‘WELCOME TO THE MACHINE!’ RESISTING ISOMORPHIC, MASCULINISED CORPORATISATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION THROUGH FEMINIST SCHOLARSHIP

Abstract

This paper discusses the synthesised findings from two interdisciplinary, feminist studies conducted under the auspices of the non-corporate nexus, the Women’s Academic Network at Bournemouth University, UK, of which the main author is a co-convenor and co-founder. These qualitative studies focus on academic women’s experiences of managing careers in the work culture of corporate Institutions of Higher Education HE in a modern UK university. The background to this work draws from a body of international research into the slower career progression rates of women academics in comparison to male counterparts and the gendered barriers the former encounter. While there has been encouragement within Higher Education bodies across the EU to balance out the current gendered inequities within academia, our findings indicate that these are woven into the institutional fabric of enacted daily academic practices serving to disadvantage women scholars. Furthermore, although located at different starting and end positions on the career track, women academics, like male colleagues, are equally subject to the increasing expectations of the corporate HEI towards production line academic work which serves to decentralise and degrade the critical intellectualism and worth of academia in an attempt to reframe it as a masculinised, quantifiably driven, quasi-business exercise in knowledge ‘output’ and production-line teaching in the context of mass education. This isomorphic global trend is analysed in an illuminating book The Slow Professor by Berg and Seeber 2016 . ‘Slow’ taken in the sense that Berg and Seeber 2016 intend is a term has been inspired by other ‘slow’ movements for example ‘slow food’ versus ‘fast food’ . In this usage it means ‘deliberate’ or ‘conscious’ as well as ‘in-depth’. This is posed as a challenge to corporatisation and the demands of an ever-increasing tempo in HE.In our paper, in line with feminist research methodologies, we take our inspiration from Berg and Seeber’s analysis to further explore how women academics are situated and ‘managed’ in the gendered commodification of Higher Education in the UK, with clear applications to a wider international community of women scholars working in entrenched patriarchal HEI

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