Being Academic: Online Teaching and the Managed University

Academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997) and the globalisation of political economies at the beginning of the twenty first century have led to a further destabilisation of the patterns of university professional work that had developed over the past hundred years. Faculties are now positioned squarely in the marketplace and increasing competition amongst universities for revenue producing students has led many universities to enthusiastically embrace the marketing possibilities of online teaching and learning and the discourse of the market place. Globally, universities are increasingly promoting online teaching, so it was timely to carry out this research which places the case study of one academic community within the wider global context. Drawing particularly on the theoretical resources of Foucault this work presents the lived experience of being academic and the often contradictory subjectivities within the power relations of the managed university in the 21st century.