Changing the Academic Subject

Abstract

The paper examines the ways in which rationalities of risk currently work to produce the academic as a self-managing worker within the ‘post-welfare’ university as a risk-conscious organisation. It explores how risk minimisation as audit (individual, departmental, organisational), engages all individuals within the university in doing particular sorts of work on themselves, the work of turning themselves into ‘professional experts’. The theme is developed drawing on Mary Douglas’s (1966, 1990) theorising of ‘risk-as-danger’, Marilyn Strathern’s (1997) inquiry into the "audit explosion" in universities, Ericson and Haggerty’s (1997) work on knowledge and professionalism within the risk-conscious organisation, and Castel’s (1991) understanding of the changing nature of the practitioner-client relationship in risk-conscious organisations.