Contents of spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/papers/harvie.alienation

ALIENATION, CLASS AND ENCLOSURE IN UK UNIVERSITIES David Harvie February 1997 Thanks to Alfredo Saad-Filho, whose comments have improved the argument and its presentation in this paper. Introduction The working conditions of many academics in UK universities have deteriorated sharply over the past two decades or so, even if =91for many the academic labour process remains in its core activities [of teaching, research, scholarship, counselling and administration] remarkably constant=92 in terms of the type or work (Miller 1991: 111). There have been dramatic and drastic changes in higher education: university budgets, together with funding in general, e.g., student grants, have been cut, student numbers have increased and assessment of both teaching and research has been introduced with a vengence. There is no need to spell out the consequent effect on academic workloads. Academics have been squeezed by pressure from three sources. First, there is an increased number of students: a system designed to impart learning to a small elite, also providing an element of pastoral care, is now struggling to adjust to mass education. Second, related to the burgeoning student population, and despite the employment of dedicated administrators in many departments, is a growing burden of administration. Third, there is research, the focus of this Polemic. My argument in a nutshell is that academic researchers in U.K. universities are in the midst of a revolution, which is somewhat akin to the transition from feudalism to capitalism. If successfully completed, this revolution will have disastrous consequences for the majority of research academics=92 freedom and job security. As part of this revolution we are seeing a number of related processes: the reduction of essentially unmeasureable research use- values to quantifiable =91research value=92; primitive accumulation and enclosure of academic =91commons=92; the emergence of two classes of academic, a research capitalist class and a research proletariat, with the class of research capitalists starting to challenge heads of department (=91lords of the manor=92) in terms of the economic and political power they wield within higher education. Related to these processes are increasing specialisation and division of academic labour. Higher education and capital; universities as intellectual commons The integration of higher education into the capitalist economy has long been recognised by Marxists. Theorists of the =91social factory=92 such as Mario Tronti argued that, far from being in some sense outside of capitalist social relations, schools and universities=92 role as shapers of young workers, as (re)creators of labour-power, made them central to the process of value- and surplus value- creation. There is also a long history of links between business and universities, with an equally long history of people organising struggles against these links and the subsumption of the interests of both university students and staff to those of capital accumulation. An early example of this is the subject of Warwick University Ltd (Thompson 1970); more recent ones, in the Canadian and US contexts, respectively, are discussed in Buckbinder and Newson (1988) and Ovetz (1996). Interesting in this context is the recent explicit recognition by the present government that much education policy, and in particular, government stipulations on curricula in schools and course content in higher and further education, will be guided by the expressed needs of =91business=92. Recently, some so-called =91failing=92 schools in the US and the UK have even been taken over by the corporate sector. [ref. the economist] The past couple of decades have seen closer links between universities and private sector companies as academics have sought money to make up for falling state funding. Slaughter and Leslie define =91institutional and professorial market or market-like efforts to secure external moneys=92 as =91academic capitalism=92, in their book of the same title (1997: 8). In this Polemic, however, this term conveys a different meaning. A number of other changes and trends have been identified and theorised. Several authors, for example, have examined the rise of managerialism in higher education (refs) and the proletarianisation of academics (refs). Wilmott (1995) argues that there have been major developments in the past 10 or so years which have =91significantly eroded the protection from pressures to render [academics=92] work more commensurable with the commodity form of value=92 (p. 995) Miller (1995) discusses in detail the changes in universities in terms of a number of agencies and relationships. These include =91the state and universities=92 and =91the economy and universities=92 and =91university management and academics=92. At each =91level=92 there are forces acting to pressurise academics. I have no argument with Miller=92s account of these shifts and forces; however, they tell only part of the story. The dynamic forces described by Miller are all external to academics: in addition, there are forces which are internal to the body of academics. Within universities themselves =91management=92 (or =91the university=92) is counterposed to =91academics=92. =91Managment=92 may well include many (mostly senior) academics: these individuals gain management status through appointment or election to a governing body (e.g., senate or council) or position (e.g., head of department). Academics, as academics, though Miller is well aware that different individuals and groups are being affected in different ways by current changes, are seen as a universal body. However, despite this integration of education institutions within the capitalist economy, the relationship until recently has largely been external. By this I mean simply that the internal organisation of universities, and other research institutions, has not been capitalistic. By and large, they have not been realms within which anything like the law of value has operated. Despite its =91ivory tower=92 moniker, H.E. has not been any bastion of =91liberty, equality and solidarity=92, though many academics have enjoyed far better conditions than many other workers. Rather, universities have historically been organised along lines which in some ways have been far more akin to feudalism and/or an artisan-centred economy. Consider the position of the British university academic two decades ago, say. This person employed as a Lecturer or Senior Lecturer enjoyed almost complete job security. In return, this academic was required to devote a fairly smallish proportion of their time to teaching and administrative duties. A level of research activity was also expected, depending upon the particular institution, but monitoring of this was minimal: the contracted obligation was to engage in reasearch or other =91scholarly activity=92, rather than to produce a research output. Although research output of high quantity and quality would almost certainly be rewarded financially through promotion, to a Readership or Chair, say, and in terms of academic prestige, even a university lecturer who published nothing could expect to enjoy a high and, for the most part, rising income, which placed them amongst Britain=92s highest earners, on a par with senior civil servants and top police officers. This situation of material security allowed research activity to be organised in a particular way. In some respects academics were akin to artisans, in others perhaps to serfs. Most worked alone and the products of their labour =97 research =97 formed a collection of use- values.1 Academics did research because they wanted to and, with few external pressures, published only if they thought they had some ideas or results worth publishing. Within this system, the requirements for researh =97 library facilities, an office, an intellectually stimulating environment and, probably most importantly, time =97 were available to all academics who wished to make use of them: for employed academics these resources were intellectual commons; the =91tithe=92 that they paid was the set proportion of their time which they had to devote to teaching and administrative duties.2 For students, though not the focus of this Polemic, the combination of less pressured academics, well-stocked libraries, the grant system and few graduation employment worries meant that for them too, universities were intellectual commons. Within this system, academics were usually answerable to their heads of department. With nearly all academics enjoying tenure, the departmental head=92s position was more akin to that of the feudal lord: s/he could try and discipline the =91lazy=92 lecturer, using moral pressure or a few extra administrative or teaching duties, but sacking them was usually not an option. Nevertheless, a common opinion is that heads of department were much more powerful, and less accountable, in the past, and in some cases had the power to destroy someone=92s career. From the lecturer=92s perspective, they were of course, unlike the feudal serf, free to move if they chose. But, with fewer pressures to constantly improve research performance, and seek promotion, there was simply less reason to do so. At a mostly subjective level =91good=92 research was distinguished from =91bad=92; there were generally-accepted notions of =91good=92 journals, departments and individuals, etc., but these things were not quantified, nor as mentioned above was there a close correlation between research quantity and =91quality=92 and material reward. Moreover, academics passed through a period of apprenticeship, completing a Ph.D. or some other research project, under the guidance of an established academic, the =91Master=92, a point made in passing by Marglin (1974). An important characteristic of this apprentice system was that the project was the student=92s own =97 a prospective D.Phil. candidate would usually write their own proposal, obtain their own funding from an H.E. institution or funding body, and choose (or negotiate) their own supervisor(s). Once the apprenticeship was satisfactorily completed, young academics could fairly easily move into a lecturing position, gaining control of sufficient resources-the researcher=92s =91commons=92: sufficient free time, money, use of a library and possibly a computer-to continue their own research. Thus the apprentice became journeyman. Neoliberalism and the imposition of the law of value in H.E. The attempt to impose the law of value in academia can be seen as being part of the economy-wide and global project of neo-liberalism. It is fundamentally concerned with strengthening the link between money and work, in this case research work. In academia, this project has several elements. Perhaps the most fundamental is the quantification or valorisation of research, through which researchers are also becoming increasingly alienated from the product of their labour. If there is to be a strong link between money and work in universities then it must be possible to quantify academic research work. In the UK, this is happening through research selectivity exercises, the universal (across all disciplines), four- yearly (at present) Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). Standards of measurement vary. In some disciplines authorship of books is the principal unit. In others, such as economics, refereed journal articles are preferred, with journals ranked such that a publication in one may be =91worth=92 much more than a publication in another. The point is that research output is no longer simply a use-value; it now has RAE-value which, as I go to argue, has an similar purpose within academia to exchange-value or value, in the normal Marxist sense, in the wider economy. Standardisation and method of measurement are still incompletely worked out: the Chairman and Deputy Chairman of the Business and Management RAE Panel for the 1996 Exercise discuss some of these issues in an article in Cooper and Otley (1998). Miller (1995) discusses some of the external changes to funding and so on which have been driving the process. >From 1974 block grants from central government fell from making up 77% of total university income to only 55% in 1987. In 1986 the basis for funding changed: funding for research is now dependent upon a department=92s research reputation and the amount of awards it has been granted from independent research grant-awarding bodies. In 1986, the year of the first research assessment exercise, the proportion of research funds allocated on its basics was 10%. This rose to 30% in 1989 and 100% in 1992 (Miller 1995: 16 and 144). Moreover, the 1991 White Paper Higher Education: A New Framework and subsequent 1992 Act provisioned increased competition and selectivity in research funding (Miller 1995: 17-18). Linked to the funding question is that of labour contracts. The Education Reform Act of 1988 =91appointed comminssioners to ensure that university statutes make provision for the dismissal of staff on the grounds of redundancy - that is, when the institution ceases to carry on an activity, teaching or research, for which a person was appointed=92 (Miller 1995: 17). And Miller suggests the national pay dispute of 1988-9, with its imposed settlement of May 1989, was significant in that it paved the way for both performance-related pay and market-related pay at the discretion of local university management (Miller 1995: 134). In 1993, at Aston University, for example, control of use of discretionary money passed to departments with the development of the =91trading company model=92, which designated academic, administrative and service-providing departments as cost centres (Miller 1995: 145-147). There are two points which should be noted about research and its RAE-value. Firstly, (RAE-)valorisation is not something which occurs after the research has been produced. Rather, RAE-valorisation has become an organic part of the production process itself. Research is produced for the RAE, research projects and the papers they will most likely yield are conceived, planned and executed always with at least one eye on the next RAE. Given the rewards and costs involved, this is almost inevitable. Secondly, the RAE-value of research is not determined by the actual, or concrete, research labour time (quantity of work) taken to produce it. Instead the RAE-value of a journal article, say, is determined by some notion of =91socially necessary=92 research labour time, how long it would take for the =91average=92 academic to produce. These norms here are as yet incompletely worked out, which is not surprising given that there have been only four research selectivity/assessment exercises to date (in 1986, 1989, 1992 and 1996) and given the difficulties from the assossors=92 point of view. (For example, the =91research cycle=92 is uneven: long years without publications may lead to a large number of closely related papers.) In 1996, =91economists=92, i.e., those researchers working in economics departments or assessed by a/the panel of economists, were judged by their four =91best=92 journal articles over the previous four years. Thus, we can interpret this as meaning that if one wants to be considered a =91good=92 economist, one must publish (at least) one article, in a =91good=92 journal, every year; or that, the socially necessary research labour time for the production of a =91good=92 article is tending towards one year. Of course, the four-yearly assessment is rather unwieldy, generating both a flurry of =91transfer activity=92 (=91top=92 academics moving to departments wishing to improve their rating and willing to pay) prior to the research submission deadline and a vast workload for the assessors. According to the more informed rumours, research selectivity therefore appears to be moving in the direction towards continuous assessment. Presumably the ideal scenario (from the assessors=92 perspective) would be one in which researchers and their research are assessed at the time of publication. At present, RAE results are published in the form of a rating, ranging from =915*=92 for the most research- productive departments, down to =911=92. More disaggregated figures, rating individual research groups within a department are also made available, to that department. It is thus possible to rate individual academics in the same way. As a result of therefore of this process of RAE- valorisation it is increasingly possible to measure the work of a labour economist, say, against that of a growth- cycle theorist, or possibly even an astrophysicist or a specialist in renaissance Italian literature (or whatever). Research selectivity, and the process I am describing as RAE-valorisation, is having or is likely to have a number of effects. 1. Perfomance-related pay. Of course, to some extent, academics=92 pay is already dependent upon their individual research performance. Promotion (which carries enhance pay, of course) depends upon an academic=92s research record to a far greater extent than their ability in either of their other two =91core=92 activities of teaching and administration. The same can be said of the award of discretionary points in the salary scale. With the RAE inducing far more =91transfer activity=92 between academic departments it is likely we will see a closer link between research performance and remuneration. Put simply, many departments in search of a high RAE research rating are willing to offer higher salaries to attract academics with impressive CVs; in turn these same academics=92 current employers must be prepared to offer them comparative rewards in order to keep them. One current proposals is the introduction of profit related pay schemes which would first require academics to accept a notional pay cut. The removed slice would go into a =91profit pool=92, which would then be redistributed. Proponents argue the end result would be increased pay, but this would be dependant upon the university achieving a =91surplus=92. This proposal would also involve a change in contracts which would undermine national collective bargaining. The introduction of differentials between universities would also pave the way for wage differentials within universities. (see AUT Update no. 35) 2. Influence of the type of research done. Harley and Lee (1998) suggest the RAE, in economics at least, is forcing researchers towards the orthodox, neoclassical paradigm. Their argument is simply that the orthodox journals are more prestigious and therefore articles published in those journals are =91worth more=92 than those published in non-mainstream alternatives. They present evidence to show that many economics departments actively encourage applicants with mainstream-journal publications when they have job vacancies. Academic economists with insecure job tenure are thus under pressure to do research within the orthodoxy. More generally, the pressure on all academics, whatever their discipline, to produce research output, as opposed to simply being engaged in research, must mean there is an incentive to undertake =91safe=92 research projects, that is, those which are more likely to yield publishable, if not Earth-shattering, results. Moreover, with assessement every four years, the incentive must be to not to engage in lengthy research projects. You wonder what would have become of the British mathematician Andrew Wiles, based at Princeton University, who in 1994 solved the 350 year old Fermat=92s Last Theorem, a fantastic achievement. Wiles spent seven years working on the problem, with no certainty of success, and during that time did little other research. Or of Sraffa 3. Alienation. There are several aspects to alienation. With research selectivity academics are under pressure to maximise the RAE-value of their research. At the limit, this will be the only consideration when submitting and publishing work. In all other respects the destination of their research product will be a matter of indifference: the researcher exchanges their product for RAE-value and through this mechanism of exchange becomes alienated from this product. At editors of Capital and Class, we have certainly noticed a trend in this direction over the past few years. Where once Capital and Class would have been first-choice, many authors are more likely to initially submit articles to =91higher-ranking=92 journals =97 usually journals which reach a far smaller socialist/communist readership. Of course, changes in an author=92s =91target=92 journal will probably imply changes in their paper=92s content, too. Socialist/communist research loses out. Again, at the limit, reseach done purely to generate RAE- value does not satisfy the human need to create (understanding and knowledge in the case of academics). Such research work becomes a chore imposed by others and is undertaken merely to satisfy needs external to the activity itself. Research capitalists and proletarians; publications as capital; the accumulation of academic capital; enclosures and primitive accumulation Alienation in a stricter sense involves not only alienating one=92s product but one=92s labour-power as well =97 the selling of one=92s labour-power. Here both labour-power and the product of the resulting labour belong to the employer. If we equate =91ownership=92 with named authorship of research papers, it is clear this already happens in academia, whenever a research =91assistant=92 or =91fellow=92 is employed. What matters in academia are publications. What matters most are single- or first-author articles in a =91good=92 refereed journal, published recently such that they =91count=92 towards the next RAE. Having (=91owning=92) such publications provides one with greater access to the resources necessary to pursue further research, research =91means of production=92, which are made available through obtaining an academic job and/or research grant. The research worker, as a rule, =91possesses=92 few such publications and therefore has an extremely limited access to these =91means of production=92. The research worker, in short, owns nothing but their ability to do research and is therefore forced to seek employment as a research assistant.3 On the other hand, the =91research capitalist=92 is someone with many publications to their name. Such publications mean that this person is not only likely to be able to obtain a senior academic job, they are also likely to be successful in applications for larger research grants. Large research grants allow one or more research assistants (or research fellows) to be employed. The crucial point here is that these researchers are working on someone else=92s project. Of course research managers do not have complete control over the production process nor can they appropriate all that is produced, but again this is to miss the point: in any work-place, the employer=92s control of the work process and the product is limited to a greater or less extent and is subject to struggle. Directors of research projects are named authors on resulting papers. (Arrangements concerning authorship vary, of course. In some projects the research assistants will be first- author; in others their name will appear only in the acknowledgements.) In effect research directors are setting in motion research labour-power. It is the =91ownership=92 (authorship) of publications which confers this power on them and the result, if the project(s) is successful, is the =91accumulation=92 of more RAE-value (publications). The situation for the research assistant at the end of a research project varies. Sometimes, they will have gained authorship of a sufficient number of publications, as part of the project, to be a position to obtain a lecturing job, say, which allows them greater freedom, though this might be only as a result of struggling to pursue their own projects at the same time as their research assistant research. In other cases, the research project will end leaving them in the same position as at the beginning =97 owning insufficient publications to do anything but obtain another research assistant position. It is increasingly common for some academics to simultaneously be director of several projects. Such an individual may well approach the extreme of a =91pure=92 research capitalist. This person is able to employ a large number of research workers, who not only do the bulk of the research work, but whose job also includes writing new research proposals, under the direction of the research capitalist, to fund the next project and most likely to secure their own future employment. In such a way the research capitalist is able to accumulate a vast number of publications and control huge resources. With their extensive CV this person is likely to gain widespread authority within their discipline, through editorship of key journals or positions on funding councils, say and is thus able to have disproportionate influence over its future direction. With their control of significant monetary resources, they will wield considerable power within their own department and university, and therefore challenging the established hierarchy of heads of departments, deans and so on. (Of course, research capitalists may be heads of department, but this doesn=92t affect the argument =97 some feudal lords became successful capitalists.) If their secure income, limited teaching and administrative committments and rich library resources were the academic-of-old=92s intellectual commons, then the current ongoing process in UK HE is one of enclosures and primitive accumulation. This process is uneven, of course. At the most basic level of material security, one third of UK academics are now employed on fixed-term contracts (AUT ??). In a large number of departments, even for those academics with tenure, access to the =91intellectual commons=92 is being squeezed, by the pincers of rising student numbers and falling budgets for library, computing, conference, etc. facilities. The typical academic in such a department, if they wish to engage in a serious research project, is likely to be forced to depend upon a series of discretionary grants in order to =91buy out=92 teaching, purchase a adequate computer, etc. In those =91top=92 departments with better =91permanent=92 research facilities, the long-term maintenence of these facilities is likely to depend upon =91good=92 collective research performance and researchers in these departments will be under considerable pressure (both formal and informal) to =91pull their weight=92. Specialization and division of labour A by-product of this research-bourgeois revolution is to accelerate the process of specialisation and division of research labour. This is further contributing to academic alienation, on at least two levels. First, academic disciplines (and sub-disciplines and so on) are becoming more specialised and there is an exponential growth in new specialisms. With this growth it becomes more difficult for any single researcher, struggling to keep up with advances in their own and related specialisms, to step back to view their work in a broader perspective. The new pressures to produce =91good=92, i.e., publishable, research at the =91cutting edges=92 mean practicing researchers have even less time in which to pursue the goal of wider intellectual understanding. In effect researcher workers are becoming increasingly alienated from society=92s body of knowledge, which they have helped produce and continue to expand. And as researchers become alienated from societal knowledge, this leaves others with more political and economic power free to interpret and therefore appropriate for their own ends this knowledge. Second, at the level of individual research projects, an increasing proportion of research is collaborative, whether or not such research is done under the direction of a research capitalist or is more self-managed. These research groups range in size from just a couple of people to teams of perhaps one or two dozen people (common in applied physical science). In such projects, each team member specializes in a different aspect of the research, and may have limited or no involvement in the other aspects. As a result, they may not fully understand the final results. It now seems common for the presenter of a (multi-authored) paper in an applied economics seminar, say, to prohibit questions on the econometrics on the grounds that this was carried out by (one of) their co-author(s) and they do not really understand it! Also common is the applied econometrician or statistician who analyses data sets with only a very hazy understanding of either the conditions under which the data was collected or the theoretical framework driving the quantitative questions they are supposed to be answering. In these cases it must be said that these researchers have become alienated from the knowledge they are producing. With a goal of =91increased productivity=92 such a division of labour may be necessary, but with proficiency in any one element of a research project=92s work requiring years of practice, some degree of such alienation is perhaps inevitable. This phenomenon has obvious implications, which I do not need to spell out here, for the balance of power between employed research worker, on the one hand, and the research project director (i.e., the research capitalist), on the other. The process of primitive accumulation and capitalist revolution I am attempting to describe has reached different stages in different academic disciplines. Broadly speaking, at the risk of being charged with technological determinism, this appears to depend upon the extent of the material needs of research in that discipline. Another factor is the degree to which =91outputs=92 can be separated from =91inputs=92. In arts subjects and many social sciences research and production are very personal; output is inseparable from (personal) input. The process is most advanced in the physical sciences, in which research activity demands a large amount of expensive equipment. It is common for research in subjects like astrophysics and chemistry to be carried out by teams of a dozen or more people, under the direction of a single senior researcher. It seems to be least advanced in the arts where, on the whole, very little equipment is required to do research. The social sciences and humanities lie somewhere in-between. Collaborative research does not necessarily mean research undertaken by research workers directed by a research capitalist; nor does it necessarily that the members of a research team will be alienated from the research =91product=92. It may instead indicate greater cooperation amongst free producers. However, the extent to which collaborative research has become more widespread over the past few decades, across a range of disciplines is interesting and suggests my thesis cannot be immediately rejected. The figures plots the mean number of authors per article published by seven differents journals, including Capital and Class, over the past four decades. In all cases there is a clear trend towards more collaborative work. FIGURES 1A AND 1B HERE The poverty of opposition The process I have been describing is marked by the limited extent of most critiques and opposition. The fundamental purpose of the process is to control academic workers through the imposition of a strong link between money and work. The process also influences the nature and content of academic research. There is a possibility that, eventually, in order to get the rewards (RAE-value, funding, etc.) all problems to be tackled must be sanctioned as such by the =91establishment=92=97well- established researchers, funding agencies, Parliament, corporations. Academics end up being cajoled into solving problems for the establishment=97capital=92s problems! This is already very clear in those fields more closely affected by military research. RAE-valorisation should be opposed in its totality. Unfortunately most opposition to date seems to have focused on attempting to modify the way in which research assessment is implemented. One tendency is to argue for different scales on which to judge and measure differing research output. Another is concerned with the effect on non-orthodox research within the social sciences, for example. This tendency is keen to emphasise that Marxist or radical research shouldn=92t be discriminated against. But by doing so, the point that this research is still being reduced to pure RAE-value and that work is still being imposed is implicitly conceded: Marxism thereby becomes a potentially =91profitable=92 niche market.4 Perhaps the idea of a research strike, along the lines of the Art Strike 1990=961993, proposed by the PRAXIS group in 1985 is worth debating. For the art strike, the propaganda and discussion in the period leading up to its proposed start were of more importance than the strike itself, which was probably never a serious proposition. (See Home 1989 and Here and Now 1990). Conclusion =97 social antagonism and class in academia My argument perhaps becomes still clearer if we understand class, not as a defined group of people, but rather as being based primarily on the antagonism in the way human social practice is organised. Although =91the polar nature of the antagonism is reflected in a polarisation of the two classes, the antagonism is prior to, not subsequent to, the classses: classes are constituted through the antagonism=92 (Holloway 1998: 183=964). Holloway suggests social antagonism is a conflict between creative social practice and its negation, or, in other words, between humanity and its negation, between the transcending of limits (creation) and the imposition of limits (definition). The conflict does not take place after subordination has been established, after the fetishised forms of social relations have been constituted: rather it is a conflict about the subordination of social practice, about the fetishisation of social relations (1998: 183). Research, the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, in any field you care to think of, is creative human activity. For many =91professional=92 thinkers there is (or was) no real distinction between work and leisure. Although in the past there have been barriers between =91disciplines=92, these were far less clear cut than they were today. Such creativity is being defined to death. Within academic research there seem to be limits whichever way you turn: what to read, how to think, how to write, how many words to write, who to cite (creative work turned against creators), where to publish and so on and so on and now, with =91research assessment=92, how many articles to publish. Of course, there are always people attempting to overcome these limits. There are always people attempting to transcend discipline barriers, despite the huge costs often involved, in terms of reading new literatures, putting one=92s position within one=92s =91own=92 discipline at risk, and so on. Moreover, many transcending =91seminal=92 papers, which cut across =91(sub)disciplines=92 end up imposing limits as a new =91(sub)discipline=92. This antagonism in academia, between creativity and its limitation, is not especially new. What is new is the power which =91research assessment=92 promises/threatens to measure and define. In turn measurement and definition offers capital greater opportunities to limit and control intellectual creativity within universities through enclosure of =91intellectual commons=92. Researchers thus become alienated from their creative output. What is also new is the extent to which =91research assessment=92, and its related research-funding arrangements, offers a small minority of academics the opportunity to participate directly in and benefit from the exploitation and appropriation of the research work, the creativity, of others, the majority of us. It is in this way that antagonism in academia is now constituting two new classes within academia. References AUT (1996) Update, no. 35, 3 June, London: AUT. Harley, S. and F.S. Lee (1997) =91Research Selectivity, Managerialism, and the Academic Labour Process: The Future of Nonmainstream Economics in U.K. Universities=92, Human Relations, vol.50, no. 11, 1426- 1460. Here and Now (1990) =91Art/Anti-Art Supplement=92 to issue 10. Holloway, J. (1998) =91Dignity=92s Revolt=92, in J. Holloway and Elo=EDna Pel=E1ez (eds) Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico, London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 159=96198. Home, S. (1989) editor Art Strike Handbook, London. Lee, F.S. and S. Harley (1998) =91Economics Divided: The Limitations of Peer Review in a Paradigm-Bound Social Science=92, Capital and Class, 66 (Autumn), pages. Marglin, S. (1974) =91What do bosses do? The Origins and Functions of Hierarchy in Capitalist Production=92 Review of Radical Political Economics, vol. 6, Summer. Also in Gorz, A., editor, The Division of Labour: The Labour Process and Class Struggle in Modern Capitalism. Brighton: Harvester, 1976. Miller, H. (1991) =91Academics and their Labour Process=92 in C. Smith, D. Knights and H. Willmott (eds.) White- Collar Work: The Non-Manual Labour Process, London: Macmillan, 109-138. [SOCIOLOGY H-2 SMI] Miller, H. (1995) The Management of Change in Universities: Universities, State and Economy in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education. [UNIVERSITIES C-1 MIL] Ovetz, R. (1996) =91Turning Resistance into Rebellion: Student struggles and the global entrepreneurialization of the universities=92 Capital and Class, 58 (Spring): 113=96152. Slaughter, S. and L. Leslie (1997) Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University, Baltimore & London: John Hopkins University Press. [UNIVERSITIES C-1 SLA] Thompson, E.P. (1970) editor, Warwick University Ltd: Industry, Management and the Universities, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Willmott, H. (1995) =91Managing the Academics: Commodification and Control in the Development of University Education in the U.K.=92, Human Relations, vol. 48, no. 9, 993=971027. Figure 1a and 1b. Cooperation/division of labour in academic research: trends in average number of authors of articles in seven journals. Note: Science and Nature each publish several thousand articles annually. The averages plotted in figure 1a are based on random samples of 60 articles for each year. They only cover the period since 1981, during which the necessary information has been available on electronic indexes. _______________________________ 1This was perhaps less true in some sciences which have always been more closely connected to industry, especially =91defence=92. 2Of course the university system was financed through general taxation, rather than by academics themselves. Academics=92 teaching and admin duties could be compared to the feudal tithe in that they in the time required for them was set quite independently of what the academic did in their remaining time, i.e., their research =91performance=92. 3This is perhaps not strictly true since many people become lecturers without first having been research assistants. However, to become a lecturer one usually needs both a Ph.D. and to demonstrate one=92s potential to produce =91goods=92 publications; moreover, competition for lecturing jobs is very fierce. 4This point is probably controversial. Of course marxism can create problems for capital. In this sense it might be useful to argue for a uniform reward for all publications. This demand undermines research assessment since it does not consider issues of =91quality=92, refereeing and so on. But I think it is also true that marxism as political economy, rather than critique of political economy, can have some uses for capital. The important point is that there is an antagonism between doing research in order to critique capital and doing research which will be quantified as part of one=92s work within capital. --Message-Boundary-16700 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: Quoted-printable Content-description: Text from file 'polemic.asc' 20 ALIENATION, CLASS AND ENCLOSURE IN UK UNIVERSITIES David Harvie February 1997 Thanks to Alfredo Saad-Filho, whose comments have improved the argument and its presentation in this paper. Introduction The working conditions of many academics in UK universities have deteriorated sharply over the past two decades or so, even if `for many the academic labour process remains in its core activities [of teaching, research, scholarship, counselling and administration] remarkably constant' in terms of the type or work (Miller 1991: 111). There have been dramatic and drastic changes in higher education: university budgets, together with funding in general, e.g., student grants, have been cut, student numbers have increased and assessment of both teaching and research has been introduced with a vengence. There is no need to spell out the consequent effect on academic workloads. Academics have been squeezed by pressure from three sources. First, there is an increased number of students: a system designed to impart learning to a small elite, also providing an element of pastoral care, is now struggling to adjust to mass education. Second, related to the burgeoning student population, and despite the employment of dedicated administrators in many departments, is a growing burden of administration. Third, there is research, the focus of this Polemic. My argument in a nutshell is that academic researchers in U.K. universities are in the midst of a revolution, which is somewhat akin to the transition from feudalism to capitalism. If successfully completed, this revolution will have disastrous consequences for the majority of research academics' freedom and job security. As part of this revolution we are seeing a number of related processes: the reduction of essentially unmeasureable research use- values to quantifiable `research value'; primitive accumulation and enclosure of academic `commons'; the emergence of two classes of academic, a research capitalist class and a research proletariat, with the class of research capitalists starting to challenge heads of department (`lords of the manor') in terms of the economic and political power they wield within higher education. Related to these processes are increasing specialisation and division of academic labour. Higher education and capital; universities as intellectual commons The integration of higher education into the capitalist economy has long been recognised by Marxists. Theorists of the `social factory' such as Mario Tronti argued that, far from being in some sense outside of capitalist social relations, schools and universities' role as shapers of young workers, as (re)creators of labour-power, made them central to the process of value- and surplus value- creation. There is also a long history of links between business and universities, with an equally long history of people organising struggles against these links and the subsumption of the interests of both university students and staff to those of capital accumulation. An early example of this is the subject of Warwick University Ltd (Thompson 1970); more recent ones, in the Canadian and US contexts, respectively, are discussed in Buckbinder and Newson (1988) and Ovetz (1996). Interesting in this context is the recent explicit recognition by the present government that much education policy, and in particular, government stipulations on curricula in schools and course content in higher and further education, will be guided by the expressed needs of `business'. Recently, some so-called `failing' schools in the US and the UK have even been taken over by the corporate sector. [ref. the economist] The past couple of decades have seen closer links between universities and private sector companies as academics have sought money to make up for falling state funding. Slaughter and Leslie define `institutional and professorial market or market-like efforts to secure external moneys' as `academic capitalism', in their book of the same title (1997: 8). In this Polemic, however, this term conveys a different meaning. A number of other changes and trends have been identified and theorised. Several authors, for example, have examined the rise of managerialism in higher education (refs) and the proletarianisation of academics (refs). Wilmott (1995) argues that there have been major developments in the past 10 or so years which have `significantly eroded the protection from pressures to render [academics'] work more commensurable with the commodity form of value' (p. 995) Miller (1995) discusses in detail the changes in universities in terms of a number of agencies and relationships. These include `the state and universities' and `the economy and universities' and `university management and academics'. At each `level' there are forces acting to pressurise academics. I have no argument with Miller's account of these shifts and forces; however, they tell only part of the story. The dynamic forces described by Miller are all external to academics: in addition, there are forces which are internal to the body of academics. Within universities themselves `management' (or `the university') is counterposed to `academics'. `Managment' may well include many (mostly senior) academics: these individuals gain management status through appointment or election to a governing body (e.g., senate or council) or position (e.g., head of department). Academics, as academics, though Miller is well aware that different individuals and groups are being affected in different ways by current changes, are seen as a universal body. However, despite this integration of education institutions within the capitalist economy, the relationship until recently has largely been external. By this I mean simply that the internal organisation of universities, and other research institutions, has not been capitalistic. By and large, they have not been realms within which anything like the law of value has operated. Despite its `ivory tower' moniker, H.E. has not been any bastion of `liberty, equality and solidarity', though many academics have enjoyed far better conditions than many other workers. Rather, universities have historically been organised along lines which in some ways have been far more akin to feudalism and/or an artisan-centred economy. Consider the position of the British university academic two decades ago, say. This person employed as a Lecturer or Senior Lecturer enjoyed almost complete job security. In return, this academic was required to devote a fairly smallish proportion of their time to teaching and administrative duties. A level of research activity was also expected, depending upon the particular institution, but monitoring of this was minimal: the contracted obligation was to engage in reasearch or other `scholarly activity', rather than to produce a research output. Although research output of high quantity and quality would almost certainly be rewarded financially through promotion, to a Readership or Chair, say, and in terms of academic prestige, even a university lecturer who published nothing could expect to enjoy a high and, for the most part, rising income, which placed them amongst Britain's highest earners, on a par with senior civil servants and top police officers. This situation of material security allowed research activity to be organised in a particular way. In some respects academics were akin to artisans, in others perhaps to serfs. Most worked alone and the products of their labour _ research _ formed a collection of use- values.1 Academics did research because they wanted to and, with few external pressures, published only if they thought they had some ideas or results worth publishing. Within this system, the requirements for researh _ library facilities, an office, an intellectually stimulating environment and, probably most importantly, time _ were available to all academics who wished to make use of them: for employed academics these resources were intellectual commons; the `tithe' that they paid was the set proportion of their time which they had to devote to teaching and administrative duties.2 For students, though not the focus of this Polemic, the combination of less pressured academics, well-stocked libraries, the grant system and few graduation employment worries meant that for them too, universities were intellectual commons. Within this system, academics were usually answerable to their heads of department. With nearly all academics enjoying tenure, the departmental head's position was more akin to that of the feudal lord: s/he could try and discipline the `lazy' lecturer, using moral pressure or a few extra administrative or teaching duties, but sacking them was usually not an option. Nevertheless, a common opinion is that heads of department were much more powerful, and less accountable, in the past, and in some cases had the power to destroy someone's career. From the lecturer's perspective, they were of course, unlike the feudal serf, free to move if they chose. But, with fewer pressures to constantly improve research performance, and seek promotion, there was simply less reason to do so. At a mostly subjective level `good' research was distinguished from `bad'; there were generally-accepted notions of `good' journals, departments and individuals, etc., but these things were not quantified, nor as mentioned above was there a close correlation between research quantity and `quality' and material reward. Moreover, academics passed through a period of apprenticeship, completing a Ph.D. or some other research project, under the guidance of an established academic, the `Master', a point made in passing by Marglin (1974). An important characteristic of this apprentice system was that the project was the student's own _ a prospective D.Phil. candidate would usually write their own proposal, obtain their own funding from an H.E. institution or funding body, and choose (or negotiate) their own supervisor(s). Once the apprenticeship was satisfactorily completed, young academics could fairly easily move into a lecturing position, gaining control of sufficient resources-the researcher's `commons': sufficient free time, money, use of a library and possibly a computer-to continue their own research. Thus the apprentice became journeyman. Neoliberalism and the imposition of the law of value in H.E. The attempt to impose the law of value in academia can be seen as being part of the economy-wide and global project of neo-liberalism. It is fundamentally concerned with strengthening the link between money and work, in this case research work. In academia, this project has several elements. Perhaps the most fundamental is the quantification or valorisation of research, through which researchers are also becoming increasingly alienated from the product of their labour. If there is to be a strong link between money and work in universities then it must be possible to quantify academic research work. In the UK, this is happening through research selectivity exercises, the universal (across all disciplines), four- yearly (at present) Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). Standards of measurement vary. In some disciplines authorship of books is the principal unit. In others, such as economics, refereed journal articles are preferred, with journals ranked such that a publication in one may be `worth' much more than a publication in another. The point is that research output is no longer simply a use-value; it now has RAE-value which, as I go to argue, has an similar purpose within academia to exchange-value or value, in the normal Marxist sense, in the wider economy. Standardisation and method of measurement are still incompletely worked out: the Chairman and Deputy Chairman of the Business and Management RAE Panel for the 1996 Exercise discuss some of these issues in an article in Cooper and Otley (1998). Miller (1995) discusses some of the external changes to funding and so on which have been driving the process. >From 1974 block grants from central government fell from making up 77% of total university income to only 55% in 1987. In 1986 the basis for funding changed: funding for research is now dependent upon a department's research reputation and the amount of awards it has been granted from independent research grant-awarding bodies. In 1986, the year of the first research assessment exercise, the proportion of research funds allocated on its basics was 10%. This rose to 30% in 1989 and 100% in 1992 (Miller 1995: 16 and 144). Moreover, the 1991 White Paper Higher Education: A New Framework and subsequent 1992 Act provisioned increased competition and selectivity in research funding (Miller 1995: 17-18). Linked to the funding question is that of labour contracts. The Education Reform Act of 1988 `appointed comminssioners to ensure that university statutes make provision for the dismissal of staff on the grounds of redundancy - that is, when the institution ceases to carry on an activity, teaching or research, for which a person was appointed' (Miller 1995: 17). And Miller suggests the national pay dispute of 1988-9, with its imposed settlement of May 1989, was significant in that it paved the way for both performance-related pay and market-related pay at the discretion of local university management (Miller 1995: 134). In 1993, at Aston University, for example, control of use of discretionary money passed to departments with the development of the `trading company model', which designated academic, administrative and service-providing departments as cost centres (Miller 1995: 145-147). There are two points which should be noted about research and its RAE-value. Firstly, (RAE-)valorisation is not something which occurs after the research has been produced. Rather, RAE-valorisation has become an organic part of the production process itself. Research is produced for the RAE, research projects and the papers they will most likely yield are conceived, planned and executed always with at least one eye on the next RAE. Given the rewards and costs involved, this is almost inevitable. Secondly, the RAE-value of research is not determined by the actual, or concrete, research labour time (quantity of work) taken to produce it. Instead the RAE-value of a journal article, say, is determined by some notion of `socially necessary' research labour time, how long it would take for the `average' academic to produce. These norms here are as yet incompletely worked out, which is not surprising given that there have been only four research selectivity/assessment exercises to date (in 1986, 1989, 1992 and 1996) and given the difficulties from the assossors' point of view. (For example, the `research cycle' is uneven: long years without publications may lead to a large number of closely related papers.) In 1996, `economists', i.e., those researchers working in economics departments or assessed by a/the panel of economists, were judged by their four `best' journal articles over the previous four years. Thus, we can interpret this as meaning that if one wants to be considered a `good' economist, one must publish (at least) one article, in a `good' journal, every year; or that, the socially necessary research labour time for the production of a `good' article is tending towards one year. Of course, the four-yearly assessment is rather unwieldy, generating both a flurry of `transfer activity' (`top' academics moving to departments wishing to improve their rating and willing to pay) prior to the research submission deadline and a vast workload for the assessors. According to the more informed rumours, research selectivity therefore appears to be moving in the direction towards continuous assessment. Presumably the ideal scenario (from the assessors' perspective) would be one in which researchers and their research are assessed at the time of publication. At present, RAE results are published in the form of a rating, ranging from `5*' for the most research- productive departments, down to `1'. More disaggregated figures, rating individual research groups within a department are also made available, to that department. It is thus possible to rate individual academics in the same way. As a result of therefore of this process of RAE- valorisation it is increasingly possible to measure the work of a labour economist, say, against that of a growth- cycle theorist, or possibly even an astrophysicist or a specialist in renaissance Italian literature (or whatever). Research selectivity, and the process I am describing as RAE-valorisation, is having or is likely to have a number of effects. 1. Perfomance-related pay. Of course, to some extent, academics' pay is already dependent upon their individual research performance. Promotion (which carries enhance pay, of course) depends upon an academic's research record to a far greater extent than their ability in either of their other two `core' activities of teaching and administration. The same can be said of the award of discretionary points in the salary scale. With the RAE inducing far more `transfer activity' between academic departments it is likely we will see a closer link between research performance and remuneration. Put simply, many departments in search of a high RAE research rating are willing to offer higher salaries to attract academics with impressive CVs; in turn these same academics' current employers must be prepared to offer them comparative rewards in order to keep them. One current proposals is the introduction of profit related pay schemes which would first require academics to accept a notional pay cut. The removed slice would go into a `profit pool', which would then be redistributed. Proponents argue the end result would be increased pay, but this would be dependant upon the university achieving a `surplus'. This proposal would also involve a change in contracts which would undermine national collective bargaining. The introduction of differentials between universities would also pave the way for wage differentials within universities. (see AUT Update no. 35) 2. Influence of the type of research done. Harley and Lee (1998) suggest the RAE, in economics at least, is forcing researchers towards the orthodox, neoclassical paradigm. Their argument is simply that the orthodox journals are more prestigious and therefore articles published in those journals are `worth more' than those published in non-mainstream alternatives. They present evidence to show that many economics departments actively encourage applicants with mainstream-journal publications when they have job vacancies. Academic economists with insecure job tenure are thus under pressure to do research within the orthodoxy. More generally, the pressure on all academics, whatever their discipline, to produce research output, as opposed to simply being engaged in research, must mean there is an incentive to undertake `safe' research projects, that is, those which are more likely to yield publishable, if not Earth-shattering, results. Moreover, with assessement every four years, the incentive must be to not to engage in lengthy research projects. You wonder what would have become of the British mathematician Andrew Wiles, based at Princeton University, who in 1994 solved the 350 year old Fermat's Last Theorem, a fantastic achievement. Wiles spent seven years working on the problem, with no certainty of success, and during that time did little other research. Or of Sraffa 3. Alienation. There are several aspects to alienation. With research selectivity academics are under pressure to maximise the RAE-value of their research. At the limit, this will be the only consideration when submitting and publishing work. In all other respects the destination of their research product will be a matter of indifference: the researcher exchanges their product for RAE-value and through this mechanism of exchange becomes alienated from this product. At editors of Capital and Class, we have certainly noticed a trend in this direction over the past few years. Where once Capital and Class would have been first-choice, many authors are more likely to initially submit articles to `higher-ranking' journals _ usually journals which reach a far smaller socialist/communist readership. Of course, changes in an author's `target' journal will probably imply changes in their paper's content, too. Socialist/communist research loses out. Again, at the limit, reseach done purely to generate RAE- value does not satisfy the human need to create (understanding and knowledge in the case of academics). Such research work becomes a chore imposed by others and is undertaken merely to satisfy needs external to the activity itself. Research capitalists and proletarians; publications as capital; the accumulation of academic capital; enclosures and primitive accumulation Alienation in a stricter sense involves not only alienating one's product but one's labour-power as well _ the selling of one's labour-power. Here both labour-power and the product of the resulting labour belong to the employer. If we equate `ownership' with named authorship of research papers, it is clear this already happens in academia, whenever a research `assistant' or `fellow' is employed. What matters in academia are publications. What matters most are single- or first-author articles in a `good' refereed journal, published recently such that they `count' towards the next RAE. Having (`owning') such publications provides one with greater access to the resources necessary to pursue further research, research `means of production', which are made available through obtaining an academic job and/or research grant. The research worker, as a rule, `possesses' few such publications and therefore has an extremely limited access to these `means of production'. The research worker, in short, owns nothing but their ability to do research and is therefore forced to seek employment as a research assistant.3 On the other hand, the `research capitalist' is someone with many publications to their name. Such publications mean that this person is not only likely to be able to obtain a senior academic job, they are also likely to be successful in applications for larger research grants. Large research grants allow one or more research assistants (or research fellows) to be employed. The crucial point here is that these researchers are working on someone else's project. Of course research managers do not have complete control over the production process nor can they appropriate all that is produced, but again this is to miss the point: in any work-place, the employer's control of the work process and the product is limited to a greater or less extent and is subject to struggle. Directors of research projects are named authors on resulting papers. (Arrangements concerning authorship vary, of course. In some projects the research assistants will be first- author; in others their name will appear only in the acknowledgements.) In effect research directors are setting in motion research labour-power. It is the `ownership' (authorship) of publications which confers this power on them and the result, if the project(s) is successful, is the `accumulation' of more RAE-value (publications). The situation for the research assistant at the end of a research project varies. Sometimes, they will have gained authorship of a sufficient number of publications, as part of the project, to be a position to obtain a lecturing job, say, which allows them greater freedom, though this might be only as a result of struggling to pursue their own projects at the same time as their research assistant research. In other cases, the research project will end leaving them in the same position as at the beginning _ owning insufficient publications to do anything but obtain another research assistant position. It is increasingly common for some academics to simultaneously be director of several projects. Such an individual may well approach the extreme of a `pure' research capitalist. This person is able to employ a large number of research workers, who not only do the bulk of the research work, but whose job also includes writing new research proposals, under the direction of the research capitalist, to fund the next project and most likely to secure their own future employment. In such a way the research capitalist is able to accumulate a vast number of publications and control huge resources. With their extensive CV this person is likely to gain widespread authority within their discipline, through editorship of key journals or positions on funding councils, say and is thus able to have disproportionate influence over its future direction. With their control of significant monetary resources, they will wield considerable power within their own department and university, and therefore challenging the established hierarchy of heads of departments, deans and so on. (Of course, research capitalists may be heads of department, but this doesn't affect the argument _ some feudal lords became successful capitalists.) If their secure income, limited teaching and administrative committments and rich library resources were the academic-of-old's intellectual commons, then the current ongoing process in UK HE is one of enclosures and primitive accumulation. This process is uneven, of course. At the most basic level of material security, one third of UK academics are now employed on fixed-term contracts (AUT ??). In a large number of departments, even for those academics with tenure, access to the `intellectual commons' is being squeezed, by the pincers of rising student numbers and falling budgets for library, computing, conference, etc. facilities. The typical academic in such a department, if they wish to engage in a serious research project, is likely to be forced to depend upon a series of discretionary grants in order to `buy out' teaching, purchase a adequate computer, etc. In those `top' departments with better `permanent' research facilities, the long-term maintenence of these facilities is likely to depend upon `good' collective research performance and researchers in these departments will be under considerable pressure (both formal and informal) to `pull their weight'. Specialization and division of labour A by-product of this research-bourgeois revolution is to accelerate the process of specialisation and division of research labour. This is further contributing to academic alienation, on at least two levels. First, academic disciplines (and sub-disciplines and so on) are becoming more specialised and there is an exponential growth in new specialisms. With this growth it becomes more difficult for any single researcher, struggling to keep up with advances in their own and related specialisms, to step back to view their work in a broader perspective. The new pressures to produce `good', i.e., publishable, research at the `cutting edges' mean practicing researchers have even less time in which to pursue the goal of wider intellectual understanding. In effect researcher workers are becoming increasingly alienated from society's body of knowledge, which they have helped produce and continue to expand. And as researchers become alienated from societal knowledge, this leaves others with more political and economic power free to interpret and therefore appropriate for their own ends this knowledge. Second, at the level of individual research projects, an increasing proportion of research is collaborative, whether or not such research is done under the direction of a research capitalist or is more self-managed. These research groups range in size from just a couple of people to teams of perhaps one or two dozen people (common in applied physical science). In such projects, each team member specializes in a different aspect of the research, and may have limited or no involvement in the other aspects. As a result, they may not fully understand the final results. It now seems common for the presenter of a (multi-authored) paper in an applied economics seminar, say, to prohibit questions on the econometrics on the grounds that this was carried out by (one of) their co-author(s) and they do not really understand it! Also common is the applied econometrician or statistician who analyses data sets with only a very hazy understanding of either the conditions under which the data was collected or the theoretical framework driving the quantitative questions they are supposed to be answering. In these cases it must be said that these researchers have become alienated from the knowledge they are producing. With a goal of `increased productivity' such a division of labour may be necessary, but with proficiency in any one element of a research project's work requiring years of practice, some degree of such alienation is perhaps inevitable. This phenomenon has obvious implications, which I do not need to spell out here, for the balance of power between employed research worker, on the one hand, and the research project director (i.e., the research capitalist), on the other. The process of primitive accumulation and capitalist revolution I am attempting to describe has reached different stages in different academic disciplines. Broadly speaking, at the risk of being charged with technological determinism, this appears to depend upon the extent of the material needs of research in that discipline. Another factor is the degree to which `outputs' can be separated from `inputs'. In arts subjects and many social sciences research and production are very personal; output is inseparable from (personal) input. The process is most advanced in the physical sciences, in which research activity demands a large amount of expensive equipment. It is common for research in subjects like astrophysics and chemistry to be carried out by teams of a dozen or more people, under the direction of a single senior researcher. It seems to be least advanced in the arts where, on the whole, very little equipment is required to do research. The social sciences and humanities lie somewhere in-between. Collaborative research does not necessarily mean research undertaken by research workers directed by a research capitalist; nor does it necessarily that the members of a research team will be alienated from the research `product'. It may instead indicate greater cooperation amongst free producers. However, the extent to which collaborative research has become more widespread over the past few decades, across a range of disciplines is interesting and suggests my thesis cannot be immediately rejected. The figures plots the mean number of authors per article published by seven differents journals, including Capital and Class, over the past four decades. In all cases there is a clear trend towards more collaborative work. FIGURES 1A AND 1B HERE The poverty of opposition The process I have been describing is marked by the limited extent of most critiques and opposition. The fundamental purpose of the process is to control academic workers through the imposition of a strong link between money and work. The process also influences the nature and content of academic research. There is a possibility that, eventually, in order to get the rewards (RAE-value, funding, etc.) all problems to be tackled must be sanctioned as such by the `establishment'_well- established researchers, funding agencies, Parliament, corporations. Academics end up being cajoled into solving problems for the establishment_capital's problems! This is already very clear in those fields more closely affected by military research. RAE-valorisation should be opposed in its totality. Unfortunately most opposition to date seems to have focused on attempting to modify the way in which research assessment is implemented. One tendency is to argue for different scales on which to judge and measure differing research output. Another is concerned with the effect on non-orthodox research within the social sciences, for example. This tendency is keen to emphasise that Marxist or radical research shouldn't be discriminated against. But by doing so, the point that this research is still being reduced to pure RAE-value and that work is still being imposed is implicitly conceded: Marxism thereby becomes a potentially `profitable' niche market.4 Perhaps the idea of a research strike, along the lines of the Art Strike 1990-1993, proposed by the PRAXIS group in 1985 is worth debating. For the art strike, the propaganda and discussion in the period leading up to its proposed start were of more importance than the strike itself, which was probably never a serious proposition. (See Home 1989 and Here and Now 1990). Conclusion _ social antagonism and class in academia My argument perhaps becomes still clearer if we understand class, not as a defined group of people, but rather as being based primarily on the antagonism in the way human social practice is organised. Although `the polar nature of the antagonism is reflected in a polarisation of the two classes, the antagonism is prior to, not subsequent to, the classses: classes are constituted through the antagonism' (Holloway 1998: 183-4). Holloway suggests social antagonism is a conflict between creative social practice and its negation, or, in other words, between humanity and its negation, between the transcending of limits (creation) and the imposition of limits (definition). The conflict does not take place after subordination has been established, after the fetishised forms of social relations have been constituted: rather it is a conflict about the subordination of social practice, about the fetishisation of social relations (1998: 183). Research, the pursuit of knowledge and understanding, in any field you care to think of, is creative human activity. For many `professional' thinkers there is (or was) no real distinction between work and leisure. Although in the past there have been barriers between `disciplines', these were far less clear cut than they were today. Such creativity is being defined to death. Within academic research there seem to be limits whichever way you turn: what to read, how to think, how to write, how many words to write, who to cite (creative work turned against creators), where to publish and so on and so on and now, with `research assessment', how many articles to publish. Of course, there are always people attempting to overcome these limits. There are always people attempting to transcend discipline barriers, despite the huge costs often involved, in terms of reading new literatures, putting one's position within one's `own' discipline at risk, and so on. Moreover, many transcending `seminal' papers, which cut across `(sub)disciplines' end up imposing limits as a new `(sub)discipline'. This antagonism in academia, between creativity and its limitation, is not especially new. What is new is the power which `research assessment' promises/threatens to measure and define. In turn measurement and definition offers capital greater opportunities to limit and control intellectual creativity within universities through enclosure of `intellectual commons'. Researchers thus become alienated from their creative output. What is also new is the extent to which `research assessment', and its related research-funding arrangements, offers a small minority of academics the opportunity to participate directly in and benefit from the exploitation and appropriation of the research work, the creativity, of others, the majority of us. It is in this way that antagonism in academia is now constituting two new classes within academia. References AUT (1996) Update, no. 35, 3 June, London: AUT. Harley, S. and F.S. Lee (1997) `Research Selectivity, Managerialism, and the Academic Labour Process: The Future of Nonmainstream Economics in U.K. Universities', Human Relations, vol.50, no. 11, 1426- 1460. Here and Now (1990) `Art/Anti-Art Supplement' to issue 10. Holloway, J. (1998) `Dignity's Revolt', in J. Holloway and Elo=A1na Pel=A0ez (eds) Zapatista! Reinventing Revolution in Mexico, London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 159-198. Home, S. (1989) editor Art Strike Handbook, London. Lee, F.S. and S. Harley (1998) `Economics Divided: The Limitations of Peer Review in a Paradigm-Bound Social Science', Capital and Class, 66 (Autumn), pages. Marglin, S. (1974) `What do bosses do? The Origins and Functions of Hierarchy in Capitalist Production' Review of Radical Political Economics, vol. 6, Summer. Also in Gorz, A., editor, The Division of Labour: The Labour Process and Class Struggle in Modern Capitalism. Brighton: Harvester, 1976. Miller, H. (1991) `Academics and their Labour Process' in C. Smith, D. Knights and H. Willmott (eds.) White- Collar Work: The Non-Manual Labour Process, London: Macmillan, 109-138. [SOCIOLOGY H-2 SMI] Miller, H. (1995) The Management of Change in Universities: Universities, State and Economy in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education. [UNIVERSITIES C-1 MIL] Ovetz, R. (1996) `Turning Resistance into Rebellion: Student struggles and the global entrepreneurialization of the universities' Capital and Class, 58 (Spring): 113-152. Slaughter, S. and L. Leslie (1997) Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University, Baltimore & London: John Hopkins University Press. [UNIVERSITIES C-1 SLA] Thompson, E.P. (1970) editor, Warwick University Ltd: Industry, Management and the Universities, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Willmott, H. (1995) `Managing the Academics: Commodification and Control in the Development of University Education in the U.K.', Human Relations, vol. 48, no. 9, 993_1027. Figure 1a and 1b. Cooperation/division of labour in academic research: trends in average number of authors of articles in seven journals. Note: Science and Nature each publish several thousand articles annually. The averages plotted in figure 1a are based on random samples of 60 articles for each year. They only cover the period since 1981, during which the necessary information has been available on electronic indexes. _______________________________ 1This was perhaps less true in some sciences which have always been more closely connected to industry, especially `defence'. 2Of course the university system was financed through general taxation, rather than by academics themselves. Academics' teaching and admin duties could be compared to the feudal tithe in that they in the time required for them was set quite independently of what the academic did in their remaining time, i.e., their research `performance'. 3This is perhaps not strictly true since many people become lecturers without first having been research assistants. However, to become a lecturer one usually needs both a Ph.D. and to demonstrate one's potential to produce `goods' publications; moreover, competition for lecturing jobs is very fierce. 4This point is probably controversial. Of course marxism can create problems for capital. In this sense it might be useful to argue for a uniform reward for all publications. This demand undermines research assessment since it does not consider issues of `quality', refereeing and so on. But I think it is also true that marxism as political economy, rather than critique of political economy, can have some uses for capital. The important point is that there is an antagonism between doing research in order to critique capital and doing research which will be quantified as part of one's work within capital. --Message-Boundary-16700--

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