Undone business: Examining the production of academic labour

Abstract

Synopsis This paper uses Dorothy Smith, 1987 , Smith, 2002 [Smith, Dorothy (1987). The everyday world as problematic—a feminist sociology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; Smith, Dorothy (2002). “Institutional ethnography.” In: Tim May (Ed.) Qualitative research in action. London: Sage] methodology of institutional ethnography to examine the conditions of labour in academic institutions, particularly in relation to tenure and promotion practices. As academic feminists, the authors are committed to theoretical perspectives that question the regimes of truth embedded in the normalized bureaucratic procedures within academic institutions, and to using these perspectives to reflexively consider our own production as academic workers. Stephen Ball, 2001 , Ball, 2003 [Ball, Stephen (2001). “The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity.” Keynote speech. Association for Teacher Education in Europe (ATEE) 26th Annual Conference, Stockholm; Ball, Stephen (2003). “The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity.” Journal of Educational Policy. 18 (2), 215–228] and Louise Morley's (2003) (Morley, Louise (2003). Quality and power in higher education. Buckingham: Open University Press) analysis of the growth of audit culture as a factor that increasingly governs the contemporary work of educators and academics provides a lens for appraising the distortions of identity and knowledge imposed by performance appraisal and the tenure review process. This article contributes to the process of disrupting the hegemonic control over behaviour, thought and emotion that habitual institutional compliance routinely engenders.