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Accountability and innovation in highereducation: a disabling tension?Sally Findlow aa Keele University , UKPublished online: 29 May 2008.
To cite this article: Sally Findlow (2008) Accountability and innovation in higher education: adisabling tension?, Studies in Higher Education, 33:3, 313-329, DOI: 10.1080/03075070802049285
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Studies in Higher EducationVol. 33, No. 3, June 2008, 313–329
ISSN 0307-5079 print/ISSN 1470-174X online© 2008 Society for Research into Higher EducationDOI: 10.1080/03075070802049285http://www.informaworld.com
Accountability and innovation in higher education: a disabling tension?
Sally Findlow*
Keele University, UKTaylor and Francis LtdCSHE_A_305096.sgm10.1080/03075070802049285Studies in Higher Education0307-5079 (print)/1470-174X (online)Original Article2008Society for Research into Higher Education333000000June [email protected]
This article is an empirically grounded critical exploration of conflict between two associatedhigher education agendas – audit-driven accountability and academic innovation. Feedinginto a discourse of quality, audit and power, it considers how far prevailing economic-bureaucratic models of higher education accountability might actually inhibit the long-termsuccess of other aspects of the quality agenda, such as innovation. Insider research intoinnovators’ experiences of constraint in one higher education institution is used to interrogateassumptions about how meaningful academic innovation can be centrally promoted, managedand accountable. Drawing on this case, the article explores what emerges as a central dynamicof tension in relation to issues of cultural capital, trust, risk avoidance, ambivalence andsubversion. It suggests that such tension is properly seen as a part of the realignment of fieldsof academic power, in both the UK and beyond.
Introduction
So long as educational innovation was primarily a matter that concerned interest groups andinformal networks, there was arguably little need for policy-oriented investigation of how inno-vation actually works. But, in the UK, changes since the 1980s in the social roles, scope andfunding of higher education have prompted moves to coordinate innovation and strategic plan-ning. Institutions have been required to be ‘encouraging and disseminating good and innovativepractice in support of high quality learning and teaching’, as one of the five ‘national areas ofpriority’ defined by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE 2002, 5). Theother areas concern widening participation and promoting access, retention and employability.The satisfactory submission by higher education institutions of teaching and learning strategiessecures teaching quality enhancement funds that they are required to spend on these five areas.
When the case study under investigation here began, in 2000, 31% of higher education insti-tutions had already made use of these funds to enable innovation via institutional schemes(Gibbs 2001). Higher educational innovation (or at least the discourse of higher educationalinnovation) was becoming programmatised. That these programmes are centrally accountable(HEFCE 2001) means that ‘innovation’ in this discourse is applied to ideas for change that areconsistent with institutional, and in turn national, priorities. As well as the areas already identi-fied, these areas for innovation include student skills development, the use of information andcommunication technologies, promoting different methods of assessment and improving effi-ciency. Institutional calls and documents emphasise in audit-managerial terminology how theirfunding criteria address these priorities and strategic objectives, and cite the importance of moni-toring progress in these terms. Such programmatisation requires academic innovators who seekfunding to adopt the language and procedures of a management-audit culture, whose drivingvalues are efficiency, transparency and standardisation. These are values and discourses that the
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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critical education literature identifies as discordant with academic ones (McWilliam 2004;Strathern 2000a).
In neither of these projects – the saturation of documentation with audit-managerialterminology, and the introduction of monitoring and defined parameters – are important mattersof culture, of cultural congruence, addressed. This article draws on an insider study of onescheme to highlight the strongly antithetical nature of these two cultures, in epistemological,affective, linguistic and political terms. It argues that overlooking the degree of potential culturalconflict in such processes can actually inhibit the production of knowledge, by producing a self-sustaining system of self-referential work characterised by waste, misunderstanding andmistrust. It considers this process in relation to discourses of quality, audit and power.
The institution is a pre-1992, post-redbrick university. Challenging standard paradigms ofchanging forms of higher education governance, for example, from ‘elite’ (collegial) to ‘univer-sal’ (managerial) (Trow 1974), the university is explicitly and simultaneously both collegial andmanagerial, with traditional collegiate sub-structures overlaid by a managerial superstructure. Atraditional, liberal arts range of disciplines is taught alongside an institutional emphasis on healthand management-related subjects. In terms of the teaching–research balance, the institution’sposition is still somewhat defensive, in the way that Brew (2003) described, claiming excellenceat everything rather than working out a nuanced position that is consistent with its other assets,such as its local industry ties, emphasis on community and cross-disciplinary curriculum struc-ture. This contributes to the kind of tension explored here. The HEFCE/Teaching QualityEnhancement Fund-funded innovation scheme run since 2000 is administered by ‘academic-related’ units within the university. These are units responsible for institutional policy and stafftraining and development. In 2002–03 the institutional call to apply for funds from this schemeread as follows:
The committee is particularly interested in projects that will examine innovative models for:
(1) Assessment and feedback(2) Small and/or large group participative learning techniques(3) Access by disadvantaged groups(4) Student feedback(5) Key and work-related skills(6) Use of information technology.
These criteria are revised annually in line with actual policy priorities and changing rhetoricalcurrencies. For instance, criteria 3, 4 and 5 above were replaced the following year with: ‘devel-oping independent learning skills in students; course evaluation; enriching teaching with disci-pline research’. The largest groups of the 22 projects funded in 2000–01 and 2001–02 explicitlyaddressed the government-linked policy agendas of ‘transferable skills’ (5), ‘employability’ (2),‘information and communication technologies’ (4), assessment (3) and ‘widening access’ (3).Funded innovators were required to report in three formats: a written report, verbally to the insti-tutional policy analyst, and by means of a presentation to interested parties within the universityat an Innovation Projects Day.
This article mixes auto-ethnographic narrative with interpretive analysis of policy and theexperiences of others. My investigation began as an internally commissioned, positivistic studyof the effectiveness of this innovation scheme, the brief assuming ‘what works’ to be straight-forward and verifiable. For this I drew on internal audit and strategic planning documents,innovators’ own reports on their innovations, and interviews with the leaders of 18 out of the 21innovations funded in 2001 and 2002. The interviews employed a classic semi-structured formatto test innovators’ experiences against enabling and constraining factors identified in the inno-
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vation literature. The long-term and open-ended nature of the diverse innovation projects meantthat all I could meaningfully find within the commission’s parameters were perceptions ofenabling and constraining factors. Tension – between conflicting aims, analyses of need andways of communicating – was the dominant theme to emerge. After the report was submitted,the investigation developed into a more broadly referenced, independent, critical ethnographicinquiry grounded in these preliminary findings. Ideas about the use of accountability and trans-parency as rallying cries, as weapons in unstable work environments, started to appear plausibleas explanations for the experiences I was hearing about. Successive accounts were tested andrefined against further empirical data gathered over two years.
The sources for these data included participant observation (my reflections as funded inno-vator and as commissioned analyst of the scheme, and field notes of overheard and engineeredconversations with administrative staff); two discussion groups of eight, mostly new, universityteachers from a range of disciplines who were engaged in what they saw as unfunded innova-tion; an email survey of all academic staff in the institution; and in-depth follow-up interviewswith three of the innovators interviewed in the first round. Across this broader range of sources,working definitions of ‘innovation’ ranged from small-scale changes to individual practice,through new module and formal procedural changes, to large-scale funded and monitoredprojects.
The discussion groups with new teachers were actually convened for a staff trainingprogramme I was leading. The venue operated as a confidential space for critical reflection onboth participants’ own practice and its context. The published topics of these two meetings wereevaluation and assessment. As conversation started, unprompted, to focus on issues of tension, Istopped proceedings to explain my research and asked for permission to make notes. Over thesame month that these recorded discussions took place, I deliberately engaged in conversationwith a broad range of administrative staff from one department, introducing concepts, proposi-tions or hypothetical situations raised by the discussion groups, seeking corroboration or chal-lenge from a perspective that might be expected to be distinct and making field diary notes.
The email survey asked three questions, consecutively: what they thought was the greatestbarrier to effective academic innovation in higher education; what sort of ‘innovation’ they hadbeen referring to in their preceding answer; and for definitions of ‘quality’ in higher education.Sixty-seven people from a possible total of 433 replied. Their responses were coded accordingto categories of perceived constraint and conceptions of innovation, and cross-referred with theirconceptions of quality and their disciplinary background.
Three follow-up interviews, referred to here as A, B and C, explored emerging key themesin greater depth, balancing and qualifying my existing understandings discursively. These inter-viewees represented three distinct areas in terms of both discipline and type of innovation:humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and business, and respectively academic skillsdevelopment, systems efficiency and employability-enterprise. Each had been interviewed twoyears earlier for the commissioned analysis project. They were all judged to be ‘successful’ inno-vators on the basis of having had funding extended beyond the first year. The texts producedwere largely free responses, with naturalistic interjections seeking clarification, incorporatingboth narrative and explanation, to my opening questions: ‘How did it go? What constraints didyou find? And how did you overcome these?’
Methodological issues
My own position as a researcher-analyst was usefully ambiguous for this exercise in theproduction of ‘local knowledge’ (Geertz 1983) that aims to ‘tell truth to power’ (Watson 2005).Critically interpretive dialogue between researcher and researched is central to both projects.
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Having been employed for two years on overlapping part-time and temporary contracts,accountable to different units as lecturer, staff developer and policy analyst, I was able to exploitdifferent aspects of this identity to order to produce a critical ethnography of my own workculture that is not too monophonic. The experiences of others are positioned against my own,and texts are analysed as inter-subjective records incorporating my knowledge of relevant powerdynamics, context and agendas. The email survey responses, for instance, would be inherentlybiased according to the kinds of motivations staff had for replying. The non-anonymity ofresponses allowed me to factor in what I knew as an insider. At the same time, given that anxietyabout self-revelation is a potential stumbling block to insider research, I was sufficiently non-establishment for my questions not to be personally threatening. In second-round interviews andthe discussion groups I sought to reduce potential anxiety by emphasising the theoretical dimen-sion of my inquiry, removing the spotlight from respondents’ own practice. Still, as an exampleof the kinds of balance that needed to be struck, my explanation was kept to the level of‘constraint’, the terms of reference otherwise the respondents’ own. Disclosure fell short ofinviting subjects to enter precisely the same discourse as that framing my study.
It should be clear then that the present study seeks to contribute to the critique of educationaleffectiveness research based on a narrow, neo-positivist and objectivist view of ‘evidence’(Clegg 2005). The claim to reliability rests on the credibility of the researcher as interpretive toolin three main ways. First is the prominence of subjective voices, including my own, on the basisthat ‘If you claim spurious objectivity in your work, you are likely to miss the most importantaspect of insider research: the opportunity it offers you to explore your existing practice and thatof others’ (Ashcroft, Bigger, and Coates 1996, 6). Second, the premise that any cultural descrip-tion, or evocation, is inevitably partial (Clifford 1986) suggests that attempts to quantify theprevalence of perceptions and experiences, which may be concealed by respondents for strategicreasons, are going to be less than useful. So, on the whole, I don’t aim to do that. Third, thisinvestigation placed slavish adherence to subjectively defined ethical standards second to theproduction of ‘truth’. Consequently, some of the ways that data were sought required sensitiveinterpretation rather than direct reproduction (even though identifying details have been changedas far as possible).
Ethical approval for the first formal stage of the research was given by an interdisciplinarysteering committee. But, at both this stage and, in common with much ethnographic fieldwork,for the subsequent freer work, blurred ethical boundaries appear. For instance, the first-roundinterview respondents were contractually obliged to report on their innovations and I was actingas institutional analyst. These circumstances will have led to guarded responses as well asuncomfortable power issues, and required note-taking rather than tape-recording. Despite thediscussion group participants’ verbal permission to take notes, and my guarantee of theiranonymity, the direct reproduction of their testimonies would raise similar uncomfortable ques-tions. My decision to use covert notes on staff conversations came from considering the limitedpotential formal interviews have for uncovering contextually grounded and unedited understand-ings of experience, particularly in an insecure environment or when the interviewer might beexpected to have different views or vested interests. While covert observation of routine talk haselsewhere been deployed as a way of accessing such ‘private talk’ (Myers and Williamson 2002)for the purpose of sociological study (Scourfield 2001), this method again does not facilitate thedirect recording of comments that may be traced, particularly in a closed environment.
Unresolved tensions as a source of constraint
The first round interviews produced experiences of innovation-enabling factors that were largelyconsistent with those identified in the empirical literature (Allen 2003; Dalton 1988; Ford et al.
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1996; Hannan and Silver 2000; Kogan and Hanney 2000): trialability; a solid research base;compatibility with immediate contexts and values; receptive and democratic cultures; seniordepartmental input and support; secure working environments; adequate and flexible space, timeand funding; time to network informally; and ‘organic evolution’ (Kogan and Hanney 2000)rather than imposed change. My sample defined success in two main ways: continuing at thetime of the study, or having achieved stated objectives. The factors inhibiting either of theseoutcomes, my respondents felt, were: lack of time; departmental resistance (which they attrib-uted to stress and overwork); demands for external accountability; incompatibility between theproject’s needs and the institutional structure (course committees, ‘red tape’ and modular/assess-ment structures were cited as problematic); the failure or suspension of technical or financialsupport (often related to unanticipated needs); and issues around the ‘ownership’ of projects,especially where innovators had relatively junior status.
The undercurrent of conflict between these innovators’ ideals and the policy framework inwhich they found themselves working was reinforced and qualified in successive stages of theinvestigation. While some first-round respondents had seemed accepting of what they neverthe-less acknowledged as a context of constraint, a greater number were explicitly or implicitlycritical, citing their frustration at either structural red tape itself, at the resistance of colleaguesworried about administrative demands, or at the imposed divide between ‘students’ needs and(institutional) perceptions of need’. These perceptions mirrored my own as a funded innovatorof a skills-development support package; I had felt constrained by having to keep my eye on theneed to tell a good news story in the terms defined by the scheme. The discussion groupparticipants, defining innovation broadly as the attempt to meet student and disciplinary needsin ways that seem best but diverge from established practice, introduced the idea of hegemonyand told how they felt constrained by their outsider or junior status. Fifty-five of the email surveyrespondents cited aspects of ‘the system’ as the main barriers to innovation. The challenge ofinnovation was: ‘to be effective … despite the system not because of it’. These systemic barriersfell into two categories: resources/time was blamed in 26 responses, and bureaucracy/manageri-alism was cited 29 times. Fourteen of the responses linked these explicitly, as in: ‘[The mainconstraint is] insufficient time and support for academics, owing ultimately to underfunding andmismanagement’.
‘Bureaucracy’ was seen as an impediment in two ways, imposing both barriers anddistractions. It was seen as the agent of an inflexible system, and the source of too much ‘busy’administrative work. For example: ‘The climate of constant change imposed by the managementmeans that colleagues are less open to academic innovation which results in more change’.
The institutional counterpoint to this was the feeling expressed, implicitly or explicitly, byall the administrative staff I talked to that, in the words of one mid-ranking administrator, ‘Nooffence, but some academics need a kick up the bum’. Only five survey respondents citedconstraints not explicitly linked to aspects of ‘the system’, singling out academics’ ‘attitudes’,which they elaborated as: ‘lack of imagination’ and/or ‘a reluctance to take risks’.
Yet the follow-up interviews raised a number of complexities to what had begun to seem likea clear picture of a system at odds with the innovative work academics wanted to do. These three‘successful’ innovators all identified features of the institutional scheme as either enabling orcritical to whatever level of success they had achieved. They wove into these accounts acknowl-edgement of a fundamental mismatch between context and objectives, and the recognition thatsuccess depended on overcoming this. Key to the general mismatch seemed to be the ways inwhich the environment – both institution and scheme – demanded subscription to a view ofaccountability that impeded real innovation; that is, the sort of accountability that is modelled onclassic audit: ‘conducted by remote agencies of control’ (Power 1994, 43), presuming an absenceof trust, and valuing standardisation according to a priori standards.
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On the one hand, accountability is intrinsic to academia: the sort of accountability that isabout honesty and responsibility, about making decisions on the basis of sound rationales, on theunderstanding that you may be called to account at any point. Strathern (2000a, 3) suggests that‘audit is almost impossible to criticise in principle – after all, it advances values that academicsgenerally hold dear, such as responsibility, openness about outcomes’. And non-malign readingsof audit’s standardising dimensions see them aimed simply at producing ‘procedural equity’ inthe service of balancing human imprecision or arbitrariness (McWilliam 2004, 155). Popularrepresentations of the ‘traditional’ university as individualistic, humanistic and dedicated to thepursuit of pure knowledge are certainly not the whole story. Utilitarian and consumer-orientedhigher education models are not historically unprecedented, nor is the liberal humanist modelquite as ‘traditional’ as many believe (Tribe 2004). Moreover, there are persuasive arguments forthe way that managerially accountable approaches to higher education governance can increasemeaningful trans-disciplinarity and knowledge application (Gibbons et al. 1994). Yet, asmanagement and industry have shifted towards ‘soft’ forms of audit in acknowledgement of thecounter-productive potential of ‘hard’ systems, the academy’s opposite transition is felt to reflectthe increased interest of consumers and politicians (Harvey and Askling 2003). Academics arguethat this kind of surveillance is counter-productive to many aspects of their work, bothpractically and ideologically. It is implicated in what has been identified as a sense of alienation,particularly among junior academics, for whom work can be felt as a struggle to negotiate asystem that both demands high-quality performance, yet simultaneously undermines this(Trowler 1998).
It may well be that academic–managerial tension is not, as McWilliam (2004) argues, essen-tial but a by-product of divergent recent trajectories, of the speed with which new managerial-audit models have been imposed on a recently relatively autonomous academy, and of the extentto which they now co-exist. Morley has suggested that the problem lies in governmental appro-priation of these essentially separate causes and discourses, which then become ‘just more noise’(Morley 2004), the incoherence of their yoking together contributing to a climate of scepticism.I do not claim more than this. What I do propose, however, is that, if the tension underminesknowledge production to the extent that the argument here suggests, it needs deconstructing.
Innovation as knowledge production: problematisation, risk and trust
The tension can be seen to start with divergent assumptions about where knowledge is locatedand how it is generated. New managerialism approaches knowledge as a finished product, pack-aged, positive, objective, externally verifiable and therefore located outside the knower. Bycontrast, an ‘academic exceptionalist’ (Kogan and Hanney 2000, 242) view of knowledge placesit in the minds of knowledgeable individuals, with the holder of the knowledge also the mainagent in its transmission (Brew 2003). This kind of expert or ‘professional knowing’, closelyrelated to conventionally acquired ‘wisdom’ (Clegg 2005, 418), is produced through an organicprocess between people in a culture of nurturing new ideas. The process is allowed to take aslong as it takes, and knowledge is not seen as a finished product.
The nature of innovation from this latter perspective is change via problematisation and risk.In order to push the boundaries of what we know, and break down dogma, problems have to beidentified and resolved (McLean and Blackwell 1997, 96). Entering uncharted territory impliesrisk, which requires acceptance by all stakeholders. My own experience as a funded innovator,and the prevailing experience of my respondents, was that participation in a funded ‘scheme’ madeauthentic problematisation, and honest description of risk, difficult. Problematisation was inhib-ited by the necessary consideration given to funding body and institutional agendas in definingparameters for approval. Audit can be seen as a response to fear of risk, and audit-managerially
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governed schemes require parameters pre-determined, expected outcomes and costs known inadvance. Respondents in this case related the reluctance of the scheme to provide for unanticipatedneeds as they arose, without which effective innovation was much harder.
The discussion groups of new academics unanimously recounted a feeling of implicit pres-sure not to acknowledge problems. They all said they had quickly learned to avoid mention of‘problems’, that if necessary the word ‘issues’ was preferable, but that these ‘issues’ should bepresented concisely and as if they had already been dealt with. While their formal institutionaltraining programme emphasised the importance of honestly addressing shortcomings, theirinformal exposure to management culture conveyed a very different message. They had learned,they said, that to get on in academia you had to protect yourself and the institution, separaterhetoric from reality, strategy from truth – that authentic problematisation was non-productiveand potentially dangerous.
The follow-up interviews with the more academically and/or institutionally senior recipientsof innovation funding provided further insights into the detrimental effect risk minimisation canhave on capacity to innovate. Innovation C was a new programme that aimed to promote cross-disciplinary skills transferable to the workplace. This innovator was constrained to put aside theirown ideals by the requirement for course committee approval. The committees, the innovatorsaid, had struggled to give approval for a technical reason, despite unanimous agreement on theproposed new module’s intrinsic value. The innovation’s pedagogic rationales were accepted bysenior academic administrators, yet formal approval still meant having to ‘lie’ about its contentto sub-committees, and on paper. The innovator described the effect of this compromise asdemotivating; in place of the initial intrinsic motivation, proceeding with the innovation becamesimply a question of getting ‘brownie points’ for the department. After two years of strugglingto achieve its intended outcomes the innovation folded, the integrity of the product and its basisfor subsequent development having been undermined by the compromise.
This experience also underlines the time dimension to risk calculations. Innovation B was anew approach to the delivery of learning–teaching. Like Innovation C, this had been deemed‘successful’ to the extent of having funding extended for a second year. Nonetheless, this fund-ing was subsequently removed before the innovations were self-financing. The viability of Inno-vation C had been undermined by the requirement for it to be self-sustaining after the first year.To be self-sustaining it had to be made compulsory. This reduced the quality of students’ expe-rience and achievement, and resulted in the withdrawal of the external funds that had boughtfacilities and presentational overheads – without which the quality of what could be offeredwould have declined to such a level that it was considered worthless. The academic and peda-gogic integrity of Innovation B, on the other hand, required that the bulk of the work be doneafter the stipulated deadline for spending and reporting. From this experience, the innovatorconcluded that the narrow time frames implicit in the scheme impeded the size of projects it waspossible, or sensible in career terms, to take on.
But the relationship of ‘risk’ to innovation has other dimensions. An audit-oriented systemand individuals’ respective units of measuring risk are likely to be as distinct as are theirconcepts of knowledge, pointing up a critically but inversely interdependent relationshipbetween intellectual risk and personal risk. Allen’s (2003) study of institutional change foundthat innovation was facilitated by the confidence that comes with secure working environ-ments. Where change was judged by staff to be successful, it tended to emerge from univer-sity environments where holistic and humanistic views of scholarship and systems of implicittrust were embedded. These gave academics the confidence to take risks. Allen found thatinsecure environments created what Power (1994, 13) describes as ‘the very distrust that [theywere] meant to address’, removed the expectation and obligation for genuinely responsibleacademic accountability (Giri 2000, 174), and made staff reluctant to devote time, signpost
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problems or try something that might not work and could reflect negatively on their careerportfolios. This is the way that institutional risk avoidance is seen as constraining academicfreedom – by both rewarding safe practice and simultaneously promoting an increasedperception of risk as danger (Douglas 1990; Tierney 2001; Kayrooz and Preston 2002;McWilliam 2004). The process has been found to contribute to stress, professional dissatisfac-tion and falling standards (Association of University Teachers 2004; Halsey 1995), as well asa reduced capacity to innovate.
The responsive ‘coping strategies’ (Trowler 1998) I found in this institution were character-ised by cynicism. Regret over the devaluing of informal modes of communication was a persis-tent undercurrent to the email responses. For instance: ‘Lack of time to liaise with colleagues inan informal way that uncovers the potential for innovation’.
The new teachers in the discussion groups said the lack of time for non-minuted ‘just talking’was frustrating. The prevailing scepticism, especially in these groups, that seemed simulta-neously to emerge from these schemes and undermine their success linked divergent understand-ings of knowledge production/innovation to incompatible senses of professional belonging andvested interests. Email respondents wrote:
Those who know what to do and those with authority to act form entirely different groups.
The costs of production of knowledge are relocated as budget for management. By this mechanismmanagement achieves its second function, the acquisition of power to fulfil the first function, thelimitation of innovation.
The emerging stressed and cynical picture endorses Trowler’s (1998, 123) finding that thesecoping strategies themselves involve a retreat from innovation, via its replacement by ‘workingto rule’, as well as the further erosion of the sort of self-esteem and confidence (Milne andMcCormack 2004) that itself promotes innovation.
Risk was attached to even minimal involvement with innovations. Two of the three follow-up interviewees reported collegial resistance to their innovation. Innovator B had needed twoyears’ worth of pilot data to convince colleagues of the innovation’s potential usefulness.Innovator A, who had introduced a new programme to address students’ inadequate entry-levelskills, cited colleagues’ fear of non-specific ‘standards’ as the major impediment. These staff hadfelt it would be too difficult to fit the innovation into the existing modular structure, and theywere concerned it would generate more work. They also objected that ‘students won’t like it’ forthe same reasons.
In having to make choices about adapting their work to the demands of the system, the staffI spoke to were confronting deeper questions about where they positioned themselves and theirwork in relation to their institution. The new-managerial model, of institutions and personnel assystems to be managed, vies with the more traditional ‘invisible college’ (Crane, 1972) or ‘scien-tific hierarchy’ (Bourdieu 1988, cited in Delanty 2001), in which academic freedom is para-mount as the primary framework for validating academic knowledge and conferring prestige andidentity. In this institution, I found academic informal networks of power and collaboration oper-ating some of the time as if the managerial superstructure did not exist. ‘Need to prioritiseresearch careers’ was one emailed articulation of constraint, representing the dominant view thatprestige lay outside the walls of this institution. ‘Scientific’ or academic prestige was seen byrespondents as incompatible with ‘innovation’ as they understood it in institutional and/orteaching-specific terms. Each of the funded innovators I interviewed presented their work andcareer in institutional terms. Some gave a reluctance to buy into the institution as their reason fornot applying for follow-on funding; they preferred to keep their careers open to validation innational or international terms.
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Mutual mistrust was implicated in decisions both to enter and not to enter the scheme. Twoviews of constraint were:
In addition to this new system of champions within the senior management seems to me another wayin which good ideas will be taken off those people who had them and then taken on by the seniormanagement who will get all the credit.
Organisational structures; possessiveness about expertise/not wanting to have one’s thunder stolen.
The latter picture was also cited by some first-round interviewees as the reason for entering thescheme, to protect one’s own work. Yet institutional ownership of innovation was advantageoustoo. Two of the three follow-up interviewees said they would not have embarked upon theirprojects without the money from the scheme, which was used for buy-out time, technical supportand salaries for contract staff. Most importantly, they said, the scheme also provided institutionalrecognition for the innovative activity, without which they felt it would have been harder (in onecase, impossible) to justify their projects. The discord between perceptions of benefit andconstraint was beginning to appear profound.
Decisions about positioning, personal security and perceptions of risk are certainly impli-cated in the above examples. Two of the follow-up interviewees attributed their receipt of centralgovernment funding to the fact that they had already gained internal institutional recognition viafunding from the scheme. They suspected, in turn, that their follow-on institutional funding hadbeen more easily obtained as a result of the central government recognition and funding. Thereappeared to be a strategic game of currency exchange where the attribution of value was somedegrees removed from actual learning or knowledge, and in which self-protection was para-mount. Without the validation of financial support, said one, ‘there was no way we could havejustified it to the HoD [Head of Department]’. The critical role of active senior departmentalsupport and prevalence of implicit mistrust across responses shored up this impression – that thescheme was primarily enabling through its validating effect, which served to provide immediatecareer security.
Quality and its evaluation
The evasive but pervasive presence of ‘standards’ sits at the core of these risk calculations. Inthe cases cited, it was less the standards themselves that were inhibiting than an underlyinginsecurity about these standards, and about the amount of extra work it would take to make anychanges conform. The problem arises from unresolved and conflicting ideas about quality, andwho in any given case is its arbiter. Managerial-audit approaches to quality – valuing saleabil-ity, strategy, demonstrable usefulness of outcome (Cowen 1996) and conformity to pre-set,transferable standards – have been condemned by academics as a piecemeal ‘paint[ing] bynumbers’ (Carroll 2003), flying in the face of what might be called ‘traditional academic’perceptions of quality in terms of truth, engagement, accuracy and depth in relation to diversecontexts.
There are well-rehearsed reservations about such culture clashes, about the importance ofcontext in assigning value, and about the slippery nature of the kind of ‘evidence’ that underpinsmanagerial approaches to quality (Clegg 2005). Yet audit’s inroads into higher education, andthe accompanying ‘relentless pursuit of evidence of professional competence’ (Morley 2003,69), proceeds apace. And it is explained, fundamentally, by shifting ideas about governance.That is, even in this formerly exempt sector, there is increasing ‘concern with the developmentof public and explicit definitions of quality’ (Furlong 2004, 29). But being thus accountable to apriori standards, especially ones in which saleability is paramount, carries particular difficulty
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for academic innovation. Often subjective and cerebral, its value can take time to establish.Measuring against such standards can constrain recognition of ‘emergent forms of creativity andaccountability’ (Giri 2000, 174) and discourage ‘hidden niches for the unexpected maverick orgenius’ (Strathern 1997, 313).
This institutional study found conflicting umbrella notions of quality, and evidence that theirnon-resolution was an impediment to successful innovation. The obfuscation that underminedInnovation C was produced by supposedly irreconcilable ideas about quality, with ‘the commit-tee’ (mostly academic-related personnel, with an eye on the smooth running of the system) onone side, and the individual lecturer (with their eye on their students and discipline) on the other.Out of the nine academics who emailed me definitions of ‘quality in higher education’, twooffered variations on the theme of ‘ideas and inspirational dialogue’; three offered a holisticpicture of integrity and conscientiousness in teaching; three saw it as adequate (career) prepara-tion of students. Only one (a lecturer in health sciences) saw quality as defined in any significantmeasure by aspects of management. The still evidently pervasive view of academic qualityappeared discordant with those that inform policy decisions such as the funding of innovation.Rhetoric extolling the virtue of thinking outside the box is undermined by quality evaluationcriteria that evoke structural conformity or government agendas. The inclusion in the 2001–02call of words like ‘participative’, ‘independent’ and ‘enriching’ within a more persuasive rheto-ric of structure, institutional oversight and technology appears gratuitous. Of the four sections onthe application form, only one asked for the purpose and rationale of proposed projects. Theother three asked for costings, evaluation methods, and ‘A section saying how your projectaddresses key areas of the Learning and Teaching Strategy’.
In judging the innovations themselves ‘successful’ and thus worthy of extended funding,three further conditions seemed to apply. At the Innovation Projects Day presentationsappeared, on the basis of the verbal feedback given, to be judged according to: their technicalsophistication and conceptual simplicity, their efficiency in terms of time, and ‘appropriate’evidence of positive student evaluation. The following randomly selected fraction of oneproject’s evaluative section typifies the kind of presentation that received the most positivecommittee response:
Correlations between summative scores and hours spent studying were weak or non-existent forweeks 3 and 4, though in weeks 4 and 5 correlations of 0.58 and 0.49 respectively were shownbetween test scores and study hours.
Guidance for follow-on funding also stressed the importance of positive student evaluation, theimplication of this day’s experience being that the more numbers the better. These criteria, bothexplicit and implicit, appeared unconcerned with the nature of academic innovation. The stresson evaluation, for example, flew in the face of practitioners’ implicit knowledge that good learn-ing does not necessarily equate with ‘positive student evaluations’, and that there are more mean-ingful ways of evaluating pedagogic effectiveness. Through successive presentations,authentically articulated rationales demanding too much thought beyond the pre-determinedcriteria struggled for approval. The critically oriented projects that were praised had respondedto this implicit message by transforming ideas and categories into series of numerical lists.Numerical and technology-enabled tools also received the most vocal commendation forconvincing evaluation procedures.
Time, a key unit of audit-oriented evaluation, was a major theme in this tension. Time wasproblematic in so far as funded innovations were required to spend the money and report withinone academic year. Convincing results within this time frame were essential to secure follow-onfunding, even though this might be discordant with a project’s natural time frame. The difficulty
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I experienced conveying the value of my own innovation, for instance, arose from both this clashand the third timescale factor – the student academic year. In the reporting year, the only thingthe money had been used for was to develop an appropriate rationale for application. Thecurriculum as well as course approval procedures prevented us piloting the innovation until thefollowing year. This was after the cut-off for spending and reporting, and so we were unable topresent anything that passed as complete.
As well as increasing the likelihood that projects will simply run out of time, theseantithetical criteria can also be counter-productive in broader qualitative terms. Over half of allrespondents gave accounts of strict time limits undermining the chances of innovations beddingdown, both to establish compatibility within existing structures and ideologies and to feed intoemerging strands of research – the measures of quality that have meaning for academics andknowledge production. Even to one academic who, non-typically, saw their job in businessterms, time constraints were felt as the most disabling of all:
In my experience, official procedures, approval by boards, ratification etc., etc. work againstinnovation as things cannot get the approval that is needed within the external deadlines imposed.We need a way to shortcut all the red tape if we are going to be competitive as a business.
Lack of time was seen as a major reason for grudging acquiescence to the deployment ofnumbers and technology as accessible ways to be seen to be doing something:
[The main constraint is] resources. In particular, sufficient time to determine whether the innovationwas genuinely useful from a variety of perspectives rather than reflecting a narrow view of innova-tion, which might be summarised as IT driven, financially rather than necessarily educationally costeffective.
In the same way that Innovator C found their ability to practise authentically constrained byformal compromise, other innovators I interviewed described how they understood this implicitcurrency exchange and were able to produce what was desired, but at the expense of performingat their best. The scepticism of the new teachers, too, was characterised by a sense that the hiddenagenda was to provide good statistics. One of these teachers said that a particular criticallyoriented module they had developed had been discontinued at least in part due to the difficultiesencountered in devising a means to evaluate it both quantitatively within the given time frame,and validly – when its rationale allowed that its value might not be seen for some time.
At the Innovation Projects Day, those projects that had secured secondary external fundingwere received with greater expressions of approval. The increased approval was applied to allaspects of these projects, but was clearly activated by the evidence of external recognition. Thereceipt of external support as an implicit fourth criterion to judging quality emphasises the self-referential nature of the exercise, evoking performativity critiques of current higher educationpolicy. Power (1994, 1997) observes that a corollary of removing the business of defining andevaluating quality from the remit of knowledge producers is that the actual focus of evaluationitself shifts away from the original object (knowledge generation-transmission) towards themaintenance of the checking system itself. It is against this shift, from ‘academic definitions’ ofquality to ‘operational’ ones (Lynch 2006), that it is most persuasively argued academics shoulddefend their freedom to decide what to produce and how to evaluate it (Bourdieu 1998, 344).
Gradually, during the course of my formal policy analysis commission, it emerged that thisrole was itself part of such a performative project. The identified need for a policy analyst wasless about bringing real transparency than it was about being seen to have a policy analyst. Myinitial brief, ambiguous in terms of what I was to analyse and the conceptual or policy frameworkfor this analysis, was fourfold. On paper, I was to:
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(1) Connect national and institutional policy to the everyday practices of academics teachingat [this institute].
(2) Gain insights about the teaching culture at [this institute] and how to change it.(3) Generate discussion within and across departments about learning and teaching; and(4) Contribute to the development of the next … University Learning and Teaching Strategy.
No problem was identified; no proposition or hypothesis was to be tested. Through consultation,I developed a working interpretation that was: to find out what worked, and what constraintsthere were on effective innovation. This still fell short of defining a context: what works … inrelation to what? It is convincingly noted, after all, that effectiveness research that takes noaccount of context is unlikely to be illuminating (Clegg 2005, 418). Furthermore, as the commis-sion was to last just a term, the possibility of the kind of medium-term to long-term approachnecessary to uncover any real evidence of what worked or not was ruled out; though clues wereaplenty – for instance, in that HEFCE funds for the commission were linked to the UniversityLearning and Teaching Strategy. And the acceptability of a genuinely critical perspective wasruled out in the way that my instructions to analyse constraints included implicit affirmation ofthe ‘rightness’ of the management agenda. But what, for me, crystallised the underlyingperformative priorities was the evident non-interest in the report I did produce. It did not reallyendorse what were emerging implicitly as institutional conceptions of quality or value asinformed by management rather than academic considerations, and nobody seemed to knowwhat to do with it.
Language, transparency, power and subversion
So academic work is undermined when discordant conceptions of quality are conflated. But sotoo is policy effectiveness. A largely non-productive linguistic game is played, wherebydocuments are written on the pretence, or assumption, that different shareholders are using thesame language to reflect common understandings. Repeated collocations of terms such as ‘themaintenance of standards and quality’ (Quality Assurance Agency 2003), for instance, arepersuasive in their repetition. Institutional policy statements present supposedly collectivelyendorsed strategic objectives, their presentation in print actually highlighting the gap betweenthe implied claim and a reality that is full of dissent.
It became clear to me that language was fairly central to the hegemonic tension betweenthese cultures – in the framing, interpreting and, crucially, misinterpreting of messages andideas. This analysis regards academic and management codes as languages, in so far as theyincorporate distinct forms as well as divergent understandings of the same forms, reflectingand promoting different perceptions of reality and value (Whorf 1956). The point ofacademic language is contextual precision; it has been noted that even general academiclanguage (‘culture, discipline, scholarship’) evokes values quite distinct from those evokedby management-audit-accountability language (‘benchmarks’, ‘criteria’, ‘strategy’) (McLeanand Blackwell 1997). This dual linguistic framework can be seen as central in two ways:either increasing tension via misunderstanding, or as the vehicle for a duplicitous strategicgame on both sides. In either case, the negotiation of the interface seems to involve an extralevel of work. For academic innovation in particular, a form of knowledge as described herecharacterised by organic integrity, the availability of diverse, authentic and nuancedlinguistic codes would seem essential to the requisite flexibility of thought. In a contextwhere value is emergent and necessarily subjective, the overlaying of spuriously objectivelanguage seemed likely to impede innovators’ ability to express that value in the terms theyhave identified.
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So what did I find? There were aspects of this scheme that suggested the imposition oflinguistic conformity to the detriment of quality. The presentations commended most highly atthe Innovation Projects Day were ones that accurately mirrored managerial language. As well asnumbers, terms such as ‘efficiency’ and ‘support’ were used as currency in rapid exchanges ofpoint-scoring capital, with little evident consideration given to their epistemological or peda-gogic meanings. The result was a sense of major discrepancy between real and published ration-ales. One innovator had explained to me in the first-round interviews the rationale for theirproject in terms of theories about learning, self-direction and the function of lectures. Theywanted to promote ‘active engagement’ with knowledge among students. Yet the applicationsubmitted to the committee was entirely efficiency and system-oriented, with no reference toknowledge or learning. Key content words extracted from every second, third and fourth line ofthe first (rationale) section of the application were as follows: ‘programmed learning’,‘programme of study’, ‘published module’, ‘immediate’, ‘structured testing’, ‘objective’,‘savings of teaching time’. The learning rationale may indeed have been genuine, but thedecision to fund the project was evidently not based on this rationale.
The perception, that there was an implicit requirement to communicate in management-approved code, was replicated in the discussion group accounts of constraint. These new teach-ers complained that the choices available to them in dealing with the extra burden of an imposeddiscourse were all unsatisfactory. For recipients of innovation funding, the choice emerges aseither: work on two levels with dual paper trails, submitting a vacuous report while continuingwith the real work separately and thereby duplicating work; or abandon meaningful explanatorydocumentation in favour of the form required for audit. Either way, the real academic work goesunderground and its governance becomes non-transparent.
Strathern has argued that what we know about symbolic exchanges, power, concealment andsimple subjectivity makes the fundamental falseness of transparency self-evident (Strathern2000a, b). It might be worth pointing out to higher education policy agencies that this under-standing was considered managerially relevant public knowledge half a century ago (Dalton1959; Gouldner 1954; Jacobs 1969). On a mundane level, persisting with this falsehood can beseen as inefficient; on a deeper level the idea of expert knowledge is further devalued. Thedemand for rhetorical conformity in the service of making academic work transparent mightbe seen as an understandable response to competition – communicating the value of innovativework to outsiders as simply part of the raft of ways in which we have to be accountable for theresources we use. However, an alternative interpretation draws on the emerging critique of theway higher education audit eats away, intentionally, at academic autonomy, with the deploymentof approved rhetoric signalling conformity and uncritical support of the institution.
Morley (2003, 73) has suggested that audit’s use of apparently innocuous yet powerfullyconstraining language both promotes and masks unpalatable political agendas, such as the trans-formation of academics into hegemonic tools rather than counter-hegemonic agents. The impo-sition of any monolingualism, as linguistic anthropologists have long known, is tyrannical,forcing those with less cultural capital to enter a dominant discourse. And, in the field ofmanagement, the ideational use of symbols has long been established as a legitimate tool ofcontrol (Trowler 1998,142, citing Alvesson 1990). It is a vision that evokes influential descrip-tions of the ‘de-skilling’ (Apple 2004) or ‘responsibilisation’ (Rose 1996) of professionals keptbusy jumping through artificial hoops, with little time left to ask awkward questions about policyand values. This counter-hegemonic reading sees the false call to transparency as a mechanismof tyrannical control (Strathern 2000b) and an effort to marginalise elite discourses. In this light,‘real’ innovation is potentially disturbing; thus the evident inadequacy of the system in facilitat-ing such innovation is intentional, the consequent inevitability of failure showing that the onlyprofitable option is to conform. It is a reading that is only meaningful against a view of higher
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education as a site of struggle between fields of power such as those proposed by Bourdieu –academic (institutional), intellectual (public influence), scientific (discipline research) (Bourdieu1988; Delanty 2001) – in which audit has contributed to restructuring the relations between thesethree fields, reducing the role of the knowledge producers in defining public knowledge. Yet theextent to which it forms an undercurrent in the accounts of most of my respondents shows it tobe a persuasive one.
On a more instrumental level, it is also argued that forcing the appearance of transparency inacademia impedes high-quality work by ensuring that problems cannot be dealt with efficiently(Strathern 2000b). The performative essence of the procedure is seen as an impediment to realtransparency by:
convinc[ing the public] that something is or will be done by someone and can ultimately deterinquiry rather than encourage it ... In other words trust in the fact that an audit is done displacespublic preoccupations with what is done and what is discovered. (Power 1994, 25–26)
It is argued that such self-referential systems also promote paralysis through sheer overload: ‘theweight of their information demands, the senseless allocation of scarce resources to surveillanceactivities – the sheer human exhaustion of existing under such conditions’ (Power 1997, 2).Logic suggests an impact on innovative capacity through the generation of counter-productivelevels of stress, which, as we have described, encourages non-risk taking behaviours (Allen2003; McWilliam 2004).
Or does it? It may be worth considering the possibility that academic innovators’ responsivestrategies keep apace, sidestepping and subverting a constraining system, enabling individuals tocontinue to work largely on their own terms. Deconstructionist theories offer insight into thecomplex nature of duplicity at work in this context, in both the call to be accountable and thesubversive nature of responses. On one side, the performative gesture is seen as an imitation ofsomething that is only an ideal, constituted in opposition to what it is not – Lacan’s ‘Other’(Butler 1993). The degree of ambivalence, imitative yet hostile (Lacan 1977), in the intersectionbetween the call and its imitation or performance can be interpreted as exposing the logical andpractical impossibility of responding authentically. In terms of resistance to a call threatening todevalue academic work in academics’ own terms, ‘slippage’ (Derrida 1973) is also seen as anintentional part of a subversive response to that call (Butler 1997).
Applied to the present case, this analysis would see the impossibility of authentic responseas lying at least in part in the dishonesty of omission or ambiguity within the call, within the offi-cial criteria. This concealment would impede innovators’ ability to adequately address criteriawere it not for the fact that, as I found here, there was little actual desire to address those criteria.The challenge was, after all, ‘to be effective … despite the system not because of it’. There wasan undercurrent of awareness of multiple meanings, of staff using ambiguity in cynical acknowl-edgement of the power games at play. Thus, the ways in which academic innovators were ableto exploit the spaces to deviate from merely implied ideals were ‘enabling’ in so far as theypermitted academics to carry on doing what they really wanted to do irrespective of the system.
Conclusions
This article showcases an innovation scheme with a pervasive undercurrent of scepticism. WhatI hope the discussion has done is demonstrate how academic innovation can be undermined bythe same things that undermine general professional satisfaction in higher education. That is,mixed messages about transparency, ideological uncertainty and complex attitudes to riskproduce stress, a perception of non-productive overwork and a lack of trust. In this small-scale
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study, perceptions of such impediment were felt most acutely (or, at least, recounted most explic-itly – in the discussion groups) by the newest staff. The more experienced staff who had takenpart in the innovation scheme were aware of constraint in these same terms, but the constraintswere accepted as given; effort went into negotiating, not protesting about them. Nonetheless,their accounts described how meaningful interaction with the ‘schematic’ aspect of the schemeseemed limited to finding the money useful, and to getting credit for being seen to be doingsomething that attracted money and was recognised by the university. That is, it was largely self-referential. The business of knowledge production emerged as a relatively minor preoccupation.The high levels of cynicism I found were discordant with the level of compliance that enablesthis process to continue. As Strathern said: ‘What intrigues me is that here people both deploy,and are sceptical about deploying, visibility as a conduit for knowledge’ (2000b, 310).
Representing experience in a not atypical higher education institution, this study suggeststhat, while such schemes might kick-start innovative work through providing resources andrecognition, they are not arbiters of quality in other than performative terms. Many of theprojects that this scheme enabled to get off the ground emerged, ultimately, to be not self-sustaining. On the other hand, projects that were genuine responses to genuine need, and whichmight have run without the scheme, encountered constraints within it that were either disablingor wasteful. The disarticulation of schematically funded, recognised and managed ‘innovations’from general academic work would appear to decrease the chances of such innovative workproving effective and lasting.
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