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The Time of Their Lives?: Academic workers in neoliberal time(s)

Bronwyn Davies
School of Education, University of Western Sydney, Bankstown Campus, NSW

Peter Bansel
School of Education, University of Western Sydney, Bankstown Campus, NSW

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the lives of academics as they are constituted in and through neoliberal time(s). We discuss those lives in relation to this present historical moment, with its particular features, emphases, and practices of government, and in this context explore the way time is constituted by academics and the way it constitutes those lives.

We consider neoliberal practices of work intensification and their impacts on the health and well-being of academic workers, and ask how else the relations between academic subjects and time might be constituted, and whether a different sense of time is required if academic work and the academic subject are to flourish.

Keywords

academic workers, neoliberal time(s), subjectivity, work intensification, workplace restructuring, stress and well-being

Article Text

The history of philosophy has thus far concentrated on two forms of temporality, one linear, progressive, continuing, even, regulated, and teleological … the other circular, repetitive, and thus infinite … The first form is best represented by a line, which can be divided into infinite units (recognizing time-measurement as arbitrary); the second, by a circle, which is capable of being traversed infinitely, in repetitions that are in some way different, and in other ways the same (Grosz 1995: 98).

This neoliberal moment in which we are each caught up (and that we will elaborate further below) depends on and generates a complex enmeshment in linear time, an end-product driven time that has power over individuals to control and shape their work-related actions, and also to erode their 'private' time and shape their subjective sense of embodiment and emotions. Neoliberal practices of government are themselves difficult to see and to analyse. Our task is to make neoliberalism visible as a particular historical moment with particular questionable effects-effects that are difficult to question because they are made to appear as the only way things could be in a globalised economy (Davies and Petersen 2005a). Part of the work we do here in making neoliberalism more visible and analysable is to call its hegemonic status into question.

The stories that we draw on, of time as it constitutes and is constituted in academic lives, were gathered in three different ways. First they were gathered in a week-long collective biography workshop run by the first author with colleagues from her own and from other Australian universities. In this workshop the participants talked about their experiences in neoliberal institutions and wrote their memories of key moments that emerged from their talk. The workshop was followed by a collaborative writing project in which the stories were analysed in terms of embodiment in neoliberal regimes (Davies et al 2005) . The second source of stories is from interviews conducted by the second author in a project examining the subjectivities of workers in Greater Western Sydney in relation to neoliberal management practices. The third source is from interviews conducted by the first author with twenty-six academics from Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and the US. The interviewees were from universities varying in status and size, in both major metropolitan universities and regional universities. Their status ranged from Senior Lecturer to Professor, with many of them having major administrative responsibilities at some time in their career. The interviews were an exploration of the impact of neoliberal management practices on their intellectual work.

At the end of one of these interviews with academics, after the tape was turned off, the interviewee, a Swedish philosopher, said it was her belief that academic life would not be so stressful if we had a different attitude to time.

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