ABSTRACT
The discourse and practices of neoliberalism are well sedimented into the academy, and the purpose is to colonise a new kind of entrepreneurial, corporate academic. The very prominence of a document set focusing on ‘customer service’ points to a construction of higher education as consumerised and transactional. At several points throughout the documents, academic staff are discursively constructed as a source of information. The ideology created in the text prevents academics from interrogating the legitimacy of change being imposed – to technology, to working conditions, to ‘performance management’ or to redundancy criteria. Technology, though, has offered newly observable ‘metrics’ which may not coincide with actual performance or competence as an academic, but which stand as convenient proxies because of their calculability. The very notion of ‘performance’ also presupposes the idea that academic work is ‘just for show’ and is transient.
