Fashioning an academic self : a study of managing and making do
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2009
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This study investigates how academics are managing and being managed by the
demands of their everyday work. Specifically, it sets out to examine how a small cohort
of academics located in a former college of advanced education (CAE), now integrated
as a Faculty in a traditional Australian university, negotiate the dominant discourses and
power relations in this setting. It considers the role played by government policy
directives in shaping this particular workplace and its inhabitants. It also explores the
tactics and strategies academics employ to manoeuvre the complexities of their day-today
work life, and how these practices of the everyday fashion academics in this setting.
To date, few studies have explored the changing nature and intensification of
contemporary academic work from the perspective of academics working in a former
CAE. In taking up this focus, observing the historical and cultural legacy of the
institution, the study provides a situated perspective about academic work: one located
in a particular workplace, at a particular point in its history. It illustrates how the
academic self is fashioned through and within the disciplinary technologies and power
relations operating within the workplace setting: how different types of academic
performances are taken up and/or valued in this context, and how these performances
are then implicated in the production of academic subjects. The research data comprised
historical and institutional documentation, as well as semi-structured conversations with
academics. A range of related theoretical ideas and positions are used to analyse three
specific perspectives about being an academic: work(ing) policies, work(ing) narratives,
work(ing) practices. Personal writing about experiences as an insider/outsider in this
research study further informs the discussion, with insights about doing academic work
in this (and other) workplace settings, and the role of the doctoral process in the
subjectification of the academic self highlighted.
The thesis puts forward the argument that managing everyday work is a complex and
(self) productive process: one situated in, and shaped by, the institutional spaces –
textual, discursive and operational – within which work performances are enacted. It
depicts how academics take up, negotiate and/or self-regulate their work practices
within these institutional spaces. The process of managing academic work is thus
represented as an interactive yet bounded practice, subject to and subjectified through
the specificities of the workplace setting and its inhabitants, and the power relations and
disciplinary forces operating on and within the institution. The thesis also demonstrates
the fashioning of the academic self involves a set of practices of managing and making
do. These practices of the self, which are shaped by the aspirations and positioning
(personally, professionally and institutionally) of academics, and the past and current
circumstances of the workplace setting, highlight the mutually constitutive nature of
discipline and desire in shaping academic work in an institutional context.
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