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Behind the digital curtain: a study of academic
identities, liminalities and labour market adaptations
for the ‘Uber-isation’ of HE
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How to cite:
Collins, Hilary; Glover, Hayley and Myers, Fran (2020). Behind the digital curtain: a study of academic identities,
liminalities and labour market adaptations for the ‘Uber-isation’ of HE. Teaching in Higher Education (Early Access).
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2020 Informa UK
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Version: Accepted Manuscript
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http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1080/13562517.2019.1706163
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Behind the Digital Curtain: a study of academic identities, liminalities and
labour market adaptations for the “Uber-isation” of HE
This paper explores sensemaking narratives from teaching academics undertaking
identity work in the context of a rapidly expanding digital education sphere. It
considers the implications for emotional labour and status of digitised higher
education teaching academics from the imposition of a rejuvenated New Public
Management. We discuss possible tainting from fractured and short-term
contractual arrangements alongside growth in managerialism, metrics and
accountability.
This study combines photographic ethnography and interviews to gain insight
into uncertainties, anxieties, identity legitimations and participant responses to
imposed changes within digitally evolving workspaces. The paper explores
teaching cultures within two higher education institutions, on different points of a
digital continuum, finding discourses of alienation, liminality and validation.
Resultant ‘sticky’ or resistant behaviours in rapid adaptations to digital teaching
life were heard as we aimed to understand what it means to teach in a digitised,
neoliberal context.
Keywords: academic identity; digital; HE management.
Introduction
Higher Education teaching is fast approaching and may already be at the crossroads of a
profound series of change intersections. Government agencies in many countries have
implemented market logics to the sector with the stated purpose of attaining value for
money. Benefits of tertiary education are increasingly being reframed as a personal
rather than public good, leading to a shift of direct costs to the rising numbers of
students as individuals, (Muller, 2018,74).
In response, universities have now sought to position themselves in competitive
markets, via a variety of selling points including employability, or cost-effective quality
provision. These economic strategies have accompanied seemingly fortuitous recent
expansions in online delivery options facilitated through technological enhancements.
New media platforms and marketized ideas for delivering pedagogy and assessments
have resulted in a proliferation of digital equivalence ‘solutions’ to traditional face-to-
face or blended teaching approaches.
Taking a comparative approach between two HE universities (labelled here as UNI A
and UNI B ) we aim to help understand how these issues impact practices for teaching
staff in different digital contexts. Different marketplaces have resulted in different
digital strategies. In university A, digital options for HE studies are increasing within a
competitive, mass-market, neoliberalised environment. They are leveraging
technological innovations hard to maximise student numbers and promote competitive
fee structures.
In university B, the teaching context, offers digitisation as an innovative
complement to traditional campus interactions. For UNI B, the digital remit is
principally to keep congruence with market trends as a now-expected component of
excellence in provision.
In both institutions, digitised teaching is a stated part of holistic ‘student
experience’ strategy, which aims to ensure currency, increase student numbers and
facilitate retention. These moves to digitisation have been described as impacting who
would learn, how and what (Zuboff, 2015:77), as competitive sector providers
undertake mimetic behaviour. The study therefore focusses on digital teaching in these
two institutions: a university leading with face-to-face teaching, supported by integrated
digital facilities and a distance learning provider offering blended approaches.
However, management motivations behind digitisation vary between
institutions. Normative technological solutions present as model enhancements, which
can help to widen participation and increase availability of teaching materials and
student support. Implementation has moved rapidly over twenty years from individual
academic interest to optimised applications that maximise benefits available. Stated
rationalities in maximising student numbers and resources, as well as models for
managing staff in economic ways, have become a feature of technological enhancement
and digital equivalence in teaching. The digital teaching sphere has created its own
logics and value system, recalling Weber’s perspectives on task specialisation and
regulatory bureaucracy (see e.g. Weber, 2009 [1946]:216). Turner (2009 xxx) considers
that Weber’s rational capital approach has evolved into our “network society”, which
provides useful insight. A digital life offers both predictability that might enhance social
freedom, but also embodies elements of Parson’s iconic translation of Weber’s “iron
cage” (Gehäuse) as a future of “mechanised petrification” (Weber, 2001 [1930] :124)
In the UK, teaching strategies explicitly accompany a secondary purpose via
neoliberalised governmental frameworks which assess the value and purpose of
universities as social institutions. These drives to metricisation have been analysed as a
form of centralised control (Muller, 2018:71-4), and in order to achieve “value”
governments institute metrics. In his book, Muller posits that HEIs are, “evaluated
largely on the extent to which various procedures are followed…”, with the twofold
result that teaching staff are forced to devote more time to paperwork, and numbers of
administrators have “mushroomed”. The enactment of these policies intersecting with
adaptations to digital workspaces and labour transformations, continually shape
academics’ bond with their University in material, economic and political ways. In the
UK, US and Australia histories of tenure are being unwound resulting in a proliferation
of fixed-term or hourly-paid contracts. Narratives of a multi-tiered academic
‘marketplace’ are sprouting, alongside untenable workloads and a higher education gig
economy, the suggested uber-isation of HE.
However, the amplification of material aspects of precarity obscures questions about the
accompanying, immaterial considerations of digital teaching evolution. The seeming
inevitability of digital equivalence as part of teaching in knowledge economies sidesteps
contestations of whether patterns of digital labour and the construction of such roles are
appropriate. There may be a variety of practical and emotional implications for this sort
of role. These include positive frames such as international reach, and spatial and
temporal flexibility, which are often normatively promoted by universities. More
contestable implications could be loneliness, (Grant et al, 2013) self (or externally
imposed) ever-presence online, and loss of institutional-belonging acts such as via
water-cooler conversations. Negative associations include loss of communities of
practice and personal development opportunities.
The rapid growth of digital labour, and its implications for normative models of
work (see Huws, Spencer and Syrdal, 2018:114) mean that possible impacts on
individuals are only recently being studied. Developments to the neoliberalised
academy have substantially changed power structures, leaving many precariously
employed lecturers facing insecurities and disengagement from their university work