ABSTRACT
There is a tension in the working lives of academics which lies at the intersection of personal commitments, everyday practices and departmental strategy and culture. That is to say, in navigating their way through their everyday work, there is both alignment and discrepancy between what individual academics are committed to, what they actually do, and the priorities of the departments in which they work. Henkel (2000) characterises these tensions as a reflection of changing relationships of academic identities to disciplines and institutions in new higher education contexts. Deem et al. (2007) suggest that new managerialism has reshaped academic work by increasing levels of bureaucracy, placing a new emphasis on finance in decision-making and decreasing discretion and trust in everyday academic work. Strathern (2000) and Shore and Wright (1999) argue that audit mechanisms such as those of the Quality Assurance Agency and the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) have profoundly changed the work and lives of academics, as individuals internalise the norms of audit and regulate their own activities in new ways. Although these studies reveal important dynamics of academic work, and provide useful accounts of why tensions and struggles between individuals and institutions exist, we are still left wondering exactly what it is that individuals and institutions are struggling for.
