MARY HENKEL Academic Autonomy in a Changin Policy

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Academic identity and autonomy in a changing policy

environment

MARY HENKELCentre for the Evaluation of Public Policy, Brunel University, UK

Abstract. The article draws on two research projects to explore the implications of policy

change in the UK for academic identities within a predominantly communitarian theo-retical perspective. It focuses on biological scientists and science policies. It examines the

impacts of changes upon the dynamic between individuals, disciplines and universities

within which academic identities are formed and sustained and upon individual and

collective values central to academic identity, namely the primacy of the discipline in

academic working lives and academic autonomy. Challenges to these have been strong

but they have retained much of their normative power, even if the meaning of academic

autonomy has changed. Communitarian theories of academic identity may need to be

modified in the contemporary environment but they do not need to be abandoned.

Keywords: Academic identity, academic autonomy, disciplines.

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 dislo-

cation 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 afforded 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

Higher Education (2005) 49: 155–176 Springer 2005



universities within which academic identities are formed and sustained

and upon individual and collective values, sense of meaning and self-

esteem in the academic profession. These latter are key constructs in a

definition of identity derived from communitarian moral philosophy.

Central to the analysis are the challenges, first, to the power and

importance of the discipline in academic beliefs and working practices

and, second, to academic autonomy, individual and collective, in the

setting of agendas and the production of knowledge. The analysis is

developed from an examination of how UK research councils (as rep-

resenting a co-opted elite, the leaders of which are also influential

members of disciplinary communities) and higher education institutionshave responded to key policies.

The empirical basis of the article consists of data from interviews and

documentary analysis undertaken for two studies of higher education

reforms and science policy in the late 20th century. One was a three-

country study of England, Norway and Sweden and the other a study of

academic responses in England to the UK Foresight programme.1 The

interplay depicted in the article between actors, structures and policies is

located in England. It is necessary, therefore, to be cautious about

drawing broader conclusions from it. However, the pressures within

which it was generated, of shifting relationships between the state, the

market and academic actors and institutions pushing the latter intovarious forms of ‘academic capitalism’ are increasingly understood as

global phenomena (Slaughter and Leslie 1997). It is likely, therefore, at

least to have resonance beyond its empirical base.

Theories of identity

Before addressing our main agenda, we will set the theoretical

framework within which it is located by briefly reviewing communi-

tarian and some related theories of identity, setting alongside them

alternative perspectives that claim to reflect contemporary social

developments.

Essentialist and liberal individualist theories of identity have long

largely given way to theories centred on the idea that identity is con-

structed within the context of social institutions and relationships.

The social theories of identity by which this article has been most

strongly influenced are those of communitarian moral philosophy andsymbolic interactionism. In such theories, individuals are both distinc-

tive and socially embedded. However, identities are, first and foremost,

MARY HENKEL156



shaped and reinforced in and by strong and stable communities and the

social processes generated within them.

There are differences 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 find 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 defining community’ for the process. One function of such a com-munity 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; Vabø 2002).

Values are central to identity within this perspective. ‘To know whoyou 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, fulfilment 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 define the construc-

tion of identity (individual and collective) as a continuous and reflexive

process, a synthesis of (internal) self definition and the (external) defi-

nitions of oneself offered by others or an ‘internal–external dialectic of

identification’ (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

ACADEMIC IDENTITY ANDAUTONOMY 157



context of strong classification, the maintenance of strong boundaries

protecting the space between groups, disciplines or discourses.

An important criticism of communitarianism and symbolic interac-

tionism is that they do not deal with the functions of conflict and power

in creating and maintaining conditions of identity construction. These

ideas are, however, central in the work of Bernstein and Castells (1997).

For Bernstein, power relations create, legitimise and reproduce

boundaries between different categories of groups or different categories

of discourse. Castells, whose primary interest is in collective identities,

argues that ‘the social construction of identity always takes place in a

context marked by power relationships’ (7) and dominant institutionsdevelop legitimising identities, through which they ‘extend and

rationalise their domination’ (8).

In the late 20th century fundamental questions about the nature of

identity were raised. Some argued that the conditions for stable identities

were disappearing with the fragmentation and dislocation of social

institutions. Giddens (1991) defined identity as a ‘reflexively organised

project’ orchestrated primarily by the individual and multiple individual

choices that are ‘filtered through abstract systems’ as distinct from local

or visible institutions (5). His position is not too distant from that of the

postmodernists: that the stable and coherent identity is an illusion,

constructed out of individuals’ ‘narrative of the self’ (Hall 1992). Post-modernism celebrates fragmentation, fluidity and the transitory. Not

only does the postmodern subject neither have nor want a fixed identity

(‘the postmodern problem of identity is primarily how to avoid fixation

and keep the options open’ (Bauman, 1996: 18)) but s/he may be pulled

simultaneously in different directions by contradictory identities.

A basic assumption of this article is that all these perspectives and

debates are relevant to questions about the nature and construction of

contemporary academic identities. We follow Clark (1983) in defining,

first, the discipline and, second, the enterprise or higher education

institution as the key communities in which individual academics have

built their identities. Disciplines are given tangible form and defined

boundaries in the basic units or departments of universities and their

role in the shaping and the substance of academic identities is there

reinforced.

Membership of these interconnected communities has enabled aca-

demics in the UK to see themselves as belonging to a distinctive and

bounded sector of society, the normative power of which has been

sustained in part by a nexus of myths, socialisation processes and reg-

ulatory practices. However, it has also depended on the status of

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academics in the nation state (as definers, producers, transmitters and

arbiters of advanced knowledge) and on the power of academic elites to

secure widespread acceptance that the fulfilment of these roles required

a strongly bounded academic arena.

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 highereducation and science became increasingly important instruments of

national economic policy, it was more difficult to conceive of academics

sustaining bounded ‘spaces of action’ (Bauer et al. 1999) or self-regu-

lating communities. The relations between higher education and the

state were redefined. 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 aca-

demic communities and institutions not only to change their culturesand 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 univer-

sity vice chancellors, had increasingly to adopt managerial structures,

mechanisms and values. Rationalisation and indirect steerage of re-

search 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

scientific 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 con-

spicuous in research council award strategies, particularly in the Med-

ical 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.




Science policies, national and international, have been setting limits

upon academic autonomy since the early 1970s. The landmark here is

the Brooks Report for the OECD (1971) which laid down the principles

that governments rather than scientists must set over-riding research

priorities and that the key driver of science policies must be the

achievement of social and economic goals.

The idea and continued institutional reality of ‘pure science’ were put

under further pressure through the adoption by policy makers at the

beginning of the 1980s of the ambiguous and increasingly dominant

concept of ‘strategic research’ (Henkel and Kogan 1993; Rip 1997).

While it represented an acknowledgement by policy makers of thecontinuing importance of research that advances knowledge and

understanding, it also put limits on the right to undertake such ‘basic’ or

‘pure’ research. Public funding became increasingly conditional on the

defining of research as strategic, likely to make at least a background

contribution ‘to the solution of recognised current or future practical

problems’ (Irvine and Martin 1984).

The Foresight policies embraced in a range of countries since the

1980s seek to establish a more robust basis for the institutionalisation

of strategic research and more decisive funding priorities. They are

among a succession of policies promoting various patterns of exchange

and co-operation between university-based scientists and industry andincreased business sponsorship of research. These policies represent a

shift towards the idea that research carried out ‘in the context of

application’ (Gibbons et al. 1994) should become the norm. This is

consistent with the widespread abandonment of the linear-rational

model of the relationship between science, technology and innovation

that assumed a progression from a foundation of basic research to

applied research. The pathway to innovation is now seen as often

beginning in industry rather than the university (Martin and Night-

ingale 2000; Nelson and Winter 1982) and as entailing more variable,

complex, uncertain and interactive patterns of communication and

collaboration between the university and industry. Moreover, funda-

mental research is no longer regarded as the monopoly of universities

in some industries.

Belief in research and innovation network structures has become

orthodoxy in social theory and science policy. Network membership is

likely to have some fluidity and cross a number of divides: disciplinary,

departmental, institutional, sectoral and national. Although the

network is hardly a new concept for scientists, the degree of its

institutionalisation and the reach that is expected of it are.

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In the next sections we consider how shifts in assumptions about

structures, functions and boundary relationships manifested themselves

first in the research councils and secondly in higher education institutions.

Implications for research councils

Changes in the membership and governance of UK research councils

signify the end of a principle of expert-based division of labour in science

policies. Scientists can no longer be said to maintain a bounded space in

which they make autonomous decisions about the allocation of publicfunding and the development of science. Rather, they are operating in

interaction with, and formal subordination to, other interests, in a ‘zone

of negotiation’ (Neave 1988) and within a policy framework geared to-

wards the exploitability of science. It is also based on a definition of

research susceptible to easily adjustable and extra-scientific interpreta-

tion and gives high priority to the users, as distinct from the producers of

science. Research councils have supported initiatives towards transdis-

ciplinary co-operation at organisational and individual levels.

They have adopted a more explicit strategic planning role. Their

priority areas for funding provide strong framing for individual aca-

demic agendas. Moreover, they increasingly push applicants to makeconnections between their work and its applicability to non-scientific

problems and to make promises accordingly. There has been a drift of

evaluative criteria in that some types of award have been made

conditional on industrial sponsorship.

However, the traditional disciplines retain a strong influence on the

frameworks in which the research council agendas are constructed. In

the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)

traditional sub-divisions of the biological sciences are well represented.

Agendas have been influenced by some of the domain-based problems

identified in the Foresight process. (Ageing is a prime example in the

area of biological sciences.) However, council responses to the demand

to develop this field of research have been substantially within estab-

lished modes of operating and explanatory methodologies. The MRC’s

framework for development seems no different from that dominant in

the 1970s. ‘When we get to a problem like ageing we are trying to say

these are such difficult and important issues that it’s best to have a . . .

cross section of approaches to that problem in a given centre all the way

from the molecular up to the patient.’ (Chief Executive) ‘The subject is

hard to define – the biological basis of ageing is still at an early phase of




‘‘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 influence

significantly 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 redefined 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 different 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 illus-

trated the conservation strategies adopted by themselves and other

representatives of the co-opted elites. They included a redefinition 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; reas-

serting the distinction between the responsibility of the Foresight

machinery to promote transdisciplinary approaches to newly defined

fields and the narrower remit of the Research Councils. And they still

tended to define 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 influence, their

representatives are attempting to ‘translate’ policies so as to protect

dominant interests and values in their communities (Latour 1987; Vabø

2002). They no longer have a space of autonomous action but they are

attempting to maximise their influence 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

MARY HENKEL162



sustain an image approximating to a collegium or to the idea of the

institution as ‘holding company’ (Becher and Kogan 1980) for loosely

coupled and strong basic units. They, too, were making strategic

connections and critical investment decisions at institutional level.

The majority were substantially influenced by the model of the uni-

versity as corporate enterprise, at first in terms of corporate organisa-

tions with corporate goals and unifying, streamlined structures andstrategies. With a reduced unit of resource and institutional growth,

academic policy making moved from the department to the centre.

Institutional leaders, rather than protecting academics from external

assessments, tended to promote compliance and use them as instru-ments of change (Henkel 2000). Enhancing performance in the Funding

Councils’ research assessment exercises (RAEs) was, at least at first, a

key driver of policy; they had substantial implications for financial re-

sources and for institutional reputation. The RAE reinforced the

importance of the discipline and of research in academic lives, but

selectively. It was an instrument of the demise of under-performing

departments, as well as of enhancement of the successful, as research

became the subject of strategic planning and national policies of selec-

tivity and output performance related support were mirrored in the

institution. Differential power between departments and individuals has

become increasingly explicit.The need for income maximisation has driven universities to re-ap-

praise and multiply their functions and relationships. Vice chancellors

are increasingly prepared to describe universities as businesses. More of

them conform to new images or models, the ‘transgressive university’

(Scott 1997), the ‘triple helix’ model of the relationships between

industry, universities and government (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff

(1997). Institutions use financial incentives to promote inter-disciplinary

and domain-based research centres, external partnerships and networks,

as well as more free standing commercial ventures. Universities have

had to superimpose more complex organisational structures upon what

is increasingly line management of departments. Advisory, support and

external liaison units are in place to promote new policies. The securing

of intellectual property rights has become an increasingly significantpreoccupation, together with the encouragement of independent

commercial ventures by academic staff.

These developments have several consequences. While academic

development and strength are the stated aim of institutional leaders,

higher education institutions have become multi-professional organi-

sations. The academy has become a site of struggle between academics




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 affect academic working

lives but it may be a weaker source of identification.

The department is now only one, and not necessarily the most secure

or important, focus of academic activity and identification. 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 grantedas 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 dis-

tinctive activity is no longer tenable. While research reputation is the

strongest academic currency in higher education institutions, they ex-

pect its strategic potential to be exploited to enhance income and

broader influence 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.

Policy impacts on academic identities

We will consider first the implications for what have been important

myths in scientific communities and then move on more specifically to

individual identities.

Empirical study (Henkel 2000; Henkel et al. 2000; Kogan et al. 2000)

supports the view that myths and the values and beliefs they represent

can survive long after social science analysis has highlighted the con-

testable nature of the picture they present and/or policy and structural

changes in conflict with them have been made.

One of the most widely sustained myths we found in our empirical

work was of the serendipity of science. There was repeated reference to

‘accidental’ scientific discoveries of profound importance and resistance

to perceived attempts by government and the research councils to plan

science and steer research agendas. ‘Strategic research’ played virtually

no part in the discourse of academic scientists in the studies. Basic or

‘blue skies’ research, generated within the scientific disciplines,

MARY HENKEL164



continued to be regarded as the primary defining activity of academic

scientists, and not only by those who had decisively rejected shifting

their work into a context of application.

There was some evidence that attitudes to industry-based research

and opportunities for commercial exploitation were changing, particu-

larly among the emerging generation of biological scientists. However, it

was also evident that, for many of their seniors, the normative signifi-

cance of the boundary between the firm and the university as contexts of

research remained quite clear and a source of identity reinforcement.

One was concerned with research agendas ‘with scientific significance’

for a peer audience; the other with producing ‘results that have usefulpractical consequences’ (Mulkay 1977).

Growing university enthusiasm for academic capitalism, including

the assertion of intellectual property rights, means that increasing

numbers of biological scientists must review their position on the value

of ‘communism’ in science (Merton 1973). Attitudes towards sharing

information seem to have moved in different directions. The intense

competitiveness in some fields of biology has led some to collaborate

earlier and more actively with rivals in order not to risk losing out on

association with significant breakthroughs.

However, as industrially sponsored research students and various

forms of exchange between firms and basic units multiply, the impera-tives towards restricting communication grow, at least in the short term.

The problems are exacerbated by departmental mergers into larger units

in the name of integrated biology and the concentration of research.

Large departments may be host to a range of commercial interests. This

may restrict what can be shared not only between academics but also

their graduate students. Practically, it might also mean tighter planning

and collaboration within departments as to their industrial connections

and their recruitment of doctoral students. Meanwhile, it seems that

larger questions to do with rethinking assumptions about science as a

public institution and science as public knowledge were not being ad-

dressed by scientists in our studies or by their universities. The nor-

mative force of the linkage between ‘the institutional conception of

science as part of the public domain’ and ‘the imperative for commu-

nication of findings’ (Merton 1973: 273) seemed certainly to have

weakened.

What was clearer was that the research policies being pursued at

national and institutional level were raising fundamental questions for

what it means to be an academic. While at one level they were rein-

forcing the value of research, they were also making the right to research




conditional on attracting income and delivering regular assessable

output that met increasingly demanding evaluative criteria.

Among university scientists, research has been regarded as essential

to academic identity. Two mid-career biochemists in pre-1992 univer-

sities gave accounts of their struggles to get the external sponsorship

they needed to pursue their research and regain a clear research identity

after they had been set back by other administrative and teaching

responsibilities. Both felt deeply their loss of a research identity.

This private sense of loss has for many become a public loss of status

and power, as a consequence of the RAE, which has created new cat-

egories of academic, ‘research-active’ and ‘research non-active’ (Henkel1999). Only those defined by their departments and institutions as ‘re-

search active’ can be included in the RAE. The definitions are, again,

output-based.

National commitment to policies of research selectivity and con-

centration is intensifying (DfES 2003) and public funding harder to

secure. This means that more academic scientists are at risk of becoming

‘research non-active’, not only because funding is being more rigorously

concentrated, but also because competitiveness in many research mar-

kets is strongly correlated with and, to some extent, affected by RAE

gradings.

Identity and the discipline

Across our higher education reform study, the two things that emerged

as most important for academic identities were the discipline and aca-

demic freedom. They were in many cases the sources of meaning and

self-esteem, as well as being what was most valued. Because it is often

difficult to disentangle these three dimensions of identity, I will deal with

them together in the discussion of the implications of policy change for,

first, the discipline and, later, academic freedom.

Policy changes highlighted are the development of strategic research,drives to heighten the importance of the domain or social problem

solution rather than the discipline as the framework for research, and

the promotion of academic-industry collaboration.

As compared with physics, there is less evidence among biological

scientists of shared myths or emotional commitment to the idea of a

disciplinary culture or community. Our informants tended to identify

themselves with science and the scientific community and with their own

MARY HENKEL166



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 con-

nections being made by academics, although the current fluidity of the

boundaries within the broad area of biological sciences may also be

influential.

Nevertheless, making a distinctive, individual contribution in a

specified 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 speciali-sation 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

field 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 scientific

fields 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 defined. Manyacademics are embarking upon new roles and relationships within a

relatively stable epistemological and value framework.

Even in fields such as pharmaceuticals, where firms have invested

heavily in their own research, what many industries want from con-

nections with universities is early access to scientific advance. Rela-

tionships 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 fields 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.




Our studies afforded examples of academics exploiting new sources

of domain-based funding and of actual or potential shifts in research

context from discipline to domain. Changes in funding could mean

introduction to new multi-disciplinary and, indeed, transdisciplinary

networks, as for cell biologists taking advantage of the BBSRC ageing

initiative. Young neuroscientists were said to be attracted to work in the

ageing domain, because it now offered them the chance to work at the

leading edge of their field. Some domain-based research centres, backed

by multiple funding, had achieved a substantial shift in institutional

balance of power. Such centres could offer a context in which individ-

uals felt more valued than in a discipline-based department, where theymight be isolated from the main streams of inquiry. Institutional poli-

cies of critical mass can isolate members who fall outside the depart-

ment’s selected areas of concentration.

However, there was little evidence that changes in context or one-off

funding initiatives would undermine the discipline-based reputational

system or shift motivations focused on the creation of knowledge within

an established individual research agenda. A researcher in cellular

ageing had been co-opted to help formulate the BBSRC’s initiative on

ageing and become part of a variegated set of networks as a result.

However, this had made no difference to his ambition or to the

frameworks of his inquiry. ‘My research is driven by trying to under-stand processes that go on in biology. If there is some way that I can

relate that to a product or to a condition, clearly that is in everyone’s

interest but it is not the driving force. I want to understand why cells age

in culture, because it adds to the sum total of human knowledge.’

(interview, Foresight study)

Only one of our informants (originally a veterinary scientist) had a

different perspective on motivation. He worked closely with a phar-

maceutical company. Describing himself as once primarily interested in

establishing his identity through contribution to scientific truths, he

went on, ‘I think now I’m realistic enough to realise that science tells

you things which mean that you have to ask more questions to

understand them. . .

It’s very rare that you are ever going to [make a

discovery that stands on its own] . . . Whereas if we’re thinking very hard

about going somewhere commercially with [a line of research], then you

can think, ‘‘I did this and it generated a new line of treatment of dis-

eases.’’ (interview, Foresight study).

There is an argument that multi-pronged approaches can stimulate

the development of new domain-oriented research fields. A cell biologist

involved in initiatives to develop the field of tissue engineering

MARY HENKEL168



articulated such an approach. It included longer term funding, targeted

on selected highly talented young cell biologists, and the development of

effective transfer mechanisms (van den Daele et al. 1977), such as

journals, conferences, a new or refocused discipline-based learned

society, that would in turn generate new networks. He was, however,

clear about the difficulties. ‘In cell biology (a vibrant research field in the

UK) the tissue engineering issues are regarded as very low priority. They

are applied and not really regarded as where someone in physical cell

biology will gain much reputation or academic position. Work on these

issues is not seen as necessarily answering key questions of cell biology.’

(Interview, Foresight study)The same person articulated the cognitive dissonance between dis-

cipline-based and domain-oriented research. ‘I am all for supporting the

very best in science but I think it is difficult for these sharp scientists [in

the MRC committees]. . . to see that the problems faced by the person

trying to tackle [a clinical condition] are of a different dimension from

those presenting to them with their nematodes. It is stretching the mind

in a rather different way than the very clean system. If you use a clean

system, you get good answers but it will take a long time for that to give

spin-off to the others.’ His analysis resembles Mitroff and Mason’s

(1981) conceptualisation of ‘tame’ and ‘wicked’ problems in the context

of social science.Overall, then, it seems that it is possible, particularly through long

term funding policies, to reshape the conceptual landscape and the re-

search contexts within which people think about the development of

their work. However, the disciplinary or ‘mode l’ forms of knowledge

production are well defended, partly by entrenched reward systems and

interests but also by values and deeply ingrained cognitive structures

and modes of inquiry.

Policy change and academic autonomy

Apart from the importance of the discipline, the most frequently dis-

cussed value in our study of higher education reform was academic

freedom but it was given a variety of meanings, individual and collective.

They included being individually free to choose and pursue one’s own

research agenda and being trusted to manage the pattern of one’s own

working life and priorities. For some, it was a matter of quality of life

and perhaps the main reward of an academic career. However, it had a

collective significance, too. Underlying many of the interviews were




more basic assumptions: that individual freedom was a function of

academic control of the professional arena of teaching and research,

that these were necessary conditions for academic work and therefore

the conditions in which their academic identity was grounded.

Neave (1988) defines academic autonomy as ‘the right of staff in

higher education to determine the nature of their work’ (43) but indi-

cates that the conception of the university within which it was generatedis one of a community of scholars, as distinct from that of a public

service. The rest of this article will explore continuity and change in the

value of academic autonomy. It will consider choice and control of

research agendas in a context where the understanding of the universityas a community of scholars has given way to one of multiple meanings.

The university is a community of scholars but it is also a public

service and often explicitly a business. It is publicly accountable to the

state and creates and responds to multiple markets. The limitation of

academic rights of self-determination and self-regulation impacts at the

level of the basic unit and the individual, as well as that of macro

policies and systems. Academic institutions and individuals have to

engage with competing rights and accept more obligations. They have to

work within externally defined rules and evaluative criteria, utility and

value for money, as well as scientific excellence. There has been

‘epistemic drift’ (Elzinga 1985)As boundaries have become more permeable and transgressive,

academics must operate within more open and contested arenas. They

must rely less on assumed rights and more on management of a greater

variety of relationships within and beyond the academic world.

Autonomy is not a matter of what is given but, as Bauer et al. (1999)

argue, the extent to which it is ‘realised’. It is true that, for some, the

ideal mode of research is still to create a niche or bounded space, in

which, free of external interference, it is possible to sustain an individual

epistemic identity and a distinctive agenda at the head of a research

group. Most regard such ‘negative freedom’ as a thing of the past, not

only because of a changed policy environment but also because devel-

opments in science necessitate collaboration outside as well as inside

previously well-established disciplinary boundaries.Increasingly, choice and control of academic agendas are not so

much a matter of freedom from external interference as of the power to

manage multiple relationships. Individual contribution to the solution

of problems identified within the discipline is pursued within intra-dis-

ciplinary, inter-disciplinary and transdisciplinary (Gibbons et al. 1994)

MARY HENKEL170



relationships. In some cases, primarily instrumental exchange relation-

ships are made with industry to secure the financial support needed to

sustain the agenda. Other types of exchange might be involved, of access

to samples or market intelligence for access to scientific advance.

Relationships with academic or extra-academic bodies may, as in all

these cases, be centred on an existing well-defined individual or research

group programme. Alternative modes of working may stem from a

belief that research agendas are best constructed or reshaped withincollaborative relationships. These may be either scientific 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,

scientific collaborative or hybrid collaborative, need the agenda be fun-

damentally altered (cf. in the context of social science, Shove 2000). If it

is, that may be the outcome of free exchange or collaborative endeav-

our, 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 differ widely, particularly in a stratified university systemlike 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 fields. Researchers with limited scientific capital may be forced

to move out of highly populated fields. Others, unsuccessful in

obtaining funding from academic sources may have no alternative but

to find 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.




Conversely, biochemists in the life sciences department of a new

university with strong policies of selectivity and concentration were

forced to shift their research focus and to draw on different combina-

tions of their expertise to collaborate with those in the department who

could attract funding. Their capacity to determine the nature of their

work was diminished.

Autonomy is integrally related to academic identity. In a climate of

collectivity in research and growing complexity and heterogeneity of

working relationships, the idea of the individual controlling his or her

own research destiny and acquiring a distinctive identity and reputation

persists, at least for some. It is, in part, matter of managing multiplerelationships in which the researcher’s function may vary but involve

different forms of research, technology transfer, defining new agendas,

indicating new areas of development in the discipline, joining new,

sometimes speculative networks and so on. The context is one where

more research is being undertaken within domains defined by multiple

interests, whose involvement in their development and revision is often

continuing, but scientific authority can be a decisive source of influence.

Epistemic identities can be enhanced in the process.

However, this is an idealised picture, realisable by those with ample

scientific and/or academic capital. The context is not only more plu-

ralist. It is increasingly dominated by money, the costs of research, thefinancial needs of universities and the potential returns from scientific

success. These are potentially a threat to research coherence and con-

trol, even for the successful. Meanwhile, perhaps for growing numbers,

individual autonomy, in the redefined terms that emphasise the man-

agement of multi-modality (Kogan and Henkel 1983) or multiple rela-

tionships in the creation and sustainment of the research agenda, may

be hard to achieve. Collective reputation may become more important.

Conclusion

The starting point for this article was that academic identity is a func-

tion of community membership and, in the case of academics, interac-

tion 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

MARY HENKEL172



polity, a more powerful and more corporate body. At the same time, it

has been an instrument of fragmentation, embracing conflicting 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 chal-

lenge as organising structure for knowledge production and transmis-

sion, as guardian of academic culture, and as nurturer of academic

identity. However, it has been strongly defended by elite members and

remains a powerful influence in reward systems and in the creation andmaintenance of academic agendas. It remains a strong source of aca-

demic identity, in terms of what is important and what gives meaning

and self-esteem.

It seems that while epistemic and organisational boundaries in aca-

demia have weakened, the strength of disciplinary community mem-

bership 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 theconcept 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 stratified 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.




Notes

1. The study of higher education reforms was carried out by teams from the Universities

of Bergen, Norway, Brunel, England and Go ¨ teborg, Sweden. The findings have been

published in five 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 findings 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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MARY HENKEL Academic Autonomy in a Changin Policy