Sarah Hayes,The labour of words in higher education: Is it time to reoccupy policy?

Reviewed by: Christine Sinclair, University of Edinburgh, UK

While writing this review I have felt a need to emulate Sarah Hayes in The Labour of Words in Higher Education when she promises to: ‘write simply and explicitly and to try to clearly ascribe labour actions to the human beings whom I am discussing’ (p. 9).

Hayes does largely achieve this worthwhile aim; however, it is a difficult task. Academic writing conventions encourage us to obscure who makes decisions about a practice and who does the actual work. This may be especially true in the UK, where many writers use the passive voice to remove the agent and provide a neutral tone (the experiment was undertaken, etc.). Hayes’ own grammatical target – nominalisation – has an even more powerful effect than merely obscuring agency. She shows through countless examples that when writers nominalise a process, this can result in the replacement of human agency by a strategy, process or even an empty aspiration. Nominalisation not only hides human agents but completely eradicates them from consideration, even though they still have work to do. Buzzwords that result from nominalisation can give the impression that important work is actually performed by, for example, a student experience strategy, technology enhanced learning, or student engagement.

Readers who work in higher education will probably instantly recognise these expressions and may even have complained about them. What Hayes does in her book is to explore the real ‘work’ such expressions do in contributing to the long hours, unrecognised academic labour, and associated stresses and tensions in contemporary academic employment. Drawing on Ritzer’s (1993) notion of McDonaldisation, Hayes shows with great humour how marketing can attribute human qualities not only to cars and hairbrushes, but also to educational technology and even student engagement. The marketing of universities is achieved through McPolicy – which simultaneously advertises the aspirational qualities of the institution to prospective students and dictates inexplicit but consequential demands on staff.

Hayes uses an analogy with Marxist analysis of industrial labour to reveal the ‘exchange value’ of these terms and others such as learning gain , to expose the often invisible labour in a ‘prosumer’ educational culture, where both students and staff are simultaneously producers and consumers of education: ‘The rational calculations that commodify human engagement with our own labour is expressed as an exchange value said to yield an enhancement (a surplus in the form of profit)’ (p. 44).

Hayes’ use of ‘rational’ threw me occasionally as the word has itself the potential to do much work. Its sociological and political uses here relate to Weber’s critique of rationalization, which is explained well in the book. Readers from other disciplines, though, may initially find it odd that ‘rational’ is seen as a negative adjective, when one of its key meanings is ‘guided by reason’. But ‘rationality’ in universities and ‘the much larger neoliberal project of rationalisation’ (p. 145) do indeed need to be noticed, as does irrationality. ‘Noticing’ is the beginning of Hayes’ resistance.

Some readers may be particularly interested in Chapter 4, which explores the work done by the expression technology enhanced learning . The coiners of this phrase have embedded in it the assumption that technology does actually enhance learning, reflecting the exchange value of the expression. This becomes the starting point for Hayes to analyse the discourse around TEL, showing how the term obscures human practice and excludes people from policy statements. Technological ‘fixes’ providing a range of solutions (to widening participation , student engagement , etc.) are likely to depend on considerable labour from some of these invisible people. Educators and students can still resist techno-determinism, however, as long as we notice its use and implications, and Hayes encourages us to take steps to ‘re-occupy this language’ (p. 112 and elsewhere).

I began by saying that it can be a difficult task to ascribe labour actions to humans. ‘Nominalisation’ is an example of itself; it is an abstract noun covering a process that obscures that a person or group of people have been doing the nominalising. People – usually unidentified – write policies and strategies. Thus an invisible author determines levels of hidden labour for unrecognised academics and students. It seems there is a move to removing the human being altogether; indeed, Hayes alludes throughout to the spectre of automation, and I can see how nominalisation might set us up for this. Automation of most jobs would certainly challenge the relevance of graduate attributes (another popular nominalisation). But Hayes’ stronger message is that we should notice the removal of recognition of human work.

A McPolicy review of this book might highlight the work of its research impact, rather than acknowledging Hayes’ painstaking labour in theorising and exemplifying using corpus-based critical discourse analysis. I believe her work does have potential impact; unfortunately, though, the main people who should be reading it probably do not have time to do so, for the very reasons outlined in the book. Hayes provides a call to arms: we need to arm ourselves through noticing the way nominalisation obfuscates and obliterates human labour that nevertheless has to be done. Once we have noticed, we will be in a stronger position to resist and perhaps to demand the same stringent quality control and accountability mechanisms on policy writing as there are on other forms of academic practice. The book is not a (too) depressing one: its positive messages also suggest ways of valuing students’ and teachers’ voices currently excluded from policy and strategy. We will still need to find the time, however.

Sarah Hayes has written an enjoyable book, accessible despite its complex themes. It resonates with my own interests in language, agency and the need to attend carefully to claims about technology. Even for those who do not share these interests, this is an important book. There is a very real danger that neoliberal policy-influencers will use buzzwords and empty phrases to drown out postdigital academic analysis and critique, resulting in an impoverished impression of work we actually do in universities. After reading Hayes’ book, the reader is primed to notice when it is happening.