Giving the Invisible Hand a Helping Hand: How 'Grants Offices' Work to Nourish Neoliberal Researchers

Autor/inn/en	Beime, Kristina S.; Englund, Hans; Gerdin, Jonas
Titel	Giving the Invisible Hand a Helping Hand: How 'Grants Offices' Work to Nourish Neoliberal Researchers
Quelle	In: British Educational Research Journal, 47 (2021) 1, S.1-22 (22 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0141-1926
DOI	10.1002/berj.3697
Schlagwörter	Grantsmanship; Neoliberalism; Research Administration; Taxonomy; Universities; Foreign Countries; College Administration; Intervention; Competition; Researchers; Bias; Sweden + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Neo-liberalism; Neoliberalismus; Forschungsadministration; Taxonomie; University; Universität; Ausland; College administrators; Hochschulverwaltung; Wettkampf; Researcher; Forscher; Schweden
Abstract	Neoliberalism has become a highly dominating and taken-for-granted way of organising the university sector around the world. In the critical educational literature, this market-based rationality has been scrutinised in detail over the past decades. However, rather scant attention has been directed to how university managers and administrators, apart from setting up quasi-markets, may intervene more directly to give the invisible hand of the market a helping hand. Aiming to address this lacuna, the "purpose" of the current article is to develop an empirically grounded taxonomy of different types of such interventions, and to theorise them in terms of the different facets of the neoliberal milieu that they reproduce and the various forms of subjectivising work among academics that they seek to engender. We do so by means of a qualitative study of so-called 'Grants Offices' at three Swedish universities. The findings arguably add to and problematise our understanding of how neoliberal markets work in academia in three different ways. First, while extant research has noted that university managers and administrators may intervene beyond the setting up of neoliberal markets per se, our study is to our knowledge the first one that identifies and systematises a broad array of such interventions. Second, it problematises the view of neoliberal markets as a form of monolithic entity that produces a uniform competitive pressure on academics. Third, and related, it furthers our understanding of the type of subjectivity that competitive milieus are assumed to bring about. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01