The experimental rhythms of academic work

• In Event: ‘Doing Time’: Temporal Imaginaries, Performances, Practices, Infrastructures

Abstract

Austere funding climates and managerialism within universities has encouraged attempts to rationalise education and research in universities. However, unlike the bodily movements of pig iron workers, famously captured in F.W. Taylor’s time-motion studies, most academic work is organised around craft principles that prevent its precise measurement and application of rational time management. The devolution of responsibility for efficiency of academic labour to department managers, teachers, and researchers has nevertheless incentivised experiments and attempts to take control of the rhythms of craftwork by academics. This paper explores (1) the policy decisions that encourage academic workers to seek control of the rhythms of their labour and (2) the strategies that academics have developed to control those rhythms. While past research often points towards the political rationality of academic governance (neoliberalism, managerialism, New Public Management, marketisation) as driving the internalisation of a new work ethos (sometimes described as an enterprising self), this top-down focus is insufficient for understanding the organisation of time in academia. I argue that academic labour researchers should be seeking to understand academics’ role in determining their work routines. The experience and organisation of time in academia is not a top-down directive, but rather a dialectic of organisational change management and experiments with self-regulation that ordinarily emerge in social life.

Author

• Fabian Cannizzo, RMIT University