Captured By The Discourse? The Socially Constitutive Power of
New Higher Education Discourse in the UK.
Dr Paul Trowler
Department of Educational Research
University of Lancaster
Lancaster
UK
tel. 44 (0)1524 592879
p.trowler@lancaster.ac.uk
Abstract
This paper addresses the extent to which academic staff are ‘captured’ by the discourse associated with the New
Higher Education (NHE) in the UK and identifies the factors which condition their ability to displace, negotiate,
reconstruct and create alternative discourses. In addressing this task the paper draws on data from a five year
ethnographic study of an English university, NewU, a single document from NewU published after that study, a
comparative study of ‘new’ academics in England and Canada and spontaneous textual data produced at a
conference on higher education. The paper concludes that the dialogical nature of universities means that the
impact of NHE discourse on organizational practices is mitigated as it is read and reacted to in varied ways: that
academics are not fundamentally ‘captured’ by this discursive form. However caution is advised in extending
this argument too far.
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Introduction
In research-based discussions of the contemporary education scene in the UK there has been sporadic
consideration of the power of the discursive repertoires available to ‘capture’ and fix the ways in which the
world is seen by teachers, students and others. In particular their power to limit the options available for thought
and its articulation, especially in relation to the increasingly marketized and managerialist character of both the
compulsory and post-compulsory sectors, has been a dominant theme. In relation to schools, Ball (1994) and
Bowe et al (1994) suggest that discursive capture is a danger but that other possibilities are present. In particular
market-oriented education policy discourse can be understood as polysemic ‘text’ amenable to alternative
readings at variance with that encoded by policy-makers. Meanwhile in considering higher education (HE),
Fairclough suggests that the new market discourse “easily becomes a part of one’s professional identity”
(Fairclough, 1993, p 153), a position close to the fears expressed by Henkel in concluding her study of academic
identities and HE policy in the UK (Henkel, 2000, p 223). Hall, however, takes a more sanguine view,
suggesting that the use of such discourse does not change “for a minute what is in [academics’] hearts and
minds” (Hall, 1993, p. 15). A similar debate has begun in the field of education management development (Gay
et al, 1996). All these writers, however, recognise the contested nature of discursive hegemony: none go so far
as to argue that discourses ‘speak the subject’ (Weedon, 1987; Deetz, 1992). Surprisingly there is little use of
empirical data from educational contexts to explore rigorously the hypothesised processes of discursive contest,
negotiation, reconstruction, displacement and creation (Bernstein, 1990) or to delimit the extent of the
hegemonic sway of discursive market and managerialist discursive repertoires there. That is the project of this
paper.
Data sources and key questions
The production of text is always socially located and different orders of discourse are drawn on in different
locations. I therefore draw on four very different sources from a variety of social locations to illustrate the
characteristics of NHE discourse: a five year ethnographic study of an English university, NewU; a formal
internal memo from NewU published after that study (NewU, 1998); presentations and discussion at an Oxford
conference on Employability and Key Skills in Higher Education (denoted hereafter as 'Oxford'); and interview
data from a study of 24 ‘new’ academics in 10 universities in England and Canada.
This paper addresses two questions:
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* how far are academic staff captured by the discursive repertoire associated with aspects of the ‘new higher
education’ (NHE) (Winter, 1991) and its managerialist roots?
* what factors condition the ability of academic staff to displace, negotiate, reconstruct and create alternative
repertoires?
While I have touched on these issues elsewhere (Trowler, 1998a, 1998b; Knight and Trowler, 2001), this paper
is the first opportunity to offer an extended discussion of them.
Conceptual Groundwork
Managerialism
Managerialism involves a framework of values and beliefs about social arrangements and the distribution and
ordering of resources. This provides a guide and justification for behaviour (Hartley, 1983, p. 26-27), behaviour
which is oriented to efficiency and economy, market responsiveness and the control of employee behaviour
towards these ends by managers. Some of the key values and beliefs of managerialism relevant to the current
discussion include the following:
* an orientation towards the customer and the ‘market’ rather than the producer
* an emphasis on individualism and an acceptance of the status quo
* the management of change is seen primarily as a top-down activity with staff adopting a passive role
* in education, knowledge and learning are conceived as being atomistic, mechanistic and explicit in character.
There are several variants of managerialism, including neo-Taylorism and 'new public management' for example
(Pollitt, 1993; Ball, 1997), each of which may be articulated in a ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ form (Trow, 1994). The
sources of managerialism are multiple too, with mixed origins in New Right ideology, management theory and
elsewhere (Pollitt, 1993; Fairley and Patterson, 1995.)
The New Higher Education
Managerialism is intimately associated with the ‘new higher education’ (NHE). This is a shorthand term
borrowed from Winter (1991) among others and refers to that part of the UK higher education system which has
the following characteristics: a curriculum structure based on the credit framework; epistemological assumptions
which commodify knowledge, and that values forms of learning acquired outside the academy, including non3
propositional and even demotic knowledge; responsiveness to the 'market-place' (with students and employers
viewed as customers). By ‘credit framework’ is meant the constellation of more or less compatible features
facilitated by the assignment of credit value to assessed learning, including modularity, the semester system,
franchising, the accreditation of work-based learning and of prior learning. The framework has quickly spread
across the British HE scene in the past 10 years. It, and NHE in general, are based in the main on managerialist
assumptions and practices which are seen as an appropriate response to the combination of a constrained
resource environment and large and recently expanded student numbers.
For managerialists NHE holds the key to a more controllable, flexible, attractive, relevant, efficient, economic
and market-oriented HE system (Trowler, 1998b; Knight and Trowler, 2001). Managerialist ideological
assumptions and New Right market and fiscal discourse are embedded in the discursive repertoires associated
with it. As a result important discursive changes have attended its spread across the British HE system. This is
what I refer to in my title as ‘new higher education discourse’: it is a subset of managerialist discourse which is
used in relation to NHE.
Discourse
The word ‘discourse’ is also used in a number of ways in the literature (see Grant et al, 1998, for a summary). It
is also defined from different perspectives: according to its function, its location or its source (Parker, 1992).
The most limited definitions appear to restrict the term to a stretch of spoken or written language or language in
use. In its most extended form it appears to be used synonymously with ‘ideology’, or even ‘culture’, this
extended form being denoted by a capital 'D' (Gee et al, 1996, p 10). Here I take ‘discourse’ to mean something
between the most limited and most extended forms: more than ‘text’ but less than ‘culture’, close to the position
taken by Fairclough in his 1989 book (p 17). Discourse means language as social practice conditioned by social
structures. The word 'discourse' thus places the emphasis on the structurally conditioned character of text, using
‘structure’ to mean properties which lend coherence and relative permanence to social practices (in this case the
production of text) in different times and locales (Giddens, 1984), and ‘text’ to mean the written, spoken or
visual product of communicative intent. Of course, there is no text without discourse and no discourse without
text: discourse is articulated in text and all text is structurally conditioned. Any discourse has textual
concomitants derived from a relatively coherent ‘discursive repertoire’. By this term, I refer to the detailed
characteristics of textual production, the denotative codes appealed to and the specific systems of representation
used.
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The Socially Constitutive Power of Discourse
Discourses are intimately situated in social contexts: they both reflect context and constitute it. As Potter and
Wetherell (1987) say, discursive practices ‘do not just describe things, they do things’, and the things they do
have important implications individually (in terms of identity), socially (in terms of social construction) and
politically (in terms of the distribution of power). Foucault (1977) argues that discourses are:
“practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak....Discourses are not about objects;
they do not identify objects, they constitute them and in the practice of doing so conceal their own
invention.” (p 49.)
Discourse can disguise the created nature of social reality partly by denying the language resources needed to be
able to think about and describe alternatives. What is absent from the text is often at least as important as what is
present, and what is implicit in the text can be at least as important as what is explicit. Moreover the ‘texture’ of
the discourse, its source, form and organization, can also be critical in determining how it is received and
understood.
Let me illustrate these points using the managerialist text on a University strategy for distance learning (NewU
1998) in a memo to all academic staff from the Head of the Validation and Review Service (please see
Appendix 1). The most striking feature of this text is the marketised character of the discursive repertoire drawn
on: the document is redolent with phrases such as 'the customer'; 'the market'; 'targeted niche'; 'market
limitations'; 'business plan'; 'niche markets' and so on. Less obvious are the absences, in particular the absence of
students as real, diverse, responsive individuals who might react in different ways to the policies proposed.
Instead we are offered the totalising category of the ‘market’ and ‘market need’. Implicit, simply assumed, is the
appropriateness of a non-academic officer setting out the parameters for a strategy which will apply across the
whole university. The texture of the document is formed by the fact that a formal memo was chosen, its source
being the Validation and Review Service, the register chosen (i.e. the style of language adopted), the headings
used and so the way the document is organized. These features condition the way it is received and interpreted.
However, the socially constitutive power of discourse extends beyond the realm of excluding the articulation of
alternative ideas and ‘planting’ tacit assumptions. It also goes into the area of alternative practices: discourse
guides and sets limits on recurrent practices as well as on values, attitudes and taken-for-granted knowledge, so
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that ‘social constitution’ affects organizational practices in ‘real’ ways too. NHE discourse is, in other words,
both perlocutionary and illocutionary in nature (Austin, 1962).
Here I use the case of epistemic discourse to consider a general argument: that discourse is constitutive of
systems of knowledge and belief, of social relations, practices as well as of social identities. The focus here is
the constitution of 'knowledge about knowledge' and its implications for social-institutional practices. Of course
to divide off the object of discourse in this way is entirely artificial, the distinction is a purely heuristic one.
Structural Conditioning of NHE Epistemic Discourse: Managerialist Ideology and
Knowledge Commodification
Like all ideologies, managerialism embodies a reductionist understanding of social life: it simultaneously
simplifies and occludes. NHE discourse in particular assumes reductionist models of learning and of knowledge.
Its model of learning is rational-cognitive, conceptualized as the serial acquisition of knowledge through
processes which are individual, private, rational and mechanistic in nature. The product of learning, knowledge,
is conceptualized as atomistic, permanent, cumulative, context-independent and commodified.
This set of understandings and the discourse in which they are encoded and reproduced derives primarily from
managerialist ideology: the values and beliefs about social arrangements and the ways resources should be
ordered and distributed. Particularly important here are the rationalistic and market-based assumptions which
stress economy, efficiency and commodification, as is illustrated in the NewU memo.
NHE discourse likewise characterises knowledge as having a ‘thing-like’ character with use value. Knowledge is
a resource, like money, which is possessed, stored, accumulated and used to acquire other desirables. Unlike
money it is never ‘spent’, but rather can become out-dated. The language of the credit framework is replete with
fiscal and commercial references, ‘credit accumulation’; ‘credit exchange’; ‘franchising’, and so on. NHE thus
becomes represented as one aspect of the commercial world. This is evident in the title of books and reports on
the credit framework (for example Toyne, 1979, Theodossin, 1986) as well as in my fieldnotes from observant
participation at NewU, where talk of students ‘cashing in’ credit for lower-level awards than their original target
and ‘shopping around’ for a good deal on credit as well as the need to devise ‘tariffs’ for qualifications obtained
elsewhere was particularly evident in formal and informal discussions about the accreditation of prior learning
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(APL). A head of a major programme at NewU talked publicly about an educational currency unit, the
“academic ECU” and wanted consortia set up in which the University could act as a “leading broker using credit
as an academic ECU” (fieldnote 27.11.92).
In this educational discourse, then, ‘learning outcomes’ are a proxy for knowledge and skills, the mechanism
which delivers them within the university is the ‘module’ and their successful acquisition is recognised through
the award of credit. As with money it is implicitly understood that a common standard exists so that skills and
knowledge can be transferred and exchanges be made. In short, learning programmes ‘deliver’ a standard
‘product’ in the shape of learning outcomes which are exchangeable:
“All courses and units should have clearly stated aims and learning outcomes.....The university
recognises prior learning wherever it occurs and will offer students the means to gain credit for such
learning wherever it aligns with course learning outcomes....Assessments should test only pre-defined
learning outcomes….” (NewU, 1994).
However in unusual circumstances these taken-for-granted assumptions may be called into question:
“If the intended market is different and the learning outcomes and assessment strategy are different
within modules for on-campus and distance learning then can the courses be considered the same?”
(NewU, 1998, p2).
It remains implicit though that in other circumstances the courses can be considered the same even if the
academic leading the course, the students, the venue and so on vary.
If knowledge and skill are like money then one can conduct a ‘skills audit’ on individuals, with the aim of
“noting the gaps and finding ways of filling the gaps”
(Personnel Manager, multinational automotive company, Oxford).
If knowledge is a product, then it needs to be delivered to its market. The 4 page document, NewU 1998,
contains 20 instances of the verb 'deliver' or a derivative:
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“Where the learning outcomes cannot be delivered by existing modules it may be necessary for there to
be versions of modules for on-campus and distance learning delivery so that there is clarity of
expectations.”
( NewU 1998, p2.)
Successful delivery of the product means an increase in the knowledge/skill capital belonging to the student:
“...the skills and competences that graduates possess...”
“...the amount of higher education you've got...”
(British Higher Education Researcher, Oxford)
Once the knowledge and skill gaps have been filled in this way it can be certified and then packed away for
future use:
'Leading change is now part of the executive's kit bag'
(Director of Human Resources, multinational pharmaceuticals company, Oxford)
Within all this the student as an individual is lost, like knowledge and skill s/he is ‘nominalised’ into a thing-like
status, merely a container for knowledge or (key) skills:
“That student was of no use to me despite its first [class degree, because 'it' lacked key skills]”
(British Director of HE/Industry liaison body, Oxford)
Students are no longer active participants in learning but a totalised category having learning outcomes
delivered to them. In NewU 1998 the words ‘he’ or ‘she’ are not used at all. This sort of absence in the
discourse becomes more apparent when one examines contrasting discourses in the same area. Compare for
example the managerialist discourse of Challis (1993) and FE College principal Field (1993) on the one hand
and Walker (1985) on the other concerning the accreditation of prior experiential learning (APEL) - the process
by which academic credit is awarded in recognition of learning experiences outside the academy, usually
through the assessment of a portfolio which describes and reflects on those experiences:
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“Where the portfolio identifies skills which can be independently assessed and accredited, then adults
are able to compete on equal footing with their younger counterparts in having demonstrably tradable
assets in the education and employment markets” (Challis, 1993, p 19)
In Field we read of ‘direct and indirect customers’ for APEL, ‘after sales service’ and ‘product development’
(Field, 1993, p3, p12).
This contrasts sharply with the discourse of a holistic (Squires, 1986) or developmental (Butterworth, 1992)
approach to the compilation and assessment of the APEL portfolio. Walker (1985), for example, uses phrases
such as 'enlightening reflection', 'creative interaction' and 'liberating experience' to describe these processes,
adding that in portfolio-development sessions participants were:
“…encouraged and helped to share with each other what they were doing in the portfolio...[It recorded]
their personal journey, as a basis for continuing reflection”. (pp 56-7).
NHE discourse is much closer to the managerialist discourse of Field and Challis than to the developmental
discourse of Walker. In it the individual is reduced to a particular configuration of needs, wants, learning
already ‘accumulated’ and, most importantly, gaps. At Oxford an overhead transparency highlighted the “skills
deficiencies identified by recent graduates” while one of the speakers regretted that “current graduates are
poorly prepared for the challenges of the 21st century.” In Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire (1972) noted that
"...education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction [between teacher and student] through...attitudes
and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole”. One of the characteristics of which is that “The
teacher knows everything and the students know nothing”. NHE discourse includes a new epistemic ‘discourse
of the oppressed’: until the right learning outcomes are delivered to them they are empty, valueless.
Discourse and Socio-Institutional Practice
The sets of assumptions and values underpinning NHE epistemic discourse are intimately connected to socioinstitutional practice in both normative and actual senses. Their function is to bring the university closer to the
managerialist ideal and hence more amenable to managerialist practices. Here managers have control of the
‘product’, academic staff are disempowered in order to eliminate ‘producer capture’, to facilitate market
responsiveness and to ensure that structures and processes are honed to maximize economy and efficiency.
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An important effect of the emphasis on rendering the tacit explicit in the form of learning outcomes opens to
view the secret garden of the curriculum and facilitates increased levels of managerial surveillance. It also
makes it possible to separate conception from execution so that teachers may become simply ‘deliverers’ of
material developed elsewhere and marketed (Apple, 1989; Nonaka, 1991).
Knowledge commodification also renders it amenable to rationalistic management practices such as
management by objectives and total quality management. This is one aspect of what has been called
McDonaldization, a shorthand term for the attempt to introduce efficiency, quantification and calculability,
predictability and the substitution of non-human technology for human technology (or control) (Ritzer, 1993, pp
9-12; Hartley, 1995). The credit framework aspect of NHE facilitates the quantification of student work hours,
while course objectives and teaching methods are shaped by constant assessment and auditing to suit
management teams’ objectives. This threatens to produce a 'compliance culture' which stresses normalisation
and standardisation and punishes deviance (Shore and Roberts, 1995, p 14)
The credit framework also promises considerable administrative advantage managerially. A unit of knowledge is
delivered and assessed in a defined period of time, the student’s profile is amended and the transaction is
complete. Standard portions of knowledge packaged into modules, supported by pre-prepared sets of materials
and marketed as sets of desirable learning outcomes can be delivered by inter-changeable non-specialist staff.
Commodification gives the potential for flexible delivery and the increased use of part-time academic labour
with very limited conditions of service. Of course, the reality is much more complicated than this and
unintended outcomes frequently surprise and depress managerialists - for reasons which have been carefully
analysed by Pollitt (1993).
Captured By The Discourse?
So far I have concentrated on the normative elements associated with university practices and fiscal signification
codes associated with knowledge and skill. In considering the two questions set out above, the second half of the
paper concentrates on the authoritative and allocative aspects of resource distribution (Giddens, 1984, p xxxi
and p 17). Here I want to develop the notion of ideological and discursive negotiation, displacement, contest and
10
creation in a way which problematises these resource questions, and so develops the notion of discourse as
polysemic text amenable to alternative readings and to reconstruction.
Universities as dialogical entities
Universities are dialogical entities (Eisenberg and Goodall, 1993), that is they are composed of a multiplicity of
discourses with plurivocal meanings brought to bear by participants whose utterances are intertextually shaped
by prior texts, that also anticipate subsequent ones (Bakhtin, 1986; Fairclough, 1992). There are two sources of
this plurivocality. First, conditioning structures within and beyond the university itself; and second the operation
of activity systems within it. The following sections deal with each of these in turn.
1. Conditioning Structures Within and Beyond the University
Managerialist ideology is not the only important conditioning structure underpinning discourse and practice. In
daily life recurrent practices, attitudes, values and taken-for-granted knowledge are processually conditioned by
multiple structures. In university contexts these include: educational ideologies; ‘stories’ about the
epistemological character of disciplines; the relative profitability of alternative behaviours as well as a mix of
‘cultural traffic’ entering the institution from outside: cultures associated with gender, social class, ethnicity and
so on. The actions, reactions, behaviour and textual production of any individual will be conditioned (but not
determined) by the particular configuration of these forces as they align in a given context. A configuration may
predispose individuals to adopt NHE discursive repertoires in ways which may well be transparent to them. This
will be the case if there is a ‘valence’ between their structural location and NHE discourse and practice - that is
if they are ideologically aligned with it, and it is profitable for them. Conversely if there is antagonistic
relationship between that configuration and NHE structural predispositions, then there is a strong likelihood of
discursive negotiation, displacement, contest and creation, as well as oppositional and creative behaviour.
One of the arguments against the role of alternative structures rendering texts polysemic is that discursive
negotiation, opposition and reconstruction does not just happen automatically as a direct result of structural
influences outside the university or of the processes within activity systems inside it: it involves a certain amount
of analytical and reflective ‘work’ (Kitzinger, 1999, p 18). When this work stops for whatever reason cognitive
spaces open for NHE discourse to fill. Though this is true, in university contexts issues frequently arise with
‘activate’ or catalyse these alternative discursive positions, mobilising actors’ resources and ideologies.
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Examples are questions about whether and how to accredit students' prior learning or in what ways to develop an
undergraduate course. At these critical junctures space is created for discursive re-authoring, spaces appear and
‘concepts, metaphors, models, analogies’ are developed for making new statements (Henriques et al, 1984, p
106).
Let me illustrate this by showing how some of these structural factors may condition a response to NHE
epistemic discourse and practice, first using educational ideology as an example. In the English university
context it is possible to identify four clear educational ideologies, at least for heuristic purposes: traditionalism,
enterprise, progressivism and social reconstructionism. Enterprise ideology aligns in many ways with
managerialist discourse. It sees the role of HE as primarily vocational, new ‘delivery’ technologies are
welcomed as more efficient and effective pedagogic tools, experiential learning is valued and ‘core skills’ are
particularly prized. In ‘fast capitalism’ the content of HE courses is relatively unimportant because knowledge
so quickly dates. The possession of a varied and ever-extending portfolio of skills and knowledge is the key to
success for the individual, and modular courses of the credit framework are a good way of providing this. Here
there is valence with NHE discourse, though not ‘capture’ because of the voluntarism involved. This is clearly
illustrated by a female faculty member in a languages department at NewU:
“What we are trying to produce here is a product that is marketable and sellable at the end, i.e. the
student....The people out there have to understand what they are getting [and for that reason we should
be] using the profiling system and [a] sort of log system...it would really give you a clear profile of
what they have studied.”
Contrast that enterprise academic with the progressivist who is concerned about student participation in and
ownership of their learning programme. Personal development is a key aim of HE for progressivists and
extending access to HE to give that opportunity to more varied sorts of people tends to be a driving force for
them. The point made by a male law lecturer at NewU exemplifies this position:
“We tend to get involved with our students...you can’t separate the student from the subject.”
Even more divorced from managerialist and NHE discourse and practice is the social reconstructionist, whose
main motivation lies in the desire to empower students for social change. The roots of this ideology may lie in
Marxism, feminism or some other ideological base, but the common theme is a rejection of the commodification
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of knowledge and vocationalisation of higher education. A male social science lecturer at NewU clearly
articulated a social reconstructionist position in identifying his aim as an educator, which was to:
"…to get students to challenge and to be able to locate the knowledge that they are acquiring
historically…socially and politically…with a view ultimately to that process being liberating or
emancipatory…Knowledge not dominating them is what I'm after."
As a visting German academic speaking from this location said in his keynote speech at the Oxford conference:
“We are in danger of generating the uncritical beta plus from Brave New World if we listen to what
employers say”
Such challenges to NHE discourse may be mitigated or enhanced by the combination and interaction of
educational ideology with other structural features such as epistemological stories about the discipline.
Progressivist academics in art and design subjects, for example, tend to subscribe to a story about their
discipline and the pedagogy that ‘must’ accompany it. This stresses the need for intensive and extended project
work supported by tutors, and ideally leads to a ‘gestalt’ experience. The studio system of working in which the
tutor’s attention is individualised, the Atelier system, encapsulates this ideology. Such stories, too, have
important implications for the reception of NHE discourse.
Disciplines are important in another way: they provide the resources to ‘read’ NHE discourse in particular ways.
Academics from linguistics backgrounds are well able to identify and challenge the discursive repertoires used
in professional life, for example. Many other disciplines and domains of study have their own particular 'take' on
NHE discourse. For instance academics in business and management fields are often sceptical of the
unproblematized transfer of specialist terms and concepts from their field to an educational context.
As I indicated above, structural factors other than educational ideology and disciplines are significant in the
reception and use of NHE discourse. Profitability (Levine, 1980) is one of these. Lingard and Garrick (1997)
have shown, for example, how the Queensland State’s requirement of familiarity with its Social Justice Strategy,
including discursive fluency, as a precondition for teachers’ promotion fundamentally changed the way the
Strategy was received and used. Altering the profitability status of particular discourses can have important
effects on their adoption and use, as the HEFCE research assessment exercise’s bibliometry also illustrates
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(McVicar, 1994; Kogan, 1994; McNay 1996). However the limited space available does not allow me to
elaborate this argument further or to discuss further structural features which condition the reception and
attribution of meaning to NHE discourse such as gender and ethnicity. The general point is made I hope:
alternative structures condition the reception of NHE discourse and the production and use of alternative
discourses. Alternative practices follow from this. Elsewhere I have mapped the ways in which academics adopt
strategies which reject, reconstruct or help them to cope with aspects of NHE policy flowing from managerialist
ideology with which they are not in sympathy (Trowler, 1996; 1998a).
2. Activity Systems in University Life
The previous section concentrated on conditioning structures within and beyond the university as sometimes
providing a basis for discursive contest. While an emphasis on structure is important, it is also important not to
forget agency: the role of individuals and groups in interpreting and, through daily practices and understandings,
changing structures. A locus of agency in university life and elsewhere is the activity systems which comprise
the immediate social context of work, social interaction, identity construction and maintenance and discursive
production and use (Blackler, 1993). Universities are dialogical entities, their cultures localised and multiple
because of the numerous activity systems which operate within them. Taken together these comprise a complex
activity network (Blackler and Crump, 2000) within which multiple communities of practice form and find
coherence. It is here that recurrent practices become shaped and embedded, where developing meanings are
constructed as individuals work together on the issues of professional life. Hart-Landsberg et al (1992) offer a
succinct description of an activity system:
“An activity system [comprises]...a number of basic elements, including a given practitioner or subject,
the object or motive of the activity, its mediating artefacts (e.g. tools, signs and symbols), the rules
generally followed in carrying out the activity, the community of co-workers and colleagues involved
in the activity, and the division of labour within the activity.” ( p 7. Emphasis in original)
The crucial relationships here are between the individual agent (subject), their community of practice and the
object of their efforts. These relationships are mediated by rules, roles (division of labour) and the tools
available or developed, including discursive repertoires.
People are invariably members of several activity systems but in higher education the academic department (or a
sub-unit of it) is usually the main one for academic staff. The community of practice may be a team associated
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with a research or curriculum development project or with a particular programme. The community of practice
may be strengthened by physical proximity and shared space, as this female academic engineer from an English
chartered university reported:
“In actual fact this corridor, I think, is made up of people who have worked together quite closely for a
number of years and they are all in that same field. There are a lot of telecommunications people in this
corridor and they have a sort of sub group in which I think they have quite a cohesive group of people
there.” (New academics study).
The community of practice will normally consist of a handful of colleagues who will often have allegiance to a
complementary system: the ‘invisible college’ (Crane, 1972). It comprises academics in other institutions around
the globe engaged in the same field. The university may set the structural context for their practice, setting out
some of the rules and providing resources, establishing guidelines for the division of labour and setting the task,
but the community of practice develops the day-to-day practices, behavioural and discursive, and develops
codes of signification and sets of assumptions about what they are doing and how, which quickly become takenfor-granted. Cultural enactment and cultural construction are both taking place. Behaviour is shaped by
structure, but social action is also important in shaping behaviour. In short, activity systems are the locus for
structuration (Giddens, 1976) to occur:
“social structures are both constituted by human agency, and yet, at the same time, are the medium of
this constitution.” (p 121)
Within activity systems understandings will be arrived at and discourse infused with meaning, sometimes
oppositional or critical in nature. Thus aspects of NHE discourse such as ‘key skills’, ‘records of achievement’,
and even terms like ‘adaptive’ and ‘transformative’ as applied to students become redolent with locally created
meaning and can evoke an emotional response. As a result texts are not just ‘read’, they are responded to and
acted upon in ways which are suffused with emotion. Moreover, as Fairclough notes (1995, p 132) discursive
struggle often occurs at the boundaries of orders of discourse. Activity systems are the locus for informal orders
of discourse, ‘under-the-stage’ discussions of personalities, ideas, new initiatives, ways of being and so on and it
is here that the discursive armoury for negotiation, contest and construction is developed.
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There are problems with theoretical approaches focusing on activity systems and communities of practice,
particularly the less subtle accounts (for example Wenger, 2000: see Contu and Willmott, 2000). However, they
do tell us something very important about the genesis of discursive contest, negotiation and creation. In addition
they offer one alternative way of thinking about the epistemic issues to that predominant in NHE discourse and
ideology. In activity systems theory knowledge is seen as socially situated, as constructed by individuals rather
than 'possessed' (Lave and Wenger, 1991). This is linked to a completely different ontological framework than
that which underpins the mechanistic epistemic discourse, and a different ideological framework too. Lave
(1993, p 8) is right to suggest that knowledge always undergoes construction and transformation in use, that
learning always forms an integral aspect of activity in the world and that the process of knowledge acquisition is
always socially situated. The discussion above illustrates the ways in which NHE discourse is not simply
transmitted and applied in contexts such as NewU but is often received, interpreted and reconfigured or rejected
in ways conditioned by complex and heterogeneous social contexts.
This understanding of knowledge and learning begins to illuminate aspects which are occluded in NHE
discourse and to offer alternative ways of thinking. For example, seeing knowledge and skill as socially
distributed within a community of practice alerts us to one of the problems with the notion of ‘key skills’ and the
idea that we should ‘fill’ our students with as many and as much of them as possible. This individualistic way of
thinking about knowledge and skill shows up the error of attributing to the individual what is in fact a social
characteristic.
Concluding comments
This paper set out to address, first, the extent to which academic staff are 'captured' by the discourse associated
with NHE in the UK and, second, to identify the factors which condition their ability to displace, negotiate,
reconstruct and create alternative discourses. With regard to the first of these aims, the paper has rejected any
simple thesis of discursive capture within a Foucauldian 'regime of truth'. The basis for this rejection lies in the
response to the second issue. Here the paper has shown that individuals can be empowered to resist NHE
discourse both through the influence of various conditioning structures and through the agency incorporated in
communities of practice operating within activity systems. The discussion has indicating that discursive
displacement, resistance, reconstruction and negotiation do occur. It has also explored the processes associated
with both structure and agency which facilitate this resistive and reconstructive activity. They derive from
16
deeply rooted social structures and processes engaged actively by social agents in a process of social
accomplishment. Together these give cause to moderate the ‘capture’ thesis. We can characterise the processes
involved as often involving discursive struggle, or sometimes accommodation, rather than simply discursive
capture.
However, there is a danger of over-extending this argument to a position which asserts the existence of a
semiotic democracy in which all texts are ‘read’ in creative ways and filtered through localised cultures,
ideologies and communities of practice. There are three main reasons for caution.
First, the ability to engage in discursive and behavioural resistance or reconstruction often depends on
occupying a locale in which alternative social structures are conditioning behaviour, including the use of
different discursive repertoires. In order to discursively resist NHE discourse and its structural roots individuals
may need to be ‘captured’ by an alternative discourse.
Second is the question of the stability of oppositional discourse and world views. Activity theory suggests that
social context is a key factor in articulating identity and producing text. From this perspective it is perfectly
possible for the same person to employ sets of discursive repertoires in different contexts which articulate and
sustain completely contradictory sets of assumptions, particularly when a different 'order of discourse' (the set of
discursive practices associated with a particular social domain or institution: the lecture, the research interview
and so on: Fairclough 1995, p 12) is being drawn on. Thus oppositional positions to NHE discourse may be
contextually dependent and so cannot be taken for granted because they are transitory. There is evidence that
this is the case from a number of studies of managers and managerialism in further and higher education in the
UK. These show that managers often adopt a form of 'bilingualism' in relation to the use of managerialist and
other discourses (e.g. Deem, 1998; Prichard, 2000), using and then dropping them according to context.
Third, powerful agencies are in a position to shift the balance in favour of the adoption of NHE discourse by
facilitating its valence with the structural location of academics. One example of this, cited earlier, is the
eligibility requirement that candidates for promotion in Queensland's schools should demonstrate 'appropriate'
discursive fluency. As Reed (2000) reminds us, such pre-existing material and other structural dimensions
constrain what is achievable in terms of discursive renegotiation and contest.
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Discourse, then, is a power resource and any account of power, including discursive power, is an account of
shifting processual relations, of a ‘complex strategical situation in a particular society’ (Foucault, 1981, p 93). In
some circumstances the socially constitutive power of discourse is strong largely because of its ‘invisible’,
taken-for-granted nature. In other situations the tacit becomes explicit, hegemony is challenged, discursive
spaces appear and alternative discursive repertoires are brought into play. This can be an almost moment-bymoment dynamic, but usually the process is longer term and contextually conditioned.
These comments should alert us to the importance of active resistance to what is becoming an increasingly
hegemonic discourse located in managerialist structural roots. They should also alert us to the danger of
complacency based on a belief in a semiotic democracy founded on the over-extension of a deconstructionist
position which sees no inherent meanings in texts. To repeat a point made above, plurivocality is always
immanent: the achievement of semiotic democracy requires engagement, struggle and considerable 'work'. As
academics we need to adopt critical theoretical positions which locate discourse in relation to power and
resources and identify social inequities in terms of its effects, to do whatever we can to render challengeable any
one way of seeing the world.
18
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Appendix 1: Extract from NewU 1998.
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