Questing Excellence in Academia by Knut H. Sørensen Sharon Traweek

Author:Knut H. Sørensen, Sharon Traweek [Knut H. Sørensen, Sharon Traweek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781000529043
Google: pjdQEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2022-01-30T05:20:44+00:00

Entrepreneurship in Academia

We have argued that UCLA has been more focused on building a corporate university model, while NTNU is more engaged in bureaucratizing, keeping in mind that these projects are not mutually exclusive. We might expect that the ways of becoming the right kind of academic in those two settings might be different, and they are. However, there also are some similarities and there are contradictions within each. How does UCLA make academics fit for a corporate life and yet require entrepreneurship? In fact, management schools have been addressing the paradox of corporate entrepreneurship for 40 years: specifying definitions, typologies, implementations, assessments, refinements, and pedagogies, all while invoking it as a fundamental characteristic of global information-based political economies (Burgelman, 1983; Covin and Miles, 1999; Kuratko and Morris, 2018; Phan et al., 2009; Schendel, 1990; Wolcott and Lippitz, 2007). Universities are far from original in demanding this new kind of worker, nor are academics the only ones to find the persona problematic. Presently, there also is much concern about academic precarity and how this may be addressed (OECD, 2021). In some putative golden age, most of those who embarked on the path to becoming an academic did so. Now there are a series of ‘purgatories’ in which supplicants can petition for advancement at one stage or another ad nauseum, with many failing to succeed. The survivors can feel simultaneously relieved, unworthy, and entitled. We consider academics’ need to cope with precarity as an additional effect of entrepreneurial universities and an issue of academic subject formation, to which we return at the end of the chapter.

The old ideal of having a ‘calling’ to practice a profession, in this case knowledge making, has been supplanted during the last 50 years by a demand for metric productivity, which we discussed in Chapter 2. This is best met by staying strictly within the same topic of inquiry, making a large ‘start-up’ time investment only once, and then using that knowledge to generate as many small contributions as rapidly and as long as possible. Within this frame of thinking, teaching should be done transactionally, specifying as much as possible in an easily reproduced syllabus, read by students as a contract. We can all become entrepreneurial in the sense of ‘gaming the system’ to generate the best metrics. All works smoothly, as long as we want to do as we should, formed as appropriate academic subjects. How is this achieved, and at what costs and benefits to whom and what? There is another definition of entrepreneurialism: the demand for innovation, originality and transdisciplinary work, which become far more elusive in the context of maximizing productivity metrics (Felt et al., 2013). Being that kind of entrepreneurial academic might be incompatible with the others while still in limited demand within some kinds of universities.

When we discuss the becoming of an academic framed through the mixed metaphor of entrepreneurship this is not just to reflect on some consequences of universities becoming entrepreneurial in the sense of broadening their sources of income (Clark, 2004).

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