Time, workload model and the entrepreneurial construction of the neoliberal academic

Abstract

This paper analyses the workload model of a UK business school. The workload model is conceived as a time budget, allocating time units to realise academic tasks. The paper highlights how this tool participates in the government of the academic population, in tandem with an individual performance measurement system. On the one hand, the multiple and competing academic tasks are independently regulated by a series of disciplinary objectives. On the other hand, they all need to be realised within a limited timeframe. Yet the workload model estimates a quantity of time resources deemed necessary to deliver on these objectives. The whole creates an apparatus of security - an ensemble of discourses and technologies that work together to control, manage and shape a population - wherein the workload model enacts competition through time to realise a variety of highly disciplined academic tasks. Thus, the academic must make choices, including the “investment” of his/her free time. Through this process the academic is subjectivised as an entrepreneur of the self.