Enactment of the university– issues and concepts

Abstract

This chapter sets out the analytical vocabulary and conceptual framework for an ethnographic exploration of processes of enacting the university, which the co-authors develop further, and in their own ways, in the rest of the book. Academics have a long history of pointing out that ‘The University’ does not equate to an organizational unity with a tangible and unified presence in the world. Yet when policy makers work to change the university through employing reductionist images of its organizational coherence, it has great consequences. Throughout this book, we engage with the tension between the power of images of the university as a coherent, tangible and even governable entity and the ways it is made up of diverse practices and positioned ideas about its nature. The chapter sets out the theoretical and conceptual field we use to explore this. Throughout the book, our ethnographic approach holds two ideas of enactment in tension – an instrumental view of policy as enacted in law, and what we call a democratic view of policy as a site where many diverse actors and organisations can potentially be actively involved in contested processes of change. This chapter stakes out the tension between these two types of enactment, and to do so, it delves into a number of subsidiary concepts, such as ‘governance’ and ‘political technologies’. Each of these concepts provides a space for reflection on the tension between dominant images of the universities that are often codified in law and the ‘everyday’ positioned practices of reproducing and reinventing the university that we have engaged with ethnographically. We seek a double take – in which we see the policy field as a space of political contestation where analytically any actors, including the researchers themselves, have the potential to become important players, but in which ethnographically people are engaging in processes and systems of power and some exert more influence over the definition of the university than others.