Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- List of contributors
- one New Labour, ‘modernisation’ and welfare worker resistance
- two Strenuous welfarism: restructuring the welfare labour process
- three A ‘Third Way’? Industrial relations under New Labour
- four Acts of distrust? Support workers’ experiences in PFI hospital schemes
- five Control and resistance at the ward-face: contesting the nursing labour process
- six ‘I didn’t come into teaching for this!’: the impact of the market on teacher professionalism
- seven Ambiguities and resistance: academic labour and the commodification of higher education
- eight The paradox of ‘professionalisation’ and ‘degradation’ in welfare work: the case of nursery nurses
- nine Social work today: a profession worth fighting for?
- ten Working ‘for’ welfare in the grip of the ‘iron’ Chancellor: modernisation and resistance in the Department for Work and Pensions
- eleven Working in the non-profit welfare sector: contract culture, partnership, Compacts and the ‘shadow state’
- twelve Beyond New Labour: work and resistance in the ‘new’ welfare state
- Index
seven - Ambiguities and resistance: academic labour and the commodification of higher education
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- List of contributors
- one New Labour, ‘modernisation’ and welfare worker resistance
- two Strenuous welfarism: restructuring the welfare labour process
- three A ‘Third Way’? Industrial relations under New Labour
- four Acts of distrust? Support workers’ experiences in PFI hospital schemes
- five Control and resistance at the ward-face: contesting the nursing labour process
- six ‘I didn’t come into teaching for this!’: the impact of the market on teacher professionalism
- seven Ambiguities and resistance: academic labour and the commodification of higher education
- eight The paradox of ‘professionalisation’ and ‘degradation’ in welfare work: the case of nursery nurses
- nine Social work today: a profession worth fighting for?
- ten Working ‘for’ welfare in the grip of the ‘iron’ Chancellor: modernisation and resistance in the Department for Work and Pensions
- eleven Working in the non-profit welfare sector: contract culture, partnership, Compacts and the ‘shadow state’
- twelve Beyond New Labour: work and resistance in the ‘new’ welfare state
- Index
Summary
Academic workers today are far removed from their ivory tower image. Once eulogised as an other-worldly haven of disinterested intellectual pursuit, free-thought, imagination and scientific breakthroughs, academic labour is becoming increasingly defined by market relations and the managerial conditions under which it operates as paid wage labour. In one sense this is nothing new. Ninety years ago Thorstein Veblen (1918) lamented an earlier commercialisation of universities while in the late 1960s E.P. Thompson (1970), and the New Left more generally, protested against the rise of the ‘industrial university’. It also reflects a tendency in the development of capitalism to deprofessionalise and proletarianise high-status forms of work, or, as Marx and Engels (1998, p 38) put it, to tear the halo from once venerated occupations.
This chapter charts the changing landscape of higher education (HE) in Britain from the point of view of academic labour. It first establishes the deepening of neoliberal priorities and managerial prerogatives throughout the sector. It then considers how this has intensified and proletarianised the academic labour process. Crucially, we argue, the indeterminate nature of academic labour and the active resistance of academic workers themselves limit the extent of their subordination to managerial prerogatives. Finally, we consider the growing militancy of lecturers, illustrated by the industrial action in 2006 over pay.
Higher education under New Labour
With the introduction of tuition fees and the abolition of maintenance grants New Labour signalled their commitment to the socio-ideological preferences of the New Right. In HE New Labour has maintained the regulatory and management regimes introduced under Conservative rule (Deem and Brehony, 2005; Ryan, 2005). New Labour embraced the utilitarian agenda of the New Right that reduces educational value to economic ends and deployed the discourse of globalisation to help naturalise and legitimate neoliberal policies within HE (Cole, 2005). Policies that bear the stamp of New Labour propose a vision of society that has a greater resonance with the political preferences of the New Right than old Labour (Callinicos, 2006). As Brehony and Deem (2005, p 409) suggest, ‘The New Right have gone but the policies that its adherents promoted are alive and well in the guise of new Labour’. Tony Blair's modernisation discourse attempted to ideologically dismantle the social democratic welfare state, advocating instead a ‘new market state under the dominance of private monopoly capital’ (Ainley, 2004, p 508; Cole, 2005, p 4).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- New Labour/Hard Labour?Restructuring and Resistance inside the Welfare Industry, pp. 137 - 162Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2007