Abstract
"What counts in the things said by men is not so much what they may have thought or the extent to which these things represent their thought, as to that which systematizes them from the outset, thus, making them thereafter endlessly accessible to new discourses and open to the task of transforming them?" Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (1973: xxii).Through a close examination of the everyday lived experience of university actors, (executives, managers, administrators, academics, and researchers at CUT), this thesis has explored the impact of neoliberalism on social science research governance and practice at a young Australian University, Community University of Technology (CUT). The study utilised Michel Foucault’s work on neoliberalism and power to better understand the lived experience of CUT actors. The main focus is on the unintended, unanticipated consequences of neoliberalism in the lived experience of university (CUT) actors, as the neoliberalism shapes the way Universities operate and actors behave. The research design applied is a qualitative and non-traditional critical ethnographic study of an institution that unearths and deconstructs neoliberalism. The methods of data collection used were interviews (39); eight focus groups; document review; five photo-elicitations; one miniature case study, and, in order to be sufficiently reflexive, to explore the researcher’s biases and assumptions, a reflective learning journal was used. Two forms of analysis were undertaken and written up in four empirical chapters, beginning with thematic coding, followed by a Genealogy, described as a history of the present and used to analyse and investigate neoliberalism at CUT.
The thesis makes several contributions to the literature by describing the mechanisms that rationalise and enact neoliberal logic. First, the study highlights that neoliberalism at CUT is complex, difficult to see and hard to understand. Second, it demonstrates that neoliberal logic moves from the macro-level, through the meso-level, into the micro-level of lived experience level and that power circulates neoliberal ideas back through all levels of the network. This movement ensures that neoliberal power is embedded in the lived experience of CUT actors’ or subjects’, in a range of materiality, CUT objects, making each actor and object a node in the network of neoliberal power. These concepts of power are discussed in relation to both objects and subjects and are discussed in various chapters. The study’s third contribution is to show that university (CUT) actors are already neoliberal subjects, demonstrating that neoliberal logic has done its job, as it conducts actors to behave in a neoliberal manner. This behaviour includes higher levels of competition, collaboration, coopetition, compliance, and entrepreneurial behaviour, and it assembles actors into a range of neoliberal personas, whilst obscuring the neoliberal movement from the actors themselves. More importantly, university actors are now assembling themselves into neoliberal subjects, resulting in changed ways of knowing and being. An example of this is the change to collegiality, where the greater good for a public institution like CUT, and its purpose as a public university, could be at risk. Finally, the study shows that (CUT) university actors can apply an alternative productive network of power, one of resistance and that challenges neoliberal logic, a possible antidote to the totalising effects of neoliberal logic.
| Date of Award | 2024 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Supervisor | Selen AYIRTMAN ERCAN (Supervisor), David MARSH (Supervisor) & Mick Chisnall (Supervisor) |