Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Springer 2005
Introduction
Towards the end of the 20th century the concept of identity came under
intense scrutiny by social theorists. The character of change in late
modernity was seen as generating degrees of fragmentation and dislocation in social institutions and patterns of life that challenged existing
basic assumptions about the nature of identity (Giddens 1991; Hall
1992; Harvey 1989).
The article explores the implications of policy change in the UK in
the late 20th century for academic identities, focusing on biological
scientists and science policies. It starts from the perception that for most
of the 20th century it was plausible to think of academics as members of
interconnected communities, notably disciplines and higher education
institutions, which aorded them stable and legitimising identities
(Castells 1997). It goes on to consider whether such assumptions retain
their plausibility in the new policy environment or whether they need
fundamental revision.
In order to achieve these aims, it analyses changes in terms of their
impacts upon the dynamic between individuals, disciplines and
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Theories of identity
Before addressing our main agenda, we will set the theoretical
framework within which it is located by briey reviewing communitarian and some related theories of identity, setting alongside them
alternative perspectives that claim to reect contemporary social
developments.
Essentialist and liberal individualist theories of identity have long
largely given way to theories centred on the idea that identity is constructed within the context of social institutions and relationships.
The social theories of identity by which this article has been most
strongly inuenced are those of communitarian moral philosophy and
symbolic interactionism. In such theories, individuals are both distinctive and socially embedded. However, identities are, rst and foremost,
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shaped and reinforced in and by strong and stable communities and the
social processes generated within them.
There are dierences of emphasis. MacIntyre (1981) underlines the
idea of the individual as bearer of community tradition. What I am is in
key part what I inherit. . . I nd myself part of a history and . . . whether
I like it or not, . . . one of the bearers of a tradition. (206) A living
tradition is an historically extended, socially embodied argument . . . in
part about the goods which constitute that tradition.
Taylor (1989), while seeming to give more emphasis to individual
choice in the construction of identity, also speaks of the importance of
a dening community for the process. One function of such a community is that it provides the language in which individuals understand
themselves and interpret their world. Being initiated into a language
entails entering into ongoing conversations between . . . people with a
particular role or status in the web of relationships that make up [the]
community (Mulhall and Swift 1992: 111; Taylor 1989). Through such
conversations individuals learn not only a language but a way of
understanding the world, through the ideas, cognitive structures and
experience expressed in that language. They are also introduced to the
myths through which deeply held values and beliefs of the community
are expressed (Bailey 1977; Vab 2002).
Values are central to identity within this perspective. To know who
you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise
about what is good or bad . . . what has meaning and importance to you
and what is trivial and secondary. (Taylor 1989: 28). For Taylor the
moral framework within which these questions are addressed has three
dimensions: obligation to others, fullment or meaningfulness and a
range of notions concerned with dignity, respect and self-esteem.
Mead (1934) argues that the self is developed most fully when the
individual integrates community attitudes and values. But his most
important theoretical contribution lies in the symbolic interactionist
framework in which he formulated the process of identity formation
and maintenance. Jenkins (1996) builds on this to dene the construction of identity (individual and collective) as a continuous and reexive
process, a synthesis of (internal) self denition and the (external) denitions of oneself oered by others or an internalexternal dialectic of
identication (20).
He and others (e.g., Barth 1969; Bernstein 1996) focus on the
importance of the boundary between the internal and the external and
the negotiations and transactions that take place across that boundary.
Bernstein argues that identities are strongest and most stable within the
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A changing environment
On the face of it, political, economic and demographic changes that
accelerated during the last quarter of the 20th century constituted a
major threat to academic identity understood in these terms. As higher
education and science became increasingly important instruments of
national economic policy, it was more dicult to conceive of academics
sustaining bounded spaces of action (Bauer et al. 1999) or self-regulating communities. The relations between higher education and the
state were redened. Higher education institutions and their members
were subject to unprecedented government steerage and scrutiny but
also had to locate themselves and compete in various forms of market.
The growth in the scale of their activities and the stringent limits placed
by the state on public funding meant that income generation was an
increasingly powerful imperative. There were strong pressures on academic communities and institutions not only to change their cultures
and structures to enable them to manage the new policy environment
but also to review their assumptions about roles, relationships and
boundaries in that environment.
Holders of academic power, whether the co-opted elites (Kogan and
Hanney 2000) of the research councils and funding councils or university vice chancellors, had increasingly to adopt managerial structures,
mechanisms and values. Rationalisation and indirect steerage of research agendas through framing, priority setting and initiatives are now
well embedded in research councils. By the end of the 1970s, resource
constraints, combined with the growth of science, had led co-opted
scientic elites to conclude that explicit strategic planning and selectivity
policies were essential to preserve the status of British science (see
Edgerton and Hughes 1989; Kogan and Hanney 2000). Concepts of
critical mass, track record and strong infrastructure became conspicuous in research council award strategies, particularly in the Medical Research Council (MRC).
The control of the scientists had been challenged and the disciplinary
culture was now informed by a managerial culture, and, increasingly, an
industrial presence in the research councils.
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can you ask some hard questions and do you have a decent hypothesis
that you can test?, (idem).
There has been strong reliance on re-orienting existing discipline
based research, some of it in sciences, that still constitute what van den
Daele et al. (1977) call theoretical frontiers of research programmes.
However, it can be argued that the research councils have not simply
found a way to accommodate social problems in their own primary
agendas. They have embraced them at a point where they can inuence
signicantly how pre-paradigmatic (Van den Daele et al. 1997) research
programmes are categorised and structured. (Ageing is located in the
framework of, e.g., cell biology, genetics and neuro-sciences (BBSRC)
and the health of the public has now been redened in the MRC in
terms of the interaction between gene inheritance and environmental
factors). Finally, evaluative criteria for funding applications remain
predominantly those of peer review.
Responses to the UK Foresight policies from scientists at the head of
the research councils were variable. The dierent approaches of key
actors highlight how their present degrees of autonomy are conditional
(Neave 1988) on such things as government appointments, as well as
policy adjustments. However, data from two Chief Executives illustrated the conservation strategies adopted by themselves and other
representatives of the co-opted elites. They included a redenition of
priority setting from imposing immediate shifts of resources to longer
term development of new research areas; a switch of emphasis from
priority setting to networking in interpreting Foresight policies; reasserting the distinction between the responsibility of the Foresight
machinery to promote transdisciplinary approaches to newly dened
elds and the narrower remit of the Research Councils. And they still
tended to dene the latter in terms of basic research.
So, while it might be said that some types of disciplinary elite have
had to open up the disciplines to more explicit external inuence, their
representatives are attempting to translate policies so as to protect
dominant interests and values in their communities (Latour 1987; Vab
2002). They no longer have a space of autonomous action but they are
attempting to maximise their inuence in a pluralist process of policy
making.
Higher education institutions
Most British higher education institutions have been transformed since
the early 1980s. Only a handful of the most prestigious were able to
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and other interest groups for control of matters previously taken for
granted as academic prerogative. Academic work and relationships have
become bureaucratised and visualised (Bleiklie et al. 2000). Their
performance is open to internal administrative as well as academic
scrutiny and security of tenure is performance-dependent for growing
numbers. The institution has more power to aect academic working
lives but it may be a weaker source of identication.
The department is now only one, and not necessarily the most secure
or important, focus of academic activity and identication. Academics
are expected to engage across the boundaries of the institution as much
as within them. The department can by no means be taken for granted
as the unit that melds the disciplines and the enterprise. . . drawing
strength from the combination (Clark 1983: 32). Interaction between
discipline, institution and individual has become far more complex and
the image of the institution as a bounded and protective space of distinctive activity is no longer tenable. While research reputation is the
strongest academic currency in higher education institutions, they expect its strategic potential to be exploited to enhance income and
broader inuence as well as their academic reputation.
We now turn to consider the meaning of the struggles described in
two sets of academic institutions for academic identities in the basic
units.
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immediate research group and the networks they had built up. These
might well include colleagues in chemistry and physics as well as their
own disciplinary area. This may be a function of the variety of connections being made by academics, although the current uidity of the
boundaries within the broad area of biological sciences may also be
inuential.
Nevertheless, making a distinctive, individual contribution in a
specied area of the discipline remained important, and not only among
senior academics. Narrative accounts of careers underlined how the
foundations of current individual agendas were laid down in discipline
based doctoral and post-doctoral studies and often how early specialisation and, thus, epistemic identity were established in that process.
Some aspects of the current policy environment served to lock in that
discipline-based identity. As permanent appointments and research
funding become more competitive, demonstration of track record in a
eld becomes even more salient.
The concept of strategic research, though problematic, does mark an
acceptance by governments and substantial elements of the private
sector that the creation of knowledge at the leading edge of scientic
elds is a priority. So values and conceptions of knowledge that have
been central in academic identity development continue to have public
support, even if their limits have been more tightly dened. Many
academics are embarking upon new roles and relationships within a
relatively stable epistemological and value framework.
Even in elds such as pharmaceuticals, where rms have invested
heavily in their own research, what many industries want from connections with universities is early access to scientic advance. Relationships are developed within an assumption that the academic
research agenda will be sustained and that it will be pursued largely in
the research group in the university. It is built on rigorous training and
specialisation in a discipline or community of inquirers, within which
the focus, theoretical base, methodologies and epistemic criteria have
been developed. The implications are that that kind of continuity and
the foundations on which it is based are always going to be required;
that advances in fundamental understanding will always depend upon
scientists whose careers are characterised by continuity and coherence in
their research agendas. While scientists may change elds during their
careers, the degrees and frequency of change are going to be limited, if
they are to be involved in work at the theoretical frontiers or even the
less demanding tasks of applying established principles to new and more
complex systems or problems.
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relationships. In some cases, primarily instrumental exchange relationships are made with industry to secure the nancial support needed to
sustain the agenda. Other types of exchange might be involved, of access
to samples or market intelligence for access to scientic advance.
Relationships with academic or extra-academic bodies may, as in all
these cases, be centred on an existing well-dened individual or research
group programme. Alternative modes of working may stem from a
belief that research agendas are best constructed or reshaped within
collaborative relationships. These may be either scientic or hybrid, i.e.,
incorporating practitioner or other professional perspectives and/or
those of research users or interest groups.
In none of the relationships outlined above, instrumental exchange,
scientic collaborative or hybrid collaborative, need the agenda be fundamentally altered (cf. in the context of social science, Shove 2000). If it
is, that may be the outcome of free exchange or collaborative endeavour, in which each partner may feel empowered. More likely, the agenda
may be sustained or moved on through a process of negotiation, in
which, nevertheless, the academic may feel s/he has control and the
freedom to withdraw if that seems best. Then the issue is a matter of the
capital s/he brings to the relationship.
It is clear that the degrees of choice and control available to
researchers dier widely, particularly in a stratied university system
like that of Britain. As we have seen, the right to research at all is
conditional upon funding and upon institutional legitimation as an
active researcher. A more internal problem is the density of certain
research elds. Researchers with limited scientic capital may be forced
to move out of highly populated elds. Others, unsuccessful in
obtaining funding from academic sources may have no alternative but
to nd industrial sponsorship. This may mean moving into new aspects
of a subject or switching from problems generated within the discipline
to applying existing knowledge to externally generated problems. Our
studies yielded examples of all these forms of restriction and pressure. In
some cases, individuals responded by making the move; others decided
that they would give up research.
Connections and collaboration may be signs of strength or weakness.
For early career scientists, they can constitute important springboards to
increased autonomy. Continuing connections with and support from
doctoral supervisors are often crucial for successful starts to careers. A
successful mid-career biochemist in the study was still working, ten years
later, on a line of research, which he had inherited from his post-doctoral
laboratory.
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Conclusion
The starting point for this article was that academic identity is a function of community membership and, in the case of academics, interaction between the individual and two key communities, the discipline and
the higher education institution. The dynamics of this interaction have
changed.
Policy impacts are most evident in the role of the higher education
institution. It has been the site of major, albeit ambiguous, changes. The
institution has become a more distinct entity in academia and in the
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polity, a more powerful and more corporate body. At the same time, it
has been an instrument of fragmentation, embracing conicting values
and multiple functions and loosening institutional boundaries. One
consequence has been that the strength of the department and its
function in melding the institution and the discipline in the lives of
academics have been challenged and sometimes diminished.
The dominance of the discipline, too, has come under severe challenge as organising structure for knowledge production and transmission, as guardian of academic culture, and as nurturer of academic
identity. However, it has been strongly defended by elite members and
remains a powerful inuence in reward systems and in the creation and
maintenance of academic agendas. It remains a strong source of academic identity, in terms of what is important and what gives meaning
and self-esteem.
It seems that while epistemic and organisational boundaries in academia have weakened, the strength of disciplinary community membership remains, even if it is less coherently reinforced by universities.
Moreover, major changes in the funding of research and the contexts in
which it is carried out have not created major disturbances in academic
values or academic identities.
At both macro and micro levels the value of academic autonomy
remains strong: perhaps not surprising, in view of its centrality in the
concept of academic identity. However, its meaning is changing. The
right of academics to determine their own agendas now must be set
against competing rights. Academics no longer work in a bounded
space. Rather, academic autonomy has become something that must be
realised by managing multi-modality and multiple relationships in a
context where boundaries have either collapsed or become blurred. This
can be observed in the lives of the co-opted elites in the research
councils, as well as at the level of the individual in the basic unit. It
seems that all scientists must negotiate between social and institutional
pressures and preservation of identity. However, in a stratied higher
education system, the resources and capacity for management and
negotiation are unequally distributed.
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper
from colleagues, particularly Stephen Hanney, Maurice Kogan and
Christine Musselin and from two anonymous referees.
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Notes
1. The study of higher education reforms was carried out by teams from the Universities
of Bergen, Norway, Brunel, England and Goteborg, Sweden. The ndings have been
published in ve books (Bauer et al. 1999; Bleiklie et al. 2000; Henkel 2000; Kogan
and Hanney 2000; Kogan et al. 2000). The science policy study was carried out by a
team from Brunel University. The ndings have been published in a research report
(Henkel et al. 2000). The total number of interviews with biological scientists in the
basic units was 54 from 17 universities. The majority were biochemists.
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