Abstract
In this paper we consider relationships between national research assessment and publication output targets within academic workload models, theorising their potential impact on research practices and the academic habitus. Thinking with Bourdieu’s theory of practice, we draw on examples from higher education systems within the United Kingdom and Australia to argue that what an agent has done in the past plays a potentially significant role in the reformation of their own habitus. In relation to academics complying with publication output targets, whatever form those targets may take, we posit that this has implications for what research is done, how, by whom and where, and also for how researchers are disposed, or not, towards what research is perceived to be possible or desirable.
Highlights
Against a backdrop of struggle for the place of universities in the reordering of society, in this paper we examine relations between research assessment frameworks and publication output targets and their potential impact on research practices and the academic habitus
Throughout we have sought to provide a brief explanation of Bourdieu’s account of practice but have argued that it could be possible, under certain circumstances, for one’s own practices to constitute secondary pedagogic work on one’s own habitus. We have made this argument in the context of the relationship between national research assessment exercises within the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia and publication output targets within academic workload models
Our argument has highlighted the potential for the practices that academics undertake in an attempt to comply with these targets, in whatever form they take, to serve as secondary pedagogic work and contribute to a long-term reformulation of the academic or scientific habitus
Summary
Against a backdrop of struggle for the place of universities in the reordering of society, in this paper we examine relations between research assessment frameworks and publication output targets and their potential impact on research practices and the academic habitus. Bourdieu’s theory of practice is apposite for this analysis because of the extensive empirical work he conducted within higher education and his theorisation of the ways in which power, and valued resources or capitals, are differentially produced and deployed within and between universities (see Bourdieu, 1988; Bourdieu, 1996) In this context, research assessment frameworks are regimes of governance that contribute to the structuring of higher education and disciplinary fields and which impact on the research practices of individual and teams of academics and on their multiple unthought dispositions towards what research is considered desirable or achievable, or not, and whether, how and why it might be undertaken. Research excellence is the primary determinant of the relative status and standing of universities and their departments or schools within the global higher education field (Marginson, 2006) In this light, the connection between institutional targets for research output that derive from national research assessment exercises and goals set for individual academics within academic workload models can be quite explicit. Unlike Australia, the impact of these publication output targets is not felt at the point of workload allocation but in terms of performance review and promotion application
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