Editorial: Special Issue of OTASC on Occupational Learning Universities as Worksites

Abstract

Contemporary universities are sites of organisational transformation and social change. A number of major studies have documented the shifts occurring across higher education systems in Australia, Europe and North America towards an enterprise model of the university (Clark 1997; Marginson 2000; Slaughter and Leslie 1997). In the current neo-liberal economic climate, universities recently governed as public institutions have become more private enterprise-like, focused on growth and profits, responding to ‘market forces’ and the ability of users to pay, competing in an ‘education market’. Symes (2001) argues that there has been a repositioning of higher education within society which has been policy driven, with governments in the United Kingdom and Australia in particular, demanding that higher education modernises itself and aligns itself to the economic needs of the contemporary nation state. In addition to the policy changes regarding the governance of universities as enterprising organisations, there are observable changes in education and employment policies and practices which have compounded the external pressures for change at universities. These shifts engender a new curriculum of academic work (McWilliam 2004). That is, universities are sites of work and learning, where learning associated with academic practices are constructed in particular ways specific to the structural, cultural and ethical norms active at the sites. Academics are just one group employed at universities, and they are in focus in the articles in this issue. The papers published here are amended versions of selected papers from the 4th International Conference on Researching Work and Learning, held in Sydney Australia in December, 2005. The ideas in these papers were presented and discussed as part of a symposium which attended specifically to the changes in the curriculum of academic work occurring as universities as we have known them are transformed. The symposium, ‘Universities as Worksites’ brought together academics from