Professional identity and the contemporary university: a culture of control, accountability and virtuality?

In recent years many changes to the funding and management of universities have taken place. In the current climate of academia in Australia professional academics find themselves immersed in the culture of the managed university that uses the rhetoric of commitment to flexible delivery to put in place systems designed to increase accountability, surveillance and control. At the same time some argue that the focus on research, quality teaching and effective pedagogy has lessened. The empirical research base for this paper has enabled me to better understand some of the emerging trends my university. It looks at how changes to the experience of being academic impact on the work of academics as the power relations of the university continuously reposition them, and how academics in turn display resistance technologies. Changes to the technologies of management/administration of the university have resulted in what some academics have described as a loss of valuing of their knowledge and expertise and which may be seen by some as a threat to their opportunities to conduct productive educational inquiry.