With an incisive reform in 2002, Austrian universities have undergone radical structural change. The formerly stagnant Austrian university landscape became a model student for university managerialism in Europe. Mechanisms for defining targets, measuring performance and evaluating success have become increasingly important for the career advancement of academics.
The managerialization of career models provokes hopes that a more formalised system limits the space for inequality based on gender stereotypes: What counts is quantifiable academic performance, not the gender of the academic. However, gendered substructures persist at universities and research institutes. Important career resources are still unequally distributed among men and women, e.g. resources enabling flexibility and (international) mobility of academics. Furthermore, core concepts of the discourse of meritocracy, such as performance and excellence, are biased towards a male dominated image of the ideal academic and have exclusionary effects.
The new form of governance also affects the conceptualization of the academic subject: Various forms of control and comparability have changed the working conditions and requirements for academics and entail new forms of self-governing. In this context, I am interested in processes of subjectivation among academic junior staff against the backdrop of the managerial university and the inequality dimensions of class and gender. From a Foucauldian perspective I analyze processes of self-governance and governance by others and question them in terms of their gendered and class-incorporated mechanisms.
I will present the results of 18 qualitative interviews with junior academics from heterogenous disciplines in 9 Austrian universities and want to tackle questions such as: How do junior academics deal with the requirements of the managerial university? How do they conceptualize academia and the academic identity? Which forms of re-interpretations, resistance, compliance or micro-emancipation can be identified? How do the inequality dimensions gender and class play a role in those mechanisms of subjectivation?
