User:Diane M Phillips/Exploring Neoliberal Modes of Governance and Conceptualizing the Future of University Social Science Research Practice in Australia

Title
Study Working Title: Exploring Neoliberal Modes of Governance and Conceptualizing the Future of University Social Science Research Practice in Australia.

Author: Diane Phillips 

Key words: Neoliberalism, Research Governance, Governmentality, Policy, Social Science, Research Practice, Discourse, Power and Dominance.

Quote
"“ Here we seek to describe how power seeps into the very grain of individuals, reaches right inside their bodies, permeates their gestures, their posture, what they say, how they learn to live and work with other people” (Foucault: 1979: 28)"

Overview of the research study
This proposed study, is a qualitative research project which plans to explore, unpack and analyse the Neoliberal ideas that are situated and embodied in research governance and impact on research practice in Universities today. This research project can be classified as a having political, economic and sociological underpinnings. The study will examine the way integrated system of research governance; practice and discourse are constituted as different forms of power and domination in the everyday and how this impacts on research practice. This will be achieved through an analysis of governance structures, policies, events, processes and activities such as focus group and interviews that are considered to be bounded by discourse and practice. The theorists that underpin this research project are based on critical theory, they include Michel Foucault’s Archaeology (2002), Genealogy (1975) and Governmentality (1982/1983) and Dorothy Smith’s Critical Institutional Ethnography (2005).

Neoliberalism in action surfaces as globalization, deregulation and the global marketization of knowledge. In Universities Neoliberalism can be seen as corporatized culture, decentralization of goods and services, outsourcing of public services and the implementation of performance management. It is a space where creativity, entrepreneurship, innovation and commercialisation are key performance indicators that are linked to organisational goals. Neoliberalism surfaces in our daily work as procedures, routines, training and normalisation of ideas. These concepts have been termed ‘new colonization’ (Rose, 1999) or reform that has resulted in institutional changes to; labour, regulation, policy and institutional governance and increased accountability and calculability in Universities. Universities have in place “standards, protocols, and auditing systems that shape conduct at a distance… and are a contemporary forms of ordering in an variety of social domains” (Higgins, Kitto and Larner, 2009: 1). Added to this there appears an increased need for entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity knowledge and skills resulting in changes to institutional and individual’s values, goals, ethics (Marginson, 2009) and behaviour.

Over the last 20 years there has been a great deal of research conducted at the global and broader policy level in higher education and University sectors by many scholars. Simon Marginson’s in his 2010 project titled, Global Creation: Space, Mobility and Synchrony in the Age of the Knowledge Economy, 2010, Jane Keyway’s, Globalising the Research Imagination, 2008, and Elaine Martin Changing Academic Work, 1999 are examples of this body of work. Marginson specifically works from a Structural paradigm that believes humanity can be understood by means of a structure and organisation.

The following scholars have undertaken work from a broader political and governance perspective and their research focuses on how regimes of ordering have impacted on society. Mitchell Dean in Governmentality, Power and Rule in Modern Society, 2009; Nikolas Rose in Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought in1999; and Peter Miller in Political power beyond the State: problematics of government in 2010: Workcover new regimes of governance. These critical scholars sit within a theoretical space where they have applied post Foucauldian, post modern and post structural perspectives. This project too will explore this context from the above ontological space. Epistemologically and methodologically the project will also focus on practice as a vital element of discursive formation to map Neoliberal ideas in research governance and practice in Universities.

To explore this context an ethno-methodological approach will be applied based on Dorothy Smith’s Critical Institutional Ethnography (2005). Smith sates that an ethno-methodological approach is an appropriate method for exploring and analysing the political, economic and social context (1987) or condition in the University sector of higher education. The process will identify Neoliberal thought though literature and theory; observe by means of shadowing; analyse institutional and governmental documentation; conduct interviews and focus groups; collect histories and narratives; reflect in a fieldwork journal; map discourse and practice and connect it to Neoliberal ideas (discursive formation) and finally be reflective and look back into practice (Foucault, 1979) a second time. This approach will determine the regimes of knowledge, modes of ordering, relations of power as the real unseen affects that shape (Foucault, 1979) research governance and practice.