Governmentality and Academic Work: Shaping the Hearts and Minds of Academic Workers

Abstract

Over the last twenty years the liberal university has increasingly been transformed into the neoliberal or audit university. Academics are re-constituted within the audit university as an enterprising collective of individuals working within an enterprise model of the academy. This paper is about the ways in which academic subjects are re-shaped and re-shape themselves, singly and collectively, through the technologies of management and self management, including the technology of audit. We attempt here to generate a perspective that dismantles the belief in the inevitability of the enterprise model of the university and its power to shape the academics within it.