., 2021).

Opportunities for contestation and resistance within the NPILF

The NPILF reporting structures, explored earlier as a mechanism of control, may also be sites of resistance and contestation. This possibility is central to the conceptualisation of ‘social fields’ which emphasises a permanent state of conflict and therefore a capacity for resistance (Naidoo, 2004). Higher education has long been operationalised as a mechanism for control and legitimisation in other ways, often to reproduce social elites (Bacchi, 2009). As Tuck and Yang (2014) confirm, research is used to extract knowledges specific to the reproduction of power imbalances (Tuck and Yang, 2014: 226). Such critiques of the construction and deployment of knowledge are evidence of the important and enabling ways that academic expertise can be mobilised to resist and contest controlling narratives.

Seeking to re-centre the public nature of academic expertise within the NPILF however is fraught with challenges. Whilst Lopdrup-Hjorth and du Gay (2020: 448–449) emphasise the importance of bureaucracy in the administrative branches of the United States government’s resistance to populist and politicised agendas, Reed and Reed (2023) demonstrate how expert authority can be ‘delegitimated, drawn into more technocratic governance structures, and fragmented/divided’ (p. 110). The danger of expert authority being delegitimised or misappropriated is particularly salient to our case, as normative control is so central to the operation of the NPILF.

Indeed, the pervasive effects this shift from a public to private good have already created boundaries on the production of expertise within universities. Rowlands and Wright’s (2021) examination of the relationship between research practice and bibliometric indicators highlights the capture and complicity of academics in sustaining an institutional obsession with metric-driven research impact. However, resistance can be an ‘act of self-care’ (Foucault, 1997) and, as suggested by Ball and Olmedo (2013: 94), create a localised and flexible ‘“concrete liberty”. Academics’ can forge resistance to NPILF characterised by the ‘courage displayed in refusing the mundane, in turning away from excellence, in unsettling truths’ (Ball and Olmedo, 2013: 94). This connects well with calls within organisation studies for a more ‘open, dynamic and flexible model of expert authority’ (Reed and Reed, 2023).

Central to our argument is the delineation of the role of higher education, from a public to private good. Marginson (2011) explore the construction of higher education as a public good, and contend that a way forward is not so much to break free of the reliance on states as validators of public goods, but rather to embrace a ‘global public space that lies mostly outside direct governance’ (p. 430) Indeed, the NPILF’s statements allow us to debate the latent factors underpinning contemporary social norms more pragmatically and visibly. As De Cock et al. (2018: 673) demonstrate, populism’s disruption of the status quo offers opportunities to more radically depart from the current social configurations that perpetuate inequalities. Further, critical responses may consider how the NPILF metrics-focused reporting may (re)produce long held inequalities between elite and equity-driven institutions (Naidoo, 2004: 469).

The framework emphasised by the NPILF’s Guidance Document (Australian Government, 2021b) presents a potential arena under which academic critique may take place within the NPILF reporting. However, central to the operation of symbolic violence is the compliance of actors to participate in the violence. The NPILF narrows the avenues for legitimate contestation by delineating a space for institutions to demonstrate their ‘autonomy’ and ‘innovation’. What is particularly concerning is how the decentring of academic expertise diminishes the legitimacy of academic critiques, with the broader forms of expert knowledge falling to the wayside.

Conclusion

We contend that the NPILF exerts symbolic violence on academic expertise by misrecognising this violence for part of an unproblematic and long-standing mission of universities. It assumes academics can simply redirect their expertise to the production of job-ready graduates and the service of industry. The NPILF’s symbolic violence relies on its capacity to make invisible other missions and elements of the socially legitimate role of public universities. Central to this violence is a shift away from a grounding in scholarship to a relational and externally verified knowledge. The NPILF displaces the centrality of the academic as the facilitator of expert and specialist knowledge. Understanding the symbolic violence produced by the NPILF elucidates how funding regimes seek to control the role and value of universities and academic expertise.

The NPILF has far-reaching implications for how, and by whom, knowledge and expertise in the academy is constructed, valued and drawn upon/mobilised. The social legitimacy conferred to academic expertise, through established academic practices, is increasingly re-shaped by the current architecture of state funding. While we do not seek to valorise academic expertise as a-political or as universally critical (Boyer, 2005; Kikabhai, 2022), it plays a legitimate, and potentially independent, role in the fabric of society. The NPILF directs experts, and expertise, to produce private goods through a narrow framing of the role of higher education: to develop job-ready graduates and to have an industry focus. The NPILF, is a substantial higher education funding package, and demonstrates the powerful role of funding and underpinning policy in (re) shaping the broader academic field.

Central to its power is the use of symbolic violence. Our use of Bourdieu’s theories of doxa, field, symbolic capital and symbolic violence demonstrates the reconfiguration of expertise within academia, positioning industry as an essential and dominant validator of academic knowledge. The NPILF’s symbolic violence is characterised by its unproblematised production of an industry-focused mission of universities and the normative control enacted through its reporting structure. In turn this symbolic violence creates a narrow construction of what is valid academic expertise, precisely as connected and relevant to industry. This centring of industry knowledge coincides with the wider popular decentring of the university sector as site/locus of expertise and further marginalises academic disciplines as arenas of knowledge creation and debate.

The NPILF reconfiguration of academic expertise has extended consequences for the way academic labour is organised and how research and higher education is funded. Indeed, the value of expertise is not simply vested in a relationship between industry and universities but rather occurs under a clearly articulated and limiting exchange that defines this relationship. No longer are academics, as experts, seen as legitimate, autonomous and agentic knowers; increasingly, they are seen as producers of specific knowledges deemed relevant only in connection to the external mission of industry. Similarly, the NPILF positions industry (and community and government) under a highly specified and homogenising narrative; creating assumptions about what industry sees as a valuable. The increasingly limited social construction of expertise is intimately tied to how expertise and knowledge can be extracted for a specific use rather than vested in expert knowers. The significant erasure of the public good role for universities elucidated in our paper not only confirms an ongoing Faustian prioritisation without regard for the future but also highlights government funding and policy as a powerful means by which the short-sighted shift to private good under the dominance of ‘industry’ is violently entrenched through the positioning of a complicit higher education sector.