ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how academics are becoming digitised knowledge workers, with a particular focus on sociologists. The higher education workplace has become increasingly digitised, with many teaching and learning resources and academic publications moving online and the performance of academics and universities monitored and measured using digital technologies. Some academics have taken the concept of 'open scholarship' even further, bringing the concept of the academic gift economy together with the ideals of new approaches to academic publishing. Digital technologies are therefore becoming an important element of constructing and performing the professional self for many workers in higher education. It also examines the benefits and possibilities offered by digital technologies but also identify the limitations, drawbacks and risks that may be associated with becoming a digitised academic and the politics of digital public engagement. It has been contended that the digitisation of academic output as part of the audit culture has had the effect of producing academics as 'metric assemblages'.
