Chapter 4: Knowledge production and autonomy: the challenge from
5. Implications for the university
5.3 Internal modes of organisation and disciplinarity
mass higher education with accompanying growth of student diversity; the international mobility of students and the consequent move to internationalise quality assurance standards; employer demand for generic work skills; the exponential growth in knowledge and the growing importance of information and information literacy to economic and social development; the influence of technology on the modes of delivery of educational services; the re-emergence of student consumerism; and increased accountability demands for the use of government funds. These forces can be seen as strong reinforcers of the „production- measurement‟ approach to quality assurance.391
The rise of the quality agenda, the increasing use of performance indicators in managing higher education systems, and the growing role of market forces in shaping higher education further serve to substantiate Lyotard‟s view of the ascendance of the performativity principle.
On the other hand, there are more pragmatic and positive views. Castells, for instance, argues that:
The science and technology systems of the new economy (including, of course, the humanities) are equivalent to what were the factories of the industrial age. Not that manufacturing will disappear, but the new manufacturing of the twenty-first century (as well as agriculture and advanced services) will only be able to perform on the basis of a new, highly developed cultural, scientific and technological system.
If knowledge is the electricity of the new informational-international economy, then the institutions of higher education are the power sources on which the new development process must rely.393
One implication of this view is that it becomes crucially important for higher education to be managed well to meet the needs of the new knowledge economy.
The application of general theories and models of management to higher education institutions has been necessitated by their growing complexity and by the need to respond to growing external demands on higher education. Readings refers to this trend as the growing corporatisation of the university, evident in the increasing use of mission statements and goal directed planning, as well as the change in university management functions.394 An example of this is the increasing use of „executive Deans‟, whose job is to manage Faculties financially and otherwise, and who are no longer purely academic leaders. The trend in organising internal university structures appears to be toward compartmentalising divisions or faculties in such a way that they can be run on business lines, with an emphasis on income-generation and future sustainability, which is assured through market forces. The consequence of this has been a threatened existence for areas of study that lack immediate practical application and employability, such as the humanities and the pure sciences. 395
A second implication for the university of postmodern views of knowledge and performativity, is a change in the organisation of the university into discipline-based structures, or fairly autonomous academic departments. In modernist views of
393 Manuel Castells, “The university system: engine of development in the new world economy”, in Salmi, J.
and Verspoor, A.M. (eds) Revitalizing Higher Education, Pergamon, IAU Press, 1996, pp.14-15; in Robert Cowen, “Performativity, post-modernity and the university”, Comparative Education, 32 (2) 1996, p.253.
394 Bill Readings, The University in Ruins, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press,1997.
395 See Chapter 5 for a more in-depth discussion on these aspects.
knowledge, the whole of knowledge could be increased through each discipline pursuing truth in its own area, without interfering with other areas. There was a presumption of disciplinary autonomy, from whence derived disciplinary authority. Sociologists approached the pursuit of truth differently from political scientists and from biologists, but none presumed to be able to comment authoritatively on the methodology followed by the other. Knowledge as a whole, however, was viewed as being advanced, and it is this project that lent the university its coherence as an institution. Mourad argues that:
The disciplines are the manifestation of the absoluteness of the pursuit of knowledge for several reasons. First, the disciplines are generally regarded as comprising the foundations of the university in practice. Second, the disciplines as currently practiced, are primarily concerned with a theoretical knowledge of reality.
Third, since theory is expressed in disciplinary terms (whether in one or more disciplines), the disciplines are the prescribed structure for intellectual activity. For these reasons, the disciplines are, in effect, generally regarded as if they were absolute. They are thought to constitute the absolute foundation for what counts as legitimate intellectual activity in the modern university. Thus, „knowledge of reality‟ is, in practice, a reality that is composed of disciplines.396
Lyotard‟s theory of knowledge as a plurality of language games serves, however, to undermine the absolutist view of disciplines, regarding them rather as diffuse and changing areas of inquiry with artificially created boundaries. Disciplines function primarily as „top-down‟ structures, but in a postmodern university, forms of thought or different language games would emerge from particular, local, context-bound inquiries.
“Postmodern disciplines would be networks of particular inquiries that would always be subject to change, dissolution and replacement as different particular inquiries and linkages come into being and end”.397 Lyotard, in celebrating dissent and difference, argues for a proliferation of incommensurable language games, and contends that
“knowledge can also be freed by giving the public access to computerised information and by mounting a multidimensional assault on artificially created discipline boundaries.”398
396 Roger P. Mourad, “Postmodern interdisciplinarity”, The Review of Higher Education, 20 (2) 1997, p.129.
397 Ibid. p.132.
398 John Davies, “Postmodernism and the sociological study of the university”, The Review of Higher Education, 22 (3) 1999, p.319. See Chapter 10 for a fuller discussion of disciplinarity.