Academic Entrepreneurs in Higher Education – New Demands, Old Manners?

Zelinka, Jozef; Benasso, Sebastiano

Zusammenfassung

Over the last decades, education has been gradually permeated by economic, mainly neoliberal logic of relationships prompting academic subjects to new responsibilities and ways of behaviour. The main change is the shift towards an academic entrepreneurism, an output-oriented practice of constant self-exploitation, accountability, and competition. This logic has intensified in the course of the digital transformation of education, which opened the gate to global academic and knowledge markets. Consistently, academic subjects have developed a series of practices and strategies to cope with the changing nature of education and the academic profession. In the following article, we seek to dismantle processes of academic subjectivation under the neoliberal imperative in the context of a specific educational institution, the Aalto University. Conceived in recent years as one of the main drivers of the Finnish reform aimed at fostering an entrepreneurial shift to Higher Education, Aalto presents itself as an innovative and edge-cutting institution “shaping a sustainable future” by training “the game changers of tomorrow”. It thus appears as fitting context where to observe contemporary modes of academic subjectivation. The article is organised in in three main sections: First, we present the debate on the changing academic nature under the neoliberal economic models. Second, based on qualitative research with academics at Aalto University, we analyse the process of their subjectification as academic entrepreneurs through their expectations toward the academic institution they enrolled in. Third, with the results of the analysis we forward the critical debate on the new forms of subjectivation within the academic domain.