Academic Subjectivities at Stake – Different University Contexts, Different Responses to Reform

Abstract

Chapter 8 traced the change from a receding ‘democratic and Humboldtian university discourse’ to a rapidly emerging ‘knowledge economy university discourse’ and showed that different university contexts responded differently to the new dominant university discourse. As will be explored further in ethnographic detail in this chapter, this general discursive space points to varying room for manoeuvre when implemented by individual academic subjects. In between the general and the individual levels are the levels of the university, faculty and department, and, in some instances, also the research section within the department. Each of these intermediate levels has its own dominant discursive spaces in terms of differences in culture, tradition and formal and informal power networks. This has made it difficult to predict exactly how the centralised introduction of a given signifier or political technology would affect local practice.