Higher Education (2005) 49: 155176

Springer 2005

Academic identity and autonomy in a changing policy

environment
MARY HENKEL
Centre 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 theoretical 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
modied 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 dislocation 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 aorded 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

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universities within which academic identities are formed and sustained

and upon individual and collective values, sense of meaning and selfesteem in the academic profession. These latter are key constructs in a
denition of identity derived from communitarian moral philosophy.
Central to the analysis are the challenges, rst, 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 representing a co-opted elite, the leaders of which are also inuential
members of disciplinary communities) and higher education institutions
have 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 threecountry 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 into
various 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 briey reviewing communitarian and some related theories of identity, setting alongside them
alternative perspectives that claim to reect contemporary social
developments.
Essentialist and liberal individualist theories of identity have long
largely given way to theories centred on the idea that identity is constructed within the context of social institutions and relationships.
The social theories of identity by which this article has been most
strongly inuenced are those of communitarian moral philosophy and
symbolic interactionism. In such theories, individuals are both distinctive and socially embedded. However, identities are, rst and foremost,

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shaped and reinforced in and by strong and stable communities and the
social processes generated within them.
There are dierences 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 nd 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 dening community for the process. One function of such a community 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; Vab 2002).
Values are central to identity within this perspective. To know who
you 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, fullment 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 dene the construction of identity (individual and collective) as a continuous and reexive
process, a synthesis of (internal) self denition and the (external) denitions of oneself oered by others or an internalexternal dialectic of
identication (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

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context of strong classication, the maintenance of strong boundaries

protecting the space between groups, disciplines or discourses.
An important criticism of communitarianism and symbolic interactionism is that they do not deal with the functions of conict 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 dierent categories of groups or dierent 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 institutions
develop 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) dened identity as a reexively organised
project orchestrated primarily by the individual and multiple individual
choices that are ltered 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). Postmodernism celebrates fragmentation, uidity and the transitory. Not
only does the postmodern subject neither have nor want a xed identity
(the postmodern problem of identity is primarily how to avoid xation
and keep the options open (Bauman, 1996: 18)) but s/he may be pulled
simultaneously in dierent 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 dening,
rst, 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 dened
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 academics 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 regulatory practices. However, it has also depended on the status of

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

arbiters of advanced knowledge) and on the power of academic elites to
secure widespread acceptance that the fullment 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 higher
education and science became increasingly important instruments of
national economic policy, it was more dicult to conceive of academics
sustaining bounded spaces of action (Bauer et al. 1999) or self-regulating communities. The relations between higher education and the
state were redened. 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 academic communities and institutions not only to change their cultures
and 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 university vice chancellors, had increasingly to adopt managerial structures,
mechanisms and values. Rationalisation and indirect steerage of research 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
scientic 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 conspicuous in research council award strategies, particularly in the Medical 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.

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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 the
continuing 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
dening 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 and
increased 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 Nightingale 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, fundamental 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 uidity 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
rst 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 public
funding 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 towards the exploitability of science. It is also based on a denition of
research susceptible to easily adjustable and extra-scientic interpretation and gives high priority to the users, as distinct from the producers of
science. Research councils have supported initiatives towards transdisciplinary 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 academic agendas. Moreover, they increasingly push applicants to make
connections between their work and its applicability to non-scientic
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 inuence 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 inuenced by some of the domain-based problems
identied in the Foresight process. (Ageing is a prime example in the
area of biological sciences.) However, council responses to the demand
to develop this eld of research have been substantially within established modes of operating and explanatory methodologies. The MRCs
framework for development seems no dierent from that dominant in
the 1970s. When we get to a problem like ageing we are trying to say
these are such dicult and important issues that its 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 dene the biological basis of ageing is still at an early phase of

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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 inuence
signicantly 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 redened 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 dierent 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 illustrated the conservation strategies adopted by themselves and other
representatives of the co-opted elites. They included a redenition 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; reasserting the distinction between the responsibility of the Foresight
machinery to promote transdisciplinary approaches to newly dened
elds and the narrower remit of the Research Councils. And they still
tended to dene 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 inuence, their
representatives are attempting to translate policies so as to protect
dominant interests and values in their communities (Latour 1987; Vab
2002). They no longer have a space of autonomous action but they are
attempting to maximise their inuence 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

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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 inuenced by the model of the university as corporate enterprise, at rst in terms of corporate organisations with corporate goals and unifying, streamlined structures and
strategies. 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 instruments of change (Henkel 2000). Enhancing performance in the Funding
Councils research assessment exercises (RAEs) was, at least at rst, a
key driver of policy; they had substantial implications for nancial resources 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 selectivity and output performance related support were mirrored in the
institution. Dierential power between departments and individuals has
become increasingly explicit.
The need for income maximisation has driven universities to re-appraise 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 Leydesdor
(1997). Institutions use nancial 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 signicant
preoccupation, together with the encouragement of independent
commercial ventures by academic sta.
These developments have several consequences. While academic
development and strength are the stated aim of institutional leaders,
higher education institutions have become multi-professional organisations. The academy has become a site of struggle between academics

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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 aect academic working
lives but it may be a weaker source of identication.
The department is now only one, and not necessarily the most secure
or important, focus of academic activity and identication. 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 granted
as 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 distinctive activity is no longer tenable. While research reputation is the
strongest academic currency in higher education institutions, they expect its strategic potential to be exploited to enhance income and
broader inuence 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 rst the implications for what have been important
myths in scientic communities and then move on more specically 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 contestable nature of the picture they present and/or policy and structural
changes in conict 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 scientic 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 scientic disciplines,

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continued to be regarded as the primary dening 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, particularly among the emerging generation of biological scientists. However, it
was also evident that, for many of their seniors, the normative signicance of the boundary between the rm and the university as contexts of
research remained quite clear and a source of identity reinforcement.
One was concerned with research agendas with scientic signicance
for a peer audience; the other with producing results that have useful
practical 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 dierent directions. The intense
competitiveness in some elds of biology has led some to collaborate
earlier and more actively with rivals in order not to risk losing out on
association with signicant breakthroughs.
However, as industrially sponsored research students and various
forms of exchange between rms and basic units multiply, the imperatives 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 addressed by scientists in our studies or by their universities. The normative force of the linkage between the institutional conception of
science as part of the public domain and the imperative for communication of ndings (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 reinforcing the value of research, they were also making the right to research

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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 universities 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 categories of academic, research-active and research non-active (Henkel
1999). Only those dened by their departments and institutions as research active can be included in the RAE. The denitions are, again,
output-based.
National commitment to policies of research selectivity and concentration 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 markets is strongly correlated with and, to some extent, aected 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 academic 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
dicult to disentangle these three dimensions of identity, I will deal with
them together in the discussion of the implications of policy change for,
rst, 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 scientic community and with their own

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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 connections being made by academics, although the current uidity of the
boundaries within the broad area of biological sciences may also be
inuential.
Nevertheless, making a distinctive, individual contribution in a
specied 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 specialisation 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
eld 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 scientic
elds 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 dened. Many
academics are embarking upon new roles and relationships within a
relatively stable epistemological and value framework.
Even in elds such as pharmaceuticals, where rms have invested
heavily in their own research, what many industries want from connections with universities is early access to scientic advance. Relationships 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 elds 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.

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Our studies aorded 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 oered them the chance to work at the
leading edge of their eld. Some domain-based research centres, backed
by multiple funding, had achieved a substantial shift in institutional
balance of power. Such centres could oer a context in which individuals felt more valued than in a discipline-based department, where they
might be isolated from the main streams of inquiry. Institutional policies of critical mass can isolate members who fall outside the departments selected areas of concentration.
However, there was little evidence that changes in context or one-o
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 BBSRCs initiative on
ageing and become part of a variegated set of networks as a result.
However, this had made no dierence to his ambition or to the
frameworks of his inquiry. My research is driven by trying to understand 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 everyones
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
dierent perspective on motivation. He worked closely with a pharmaceutical company. Describing himself as once primarily interested in
establishing his identity through contribution to scientic truths, he
went on, I think now Im realistic enough to realise that science tells
you things which mean that you have to ask more questions to
understand them. . . Its very rare that you are ever going to [make a
discovery that stands on its own] . . . Whereas if were 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 diseases. (interview, Foresight study).
There is an argument that multi-pronged approaches can stimulate
the development of new domain-oriented research elds. A cell biologist
involved in initiatives to develop the eld of tissue engineering

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

on selected highly talented young cell biologists, and the development of
eective 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 diculties. In cell biology (a vibrant research eld 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 discipline-based and domain-oriented research. I am all for supporting the
very best in science but I think it is dicult 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 dierent dimension from
those presenting to them with their nematodes. It is stretching the mind
in a rather dierent 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-o to the others. His analysis resembles Mitro and Masons
(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 research 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 discussed 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 ones own
research agenda and being trusted to manage the pattern of ones 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 signicance, too. Underlying many of the interviews were

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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) denes academic autonomy as the right of sta in
higher education to determine the nature of their work (43) but indicates that the conception of the university within which it was generated
is 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 university
as 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 dened rules and evaluative criteria, utility and
value for money, as well as scientic 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 developments 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 identied within the discipline is pursued within intra-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary and transdisciplinary (Gibbons et al. 1994)

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171

relationships. In some cases, primarily instrumental exchange relationships are made with industry to secure the nancial support needed to
sustain the agenda. Other types of exchange might be involved, of access
to samples or market intelligence for access to scientic advance.
Relationships with academic or extra-academic bodies may, as in all
these cases, be centred on an existing well-dened individual or research
group programme. Alternative modes of working may stem from a
belief that research agendas are best constructed or reshaped within
collaborative relationships. These may be either scientic 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,
scientic collaborative or hybrid collaborative, need the agenda be fundamentally altered (cf. in the context of social science, Shove 2000). If it
is, that may be the outcome of free exchange or collaborative endeavour, 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 dier widely, particularly in a stratied university system
like 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 elds. Researchers with limited scientic capital may be forced
to move out of highly populated elds. Others, unsuccessful in
obtaining funding from academic sources may have no alternative but
to nd 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.

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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 dierent combinations 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 multiple
relationships in which the researchers function may vary but involve
dierent forms of research, technology transfer, dening 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 dened by multiple
interests, whose involvement in their development and revision is often
continuing, but scientic authority can be a decisive source of inuence.
Epistemic identities can be enhanced in the process.
However, this is an idealised picture, realisable by those with ample
scientic and/or academic capital. The context is not only more pluralist. It is increasingly dominated by money, the costs of research, the
nancial needs of universities and the potential returns from scientic
success. These are potentially a threat to research coherence and control, even for the successful. Meanwhile, perhaps for growing numbers,
individual autonomy, in the redened terms that emphasise the management of multi-modality (Kogan and Henkel 1983) or multiple relationships 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 function of community membership and, in the case of academics, interaction 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

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173

polity, a more powerful and more corporate body. At the same time, it
has been an instrument of fragmentation, embracing conicting 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 challenge as organising structure for knowledge production and transmission, as guardian of academic culture, and as nurturer of academic
identity. However, it has been strongly defended by elite members and
remains a powerful inuence in reward systems and in the creation and
maintenance of academic agendas. It remains a strong source of academic identity, in terms of what is important and what gives meaning
and self-esteem.
It seems that while epistemic and organisational boundaries in academia have weakened, the strength of disciplinary community membership 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 the
concept 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 stratied 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.

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Notes
1. The study of higher education reforms was carried out by teams from the Universities
of Bergen, Norway, Brunel, England and Goteborg, Sweden. The ndings have been
published in ve 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 ndings 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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