Dimensiones según Litwin y Stringer

For Gouldner, being critical cannot be restricted to a theoretical claim, but needs to be fulfilled in practice, inside and outside the university: ‘The core of a Reflexive Sociology then is the attitude it fosters toward those parts of the social world closest to the sociologist – his own university, his own profession and its associations, his professional role, and importantly, his students and himself – rather than toward only the remote parts of his social surround. A Reflexive Sociology is distinguished by its refusal to segregate the intimate or personal from the public and collective, or the everyday life from the occasional ‘political’ act. It rejects the old-style closed-office politics no less than the old-style public politics. A Reflexive Sociology is not a bundle of technical skills; it is a conception of how to live and a total praxis’ (Gouldner, 1970: 504). In the following, we would therefore like to analyse how sociologists practise their subject in academia.

Whilst in the previous chapter social theory was discussed as an example of sociological practice, thereby already briefly touching upon the shaping forces of institutional frameworks, we have not yet systematically shed light on the social and economic underpinnings of sociological practice in the UK. In the following sections, we will explore some key features of the political economies of UK Higher Education in their framing of sociological practice. Centering around the relationship between research and teaching, we will discuss the priorisation of

research over and above teaching in academia as an outcome of the RAE. In this context we will analyse how the critical calling of the discipline is challenged by the ways in which sociological practice is institutionally framed by the current political economies of the RAE.

8.1

The Institutional Framing of Sociological Practice

What is it like to be a sociologist in the UK? Asked for their work processes as sociologists, almost unanimously, my respondents listed their activities as the following:

‘Teaching, doing research, doing lots of administrative work, reviewing, journal articles, book proposals, going to conferences, writing conference papers and meeting people there. I am a member of a professional academic association. So you get meetings with this group. These are the main tasks I can think of – trying to get research funding, trying to get your research done in your free time if you don’t have people who work with you or for you. Admin is really something that is taking over if you are in modern universities or in universities in the UK. The whole exam board business is taking up a lot of time. We are doing a high level of customer service in that we exclude any sort of bias treatment of students. Anonymous marking, second marking of lots of work - this is all undergraduate level. We are not talking about academics. This is just the papers at undergraduate level. This takes up a lot of time. Hours of exam board discussions.’ (Arthur, 51, senior lecturer, red-brick university)

The list of activities that Arthur named is indicative of the general workload of academics in this country. This has to be seen in the context of restructuring

processes within Higher Education over the last thirty years.72 While universities have been the main site of knowledge production in the modern period, scarcity of state funding, along with an increased distrust of scientific authority from a scientifically better informed public, have resulted in a more diverse landscape of knowledge producing institutions (Gibbons et al.,1994). In this context, scarcity of state funding forced academics to acquire additional funds from private sponsors and funding institutions and also resulted in fewer permanent posts being available and in an increase of fixed-term contracts (Shore and Wright, 2000; Hockey, 2004). Besides, the implementation of quality assurance such as the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) has substantially altered working conditions for academics, putting stronger emphasis on research and publications (Miller, 1996), with a rising teaching workload as a result of the massification of academia from the 1960s onwards (Martin, 1999). Moreover, managerialism put a stress on administration, leaving less time for research while at the same time involving rising pressure to publish (Dominelli and Hoogvelt, 1996; Henkel, 2000). These changes seem to constrain the autonomy of academics while simultaneously shifting responsibility to them to acquire funding and manage an increasingly onerous workload. This is reflected in Arthur’s statement and the list of activities he describes as being part of his working life as a sociologist. Yet, what is at the heart of these changes was described by another respondent.

‘There is the RAE culture, most obviously. But this is a general question for academics, not simply for sociologists. And in my previous

72 For a synopsis of the changes in the British Higher Education system in the post-war period and the effects on sociology see APPENDIX E: The British Higher Education System.

workplace that changed the intellectual culture quite a lot. And it created a great deal of competitive anxiety.’ (Elizabeth, 39, lecturer, old university)

The Research Assessment Exercise is a performance measure instrument. Yet, with Elizabeth describing it as a culture, we can already see some of the far-reaching effects and anxieties that were triggered by the RAE. In fact, Strathern identified the RAE as one of the most powerful discourses in academia (Strathern, 2000). In a nutshell, The Research Assessment (RAE) can be explained as follows: ‘RAE 2008 is the sixth in a series of exercises conducted nationally to assess the quality of UK research and to inform the selective distribution of public funds for research by the four UK Higher Education funding bodies. RAE 2008 will provide quality profiles for research across all disciplines. Submissions from institutions will be assessed by experts in some 70 units of assessment. The main body of the assessment will take place in 2007-2008’ (RAE, 2008).73 The Resesarch Assessment Excercise (RAE) was implemented in the UK in the early 1980s due to the scarcity of state funding. Universities were increasingly treated as ‘cost centres’ with academics as ‘work units’ (Shore and Wright, 2002: 67). Thus, universities became more dependent on private sponsorship, reflecting a global trend in Higher Education (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997). In the RAE, the productivity of researchers and departments are assessed (Parker, 2003). The rating of departments determines the amount of funding allocated by the state. With so-called ‘objective criteria,’ ‘active researchers’ can be discerned from ‘less active researchers’ (Willmott, 2003: 134). Yet, the fact that evaluators are not required to reveal how they reach their conclusions is inconsistent with the claim that the evaluation is governed by

transparency (Shore and Wright, 2000). The RAE is also rated as having a disastrous effect on Higher Education by the University College Union: ‘The RAE has had a disastrous impact on the UK Higher Education system, leading to the closure of departments with strong research profiles and healthy student recruitment. The RAE has been responsible for job losses, discriminatory practices, widespread demoralisation of staff, the narrowing of research opportunities through the over- concentration of funding and the undermining of the relationship between teaching and research, with a consequent reduction in the quality of Higher Education available to students. […] The current exercise is stimulating even more ‘game- playing’, victimisation of individual members of staff, competitive recruitment, departmental closures and ‘restructuring’ driven purely by attempts, ill-fated or otherwise, to maximise RAE income. The exercise will further distort and disrupt the system and devalue the professional contribution of many staff to teaching and research [….]’ (UCU, 2005).74

The facts are clear. Yet, only in such a limited number of writings do the all- encompassing effects of the RAE on academics and their lives seem to be captured, going beyond a sketch of the technicalities of submission requirements but touching the theme that the RAE now seems to rule our lives, determines our work practices and our approach to the discipline. Based on informal interviews with academics at various universities in England, Andrew Sparkes looked at the stories behind the scenes and presented the ‘embodied struggles of an academic at a university that is permeated by an audit culture’ (Sparkes, 2007: 521). As he explains in the beginning

of his article, his way of making sense of the RAE ‘[…] is inspired by partial happenings, fragmented memories, echoes of conversations, whispers in corridors, fleeting glimpses of myriad reflections seen through broken glass, and multiple layers of fiction and narrative imaginings’ (Sparkes, 2007: 521). In a similar way, just as Sparkes analysed the effects of the RAE on his respondents’ lives, the RAE could be seen to be at the forefront of my own respondents’ reflections. At the time of my interview encounters with my respondents between January and June 2007, my respondents were busily preparing their final RAE submissions. In fact, not being constantly aware of the RAE seems to be difficult. Moments of forgetting about itare rare,as I had recently had the chance of witnessing in a meeting with a colleague when he – after his three weeks of annual leave – was trying to remember the word to describethephenomenon.

In fact, a lot of academics find themselves in a constant tension between more extant control, increasing workload and the pressure to satisfy these demands (Barrow, 1995). Whilst research is rewarded much more than teaching, Elizabeth describes her difficulties of responding to the demands of the RAE, being mainly occupied with teaching during term time and not finding enough time for research and publishing.

‘I am not doing much research at the moment because I don’t have enough time to. I don’t have any major research projects at the moment. I am doing bits of writing. I am sort of between having finished a couple of book projects in the last couple of years, I am now thinking about what I might do next. My life at the moment, and mind that it is term time, is dominated by teaching and administration. And I have virtually no time to do any research. I have a few small things on the go but it is just not feasible.’(Elizabeth, 39, lecturer, old university)

As a young lecturer, Elizabeth has never known anything other than the current system. Yet, some of my respondents, like George, who studied in the 1950s and entered the academic labour market at the height of the Higher Education expansion, have experienced a massive change of the Higher Education system and working conditions within the span of a career. When he finished his graduate studies at the LSE, George was immediately offered a job:

‘And it was my generation that benefited from the expansion of the universities following the Robbins report. So there were plenty of jobs. There wasn’t any problem about when you finished postgraduate work whether you would get a job or not. People would head-hunt you. It was a lovely situation. An extraordinary situation and it will never be repeated. It meant that although I had no intention of becoming an academic initially, I got a job.’ (George, 64, senior lecturer, 60s university)

We are therefore also able to spot generational differences between those sociologists who started their careers under very different circumstances, thirty or forty years ago, and those respondents who have never experienced anything other than a highly performance-oriented and competitive academic landscape.75 In addition, fulfilling the requirements of the RAE, researching and most of all publishing the required amount of publications in journals that are highly ranked by the RAE, is even more difficult for those academics who do not have a permanent contract. Hence, academics’ different positions and career histories already point to

75 In a longitudinal study on the career experience of men and women in British university sociology from 1950 to 2000 Jennifer Platt observed similar patterns as those that emerged across the different birth cohorts amongst my respondents (Platt,

different positions from which my respondents tackle the current challenges in Higher Education.

8.2

The Glorification of Research: ‘How to Write One’s

Career without Audience’ or ‘How to Count Nothing for