ABSTRACT
All contemporary organisations, including universities, are risk organisations. This is because all organisations must, of necessity, focus on guarding themselves against the possibility of failure. The standard models for measuring organisational performance are very much in evidence in the professional development of academics, which is increasingly focused on the nature of organisational work as distinct from disciplinary knowledge. For better and worse, academics are being required to ‘plug in’ to audit technologies, those ‘supremely reflexive’ practices through which the university can make sense of itself as an organisation, can ‘perform being an organization through the act of self-description’. The self-managing academic is more informed about, more focused on, and more likely to contribute to, on-line information flow and the virtual information storage systems that exist within the university. Central to the ‘negative’ logic of risk management is the idea that there must be more self-scrutiny, regularity and control within and across an organisational sector.
