Introduction

The landscape of science policy today is dominated by two transformative trends that social science academics have critically analysed as ‘academic capitalism’ (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997, 2001), referring primarily to the United States, and the ‘audit culture’ (Power, 1997, 1999; Strathern, 2000), of which the United Kingdom seems to be the strongest proponent.Footnote 1 Academic capitalism emphasises the connections between public research institutions and the private sector, the conversion of knowledge into intellectual property and an overall entrepreneurial spirit in science. The audit culture is primarily concerned with the assessment of research, the efficiency of public funding and the social accountability of research. During the last 10 years, the elements of academic capitalism and the audit culture have also gradually become stronger in Czech research policy (Linková and Stöckelová, 2012; Stöckelová, 2012).

These changes are, however, far from linear and the current situation is by no means a simple conflict between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ that can be associated with specific interest groups. In this article I focus on heterogeneity in science as regards its logics, regimes and interests. I make use of Law’s (1994) concept of modes of ordering, which he developed in a study he did of a physics lab in the United Kingdom in the early 1990s. Drawing upon the sensibilities of Actor Network Theory (Law, 1992; Law and Hassard, 1999), modes of ordering are not concerned with and enacted through simply discursive means, but also involve the material, technological and bodily realities of science. They refer to transversal and recursive processes that relate to forms and contents of collaboration, research assessment and funding, scientific careers, the public engagement of researchers and their intimate personhood. They are concerned with and differ by their answers to fundamental questions such as what is good and meaningful science or what the motivations for engaging in it are (Law, 1994).

In the first part of the article, I outline the different modes of ordering that I identified in the department selected for study. While Law focuses primarily on the organisation and steering of science and his key characters are managers, I extend my attention to the other above-named dimensions of science as well. In the second part I am concerned with the ways in which different modes of ordering coexist in a department. The very definition of these modes and the switches and interfaces between them will be analysed as important sites of power (re)generation and also possible resistance. Crucially, I do not interpret this multiplicity of modes as a residuum of the ‘old’, public knowledge regime of science (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997), not yet extinct under current policy aims. On the contrary, focusing on the impureness and heterogeneity of reality, I look at how the various modes are strategically used even by proponents of the transformation towards academic capitalism and an audit logic. The key questions addressed in this article are: How do the current transformations of academic governance towards academic capitalism and an audit culture play out in career and research practice at a university department? Whom and what do they constrain, whom and what do they empower, and how? And what, especially, are the consequences of this for the working conditions and futures of junior staff?

The Field Site and Methods

The following analysis draws upon ethnographic data generated in a social science department and its attached research centre. The majority of the data presented were generated within an international research project titled ‘Knowledge, institutions and gender: An East-West comparative study (KNOWING), 2006–2008’, which was funded through the 6th Framework Programme of the European Commission. There were five research teams from Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Slovakia and the United Kingdom, and each team carried out ethnographic fieldwork in two academic institutions — in the social sciences and the biosciences. In 2006–2007 I conducted research in a Czech social science department. There were two main reasons for choosing this field site: (1) the department was based at a well-established public university and is one of the few major institutions in a particular field of the social sciences in the country;Footnote 2 (2) the university and the faculty were explicit about their interest in new styles of academic governance. I conducted the ethnographic study in collaboration with my colleague Alice Červinková. In this article I draw upon: (1) my own ethnographic fieldnotes; (2) interviews with staff done by my colleague or myself (a total of 20 interviews were conducted, 10 with senior staff and 10 with junior staff or Ph.D. students working in the department or the research centre); (3) group interviews that my colleague and I conducted together (one interview was done with seven Ph.D. students employed at the research centre and the second was done with 10 members of the department).

As with any qualitative study, the interpretations and conclusions subsequently presented cannot be automatically generalised and transposed elsewhere, but they nevertheless speak to the wider changes under way in academia in the Czech Republic. Given the position of the university institution and the department, realities under study not only reflect but also significantly contribute to the development of the social sciences in the country. I fully came to realise this after one research centre meeting, when I left with one of the Ph.D. students who had a part-time research contract in the centre. She was very disenchanted. Among other things, her research team leader had just announced, without any prior consultation with her, that she would be a part of a ‘compact research team’ with two senior researchers, with whom she had no desire to collaborate. She told me she was considering resigning from her research position and starting a fulltime job at a non-governmental organisation that she had already been working at for some (she soon after did indeed leave the research centre and her Ph.D. studies). As we walked together, she asked me what I, as an ‘impartial observer’, thought about the matter. Confronted with her question, I realised that I am by no means an impartial observer. What I was witnessing was the formation of the future of social science in the country, which I wanted to be a part of.

What was happening in front of my eyes was not simply a local issue. And it was not simply a mechanical application of national or European research policy. The institution under study is one of the places where the new policy rules and regimes are being, so to speak, ‘tested’. Academic institutions are not simply the objects but also actors of these policies, as they translate them into their institutional operations and implement them through their representatives’ participation in various policy and professional bodies that co-shape these very policies. It is at the level of academic intuitions where (junior) researchers are ‘selected’ for their capacity for and interest in working in academia and consequently where they begin to form the field’s national community. During the fieldwork there were several people who left the institutions with whom I would have wished to share (future) social science in the country.

Modes of Ordering Played Out

I will now introduce Law (1994) and his modes of orderings as I witnessed them played out in the department. My account will put a special focus on institutional conditions, team collaboration, researchers’ career trajectories and the science–society relation, and on the positions, views and future outlooks of junior researchers.Footnote 3 I will start by looking at the two modes of ordering that could be assumed to best correspond to the current transformation trends in science policy, which Law refers to as administration and enterprise, and I will then move on to vocation and vision.

Administration

In the mode of administration an organisation is enacted as a hierarchy of offices with strictly defined tasks and rules of work, rewards and career progression (Law, 1994). In the research centre’s team, which is primarily managed in this mode, planning is key: there is an annual work plan for activities and publications, fulfilment of which is later checked. The research team is headed by the centre’s director, who decides on who collaborates with whom. Team meetings take place weekly, but junior researchers lack a sense of belonging and a collective spirit: ‘We are five or so and it is not possible to talk about a team in terms of team spirit and a common goal’ (interview, female researcher).Footnote 4 The meetings are more about checking that tasks have been fulfilled than they are about intellectual exchange. The research activities take place under the heavy shadow of the project’s budget and in nearly permanent reference to administrative accountability to the project’s funding agency. Audit logic is omnipresent here.

External rules and environments are taken as a given in this mode. This was especially evident in relation to the research assessment.Footnote 5 For example, while the director expressed his reservations about the assessment criteria in a critical tone on several occasions, he nonetheless held the centre’s researchers to the strict application of these criteria. ‘We can doubt whether the evaluation of publications is reasonable or not, but we have to accept it as a social fact in the narrow sense of something external to us which puts us under pressure’ (interview, director of the research centre). In a speech he made at a pre-Christmas meeting of the centre’s staff, he said of the national evaluation that ‘it is clear that screenings are taking place’ (fieldnotes). He used the same word as that paradigmatically employed in reference to the Communist Party’s political screenings at the onset of the ‘normalisation’ period after 1968 in Czechoslovakia. It is noteworthy that the key power mechanism of screenings is not to discover the ‘true inner’ attitudes of people but to test their loyalty to the rules and norms everybody knows but nobody believes in.Footnote 6 This approach to research assessments can be then seen as part of a wider societal process of ‘neonormalisation’ in the Czech Republic, which, according to some authors (e.g., Bělohradský, 2007; Škabraha, 2008), has been depoliticising the Czech public space since the late 1990s.

As Law stresses, no mode of ordering is, in principle, morally or otherwise superior to others. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Administration at its best offers clear rules for research collaboration and career progression. But it also may take the shape of depersonalised formalism and hierarchy, and this is indeed how I mostly encountered it in the department. It was the core criticism raised by junior researchers, who characterised the team (and to an extent the whole research centre) as a ‘fusty, formalist organisation that absolutely does not motivate people to enjoy research or science’ (interview, female researcher). Here is an email from the director inviting researchers to the centre’s pre-Christmas annual meeting. ‘Dear colleagues, we will meet on December 13, 9 am, in YY to evaluate your work in 2006. Don’t forget, this is a part of your work duties. Best regards, XX’ (fieldnotes). Before the start of the meeting I overheard a sentence stated by a professor addressing the director of the centre as they stood by an attendance roster: ‘Drive it all into the first row’ (fieldnotes, emphasis mine). What he meant by ‘it’ were the junior members of the research centre, most of whom were at the same time Ph.D. students in the department, but he referred to them with an inanimate pronoun or like they were a herd of cattle. They were clearly not conceptualised here as colleagues but as a subordinate labour force or pawns (Tight, 2013).

Enterprise

Enterprise enacts research organisations in different ways. According to Law (1994), it forms a set of sites that should effectively mobilise and valorise resources. At the faculty under study, rooms are, for example, rented to departments; those unable to pay for more space have to move to smaller rooms. Entrepreneurial organisation also demands permanent competition and (the continuous) selection of people. Flow is the new norm. A team leader explains: ‘I simply contracted three people and dismissed two people last year — this is roughly how it works in the world. This is new. We have a huge wave of Ph.D.s. finishing now and it is one of the signs of the changing situation on the labour market that [the Ph.D. students] understand that it is first come first served. […] I think that this is how it works at elite schools everywhere since if they do not select their own people they wouldn’t be elite. And in spite of the selection, the identification is there’ (interview, professor, research team leader). At a meeting of the research centre, a professor addressed his junior colleagues as follows: ‘The self-serve approach to money is coming to an end. From now you’ll get money based on your performance; whoever doesn’t have his/her research [done] will not get his/her salary. The promise of a future depends on the amount of ‘points’ you get [in the research assessment], dear friends’ (fieldnotes).

It is not enough to be good. A researcher and an organisation have to be the best, to ‘excel’ in this mode. Shore and Wright (2000) liken the audit culture at British universities to the Foucauldian panopticon: ‘It orders the whole system while ranking everyone within it. Every individual is made acutely aware that their conduct and performance is under constant scrutiny’ (77). According to them, it is the intention of this mechanism to create stressed, overworked and self-disciplining individuals (ibid., 77–78). As much as administration entails quantification and control, it is omnipresent competition as an organisational principle of control that is characteristic of enterprise. In contrast to administration it is not enough to just account for ‘bills’, it is necessary to ‘excel’ and constantly grow.

In the accounts of junior researchers, the entrepreneurial ethos was raised as a subject mostly in critical terms: the emphasis on performance was a source of permanent stress. Some of them linked to it their recurring health problems and serious illness was seen as the body’s last resort in trying to cope with the constant pressure. A junior department member described to me a dream she had had one night: ‘It was decided in the department that one day we would not work and we would go to the countryside together. The head of the department was playing the guitar. People wanted to sing but couldn’t recall the words of the songs. I wanted to contribute to the fun and bring some songbooks /…/ The head of the department is a big fan of the Beatles and started to sing “Eight days a week I love you, eight days a week is not enough to show I care” …’ (fieldnotes). This dream expresses a longing for the department to assume a different face and presents a stark contrast to current practices. As Law emphasises, enterprise tends to create heroes — risk-taking, energetic individuals, and makes ‘the other’ (family, team, epistemic community) invisible. As one researcher in the department put it: ‘There is work, which shouldn’t be just pressure but also joy, as work is also a part of the meaning of life for us; but then there is family, which is not just children but also your partner and your shared life and all that; and the third thing is health […] Intuitively I know there are certain limits beyond which I can’t and don’t want to go. But the work system is not interested’ (interview, assistant professor). The issue for a lot of the junior researchers was to defend their personal life and health against the hegemonic demands placed on their work performance, a performance that can always and must be ever higher.

Vocation

Law conceptualises the vocation mode in reference to the Kuhnian puzzle-solver, who is creative within ‘normal science’. A researcher derives authority from his/her specialist expertise, experience and skill, not from his/her position in the organisation (Law, 1994). Our investigation points to a possible connection of this mode to specific collaborative and career arrangements and to relations between professional and private lives. Members of the research centre’s team who strongly embodied vocation were the most critical of the increasing emphasis on ‘research performance’ as the goal and meaning of doing research. ‘We didn’t care at all about the “points” [counted in the research assessment] we get. Not at all. I think this is terribly important’, said one researcher in relation to a book the team members were collaborating on (interview, researcher). Another member of the team puts it this way: ‘In our team we try to do work we fancy. And we think it is very important to enjoy what we do’ (interview, junior researcher). The team builds a sense of community and works collaboratively. It is noteworthy that this was the only team in the research centre that was formed out of a student group around an assistant professor. Relations between this team’s members are often rather personal: they are friends who also visit each other at home or sometimes go on vacation together.

According to Law (1994), enterprise, vocation and vision are in common characterised by workaholism, overtime work and indifference to time (119–120). Enterprise asks for all this in the name of performance; vocation in the name of careful and thorough epistemic engagement; vision is about total dedication. However, as I observed in my study, these demands are tackled differently in each mode. Enterprise appreciates stress and overwork as a positive value and the personal side of life is repressed. In the vocation mode, by contrast, these demands are tackled through an intense entanglement of the professional and the personal sides of life. As I noted, these collaborators are very often friends and sometimes even partners or spouses. The professional is present in the personal and vice versa. Researchers also often investigate what interests them personally (e.g., gender issues), do research in an area where they are at the same time active as citizens (e.g., AIDS prevention), or locate their investigation in places where a part of their family resides. The professional and personal then do not have to compete as much.

Such private–professional entanglements and informal community coherence can, however, also mean inaccessibility to outsiders. The absence of inner hierarchy may be offset by a relative impermeability in relation to outsiders. Law (1994), for example, described the tendency in the lab he studied to make a class distinction between ‘scientists’ and ‘technicians’. We observed that the high level of informality in the team (e.g., irregular, though highly frequent meetings) prevented ‘newcomers’ from becoming included in the team. While administration and enterprise may lead in their extreme to the breakdown of any community (through excessive formalisation in one case and excessive competition in the other), vocation is threatened by ultra-closeness and the impermeability of its collaborations.

Vision

The vision mode builds on charisma. Authority derives from talent — something that has to be ‘given’ to an individual rather than learnt. Vision opens up new horizons (Law, 1994). When answering a question about the standard form of university career, a professor and a key figure at the department mobilised this mode in his argument: ‘Look, you either have the observer talent and you will write an interesting book, or not. (…) If you have it in you, then you have a certain responsibility — but you don’t know in advance how much of it you have — but you have a responsibility to try. It is important that you don’t panic if you can’t manage to write [a book] until thirty or so. If you don’t try, you won’t find out. If you now have one child and then another one, nothing is lost. If the book is in you, it will come out. It will not die if you are eight years out of the discipline’ (interview, professor). In this perspective, junior (and in this account specifically female) researchers do not need any special career support, they just have to let their talents develop. And it is noteworthy that the noble mode of vision can potentially be mobilised by an academic institution and its representatives precisely to argue their lack of career support for juniors.

The vision mode was rather rarely enacted in the department under study, which is also the reason it will be rather thinly explored in my account. The person who most embodied vision in a ‘concentrated’ form was a professor and left-wing intellectual who left the department and later the faculty under study here several years ago, after a series of conflicts with the faculty management. A former colleague of his recalled: ‘When I headed the department I was bothered by the fact that he was a man who had the capacity to supervise a number of students but he even didn’t read the theses. He built his own, not career, but fame, maybe even celebrity. (…) He didn’t fit the environment, with its economistic approach to performance and workloads. I vaguely recall that he really didn’t deliver some of his reviews, didn’t perform elementary everyday duties and colleagues had to do them instead of him. (…) He was a luxury piece, I would say. If we had seven people in the department and he was the eighth we would have loved him. But we were three, so it was impossible’ (interview, professor).

This quotation sets the ‘visionary’ in opposition to the ‘economistic approach’ and also to administration in the sense of fulfilling everyday duties. In this case, authority strongly derives from the public space and engagement, wherein the social scientist participates not simply as an expert (as may be the case in other modes) but as a public, politically situated intellectual.

Powerful Interfaces

I repeatedly heard a retrospective narrative of the post-1989 years from the senior generation of academics that was centred on the new potential that could be realised through committed hard work. Not only the department and the university but the city as such was striving to overcome its marginal position in relation to the capital of the country (and its academic institutions). The department was rather small at the beginning and was based on strong personal connections and loyalties. ‘The issue of identification — to what extent I am an employee and to what extent I am an institution — that really is a challenge. When we first sat in an empty room, with only a carpet, thirty people on the floor, and I talked about this issue, we were all one family. Then new generations started to come …’ (interview, professor).

In spite of the growth of the institution, many relations and expectations still have a rather informal nature, and strong personal loyalty and sacrifice to ‘higher ends’ remain the norm into which the junior generation has been socialised by the seniors. The initial years of the institution were thus characterised primarily by the modes of vocation (informality, collegiality and enthusiasm about the newly gained academic freedoms) and enterprise in the form of a ‘family business’ and Protestant work ethic. With the massification of the higher education system since the mid-1990s (Prudký et al., 2010) and the introduction of the research assessment at the national level since 2004 (Linková and Stöckelová, 2012), administration became the stronger mode (formalisation, control, audit) and the ‘family business’ became more corporate (e.g., the faculty’s website changed significantly to create the impression of a cosmopolitan academic institution and it assumed a more corporate face). In this process, the darker sides of vocation and enterprise also grew in strength. Loyalty and informality may generate pressure — for example, when Ph.D. students are not given a clearly defined amount of work to do for the department and feel they never do enough, or when workaholism becomes the norm of the workplace. And as I will show below, administration is at the same time not always perceived as providing universal rules and equal conditions for everyone.

These changes are associated not only with the history of the institution but with the developments of higher education and research policies, which have started to put emphasis on administration and enterprise. It might seem that it is favourable for organisations to fully reorient towards those two modes as their internal mode of governance. This, however, is not the case. Vocation and vision are not displaced and they do not survive as a relic of history at the institution. On the contrary, they are used by the management on different levels and are combined with the logic of administration and enterprise.

Although Law (1994) conceptualises modes of ordering as recurrent process, he pays attention neither to the possible conflicts over how they are shaped nor to the tensions between them. If anything, he considers heterogeneity of modes as a possible source of ethical action and responsibility, for alternative logics serve each other as a corrective view from the outside (Law, 1997). Going beyond Law’s initial analysis, I will focus, in this second part of the chapter, on the dynamic of the modes of ordering in terms of the strategic shaping of respective modes and the switching between them by different actors. I am interested in the power effects of these processes.

Committed labour force

‘We don’t ask for money here [in this department]’, replied the head of the department after an assistant professor requested an increase in salary after acquiring her Ph.D. title (fieldnotes). On one hand, the pressure for ‘career normalisation’ has grown stronger in the institution and employees are expected to move predictably up the career ladder from M.A. to Ph.D. and professorship, thereby adding to the much needed ‘personnel capacity’ of the institution. On the other hand, it is perceived as an offence if an employee asks for an increase in salary, even if it is in line with internal regulations. At that moment the representative of the institution switched from the administration mode, wherein such a request is perfectly legitimate, to the vocation mode: here our work is motivated by dedication and loyalty to the institution and to science, not money! Switching to this mode made the request for money immoral. Here vocation does not stand in opposition to managerial steering but becomes its tool.

This kind of double-bind characterises, in different variations, the institution’s relationship to its doctoral students. They are sometimes conceived as department members and through the emphasis on identification are made responsible for its future (they are ‘appealed to’, as one Ph.D. student put it, for potentially unlimited amounts of work for the good of the department); on other occasions they are treated, in the administration mode, as mere students (e.g., when they were not invited to take part in a faculty party at the end of the semester). Furthermore, while some rules are strictly enforced in the department, others are systematically broken. Minutes from a meeting about the reaccreditation of a B.A. study programme reads: ‘It is necessary to secure guarantors of the courses taught by persons without a Ph.D.. Professors or associate professors will be listed as “professors” along with the real lecturers, their participation will however be only on paper’. The faculty opened some study programmes knowing it would not have the required personnel capacity and would have to make provisions like the ones mentioned above. By the logic of vocation doctoral students are good enough to carry out teaching, while, for the sake of administration, they are ‘covered’ by professors.

The tension between administration and enterprise on one side and vocation on the other is characteristic of Czech academia more generally. Research policies operate in the former two modes: researchers are conceptualised as employees like any other profit-maximising entrepreneurs. For example, the Czech science policy reform of 2008, introduced with the declared aim of strengthening the international excellence, efficacy and public accountability of research, was implemented under the motto: ‘to create an innovative environment so that “science makes knowledge from money, innovations make money from knowledge” ’ (Rada pro výzkum a vývoj, 2008: Section III.1.1.). Other documents, however, conceptualise science as a highly specific area. For example, the Code of Ethics of the Academy of Sciences has the following motto, borrowed from the first president of Czechoslovakia, T. G. Masaryk: ‘The pursuit of knowledge, my fellow man, is a highly active life. When you speak of science you speak equally of time effort, patience, endurance, self-sacrifice, honesty — all the demands of an active life — and a moral life’ (AV ČR, 2010). As much as the two documents may look contradictory, they create a reservoir of complementary appeals with which to steer and organise science. A researcher is on one hand an ‘academic employee’: the organisation relates to the researcher depending on his/her performance; academic institutions even have an exemption from the law to repeatedly offer non-tenure contracts only. On the other hand, academics are conceived as persons with a special vocation in relation to the truth and also to society: they have to have the morals of endurance, sacrifice and higher responsibility. Switching between modes serves as a tool for management, control — and potential exploitation.

Multiple qualities

Research assessment is another area where switching between enterprise, administration and vocation plays a significant role in the organisation under study. When at one departmental meeting the dean presented the results of the research performance of the faculty’s departments and in a critique of the department under study referred to it as ‘mediocre’, a conflictive exchange followed:

Head of the department: Why do we publish? To satisfy bureaucrats? People in the hinterland [he meant those who don’t publish much but teach – TS] are important. You want to tell me that department X is superior because it has a better research performance? It is not, nobody here would say that.

Dean: Quality is another issue [than research performance — TS] …

[emotions are high in the room]

Professor: But they will start completing their habilitations [to become associate professors — TS] like rabbits. They have people in the pipeline. (fieldnotes)

The dean defended the measure of research performance used. The lack of respect for the assessment system ‘subverts the main goal of the faculty’, in the dean’s words (fieldnotes). The assessment has institutional consequences: some members were dismissed from the research centre and their project was halted as a result. But at the same time, the dean is ready to admit that the assessment’s results are not indicative of ‘real’ academic quality. The switch between the modes of administration and enterprise on one hand and vocation (and possibly vision) on the other did not go smoothly and became nicely ethnographically visible at the department meeting. But these strategic switches take place on an everyday basis and form a significant power strategy.

Let us look at another occasion of its use. At a research centre meeting, a team leader presents his team’s annual outputs. Using a PowerPoint presentation (the text projected on slides is underlined), this is how one part of his presentation went that referred to the work of a junior female team member and his own work (‘Pichova’ and ‘Vostry’ are their pseudonyms, respectively):

Books:

Vostry. 2006.

This is a cheap result. A remake. A new title for the third edition of an old book – but the reviews are there as if it were a new one. ‘Points’ for us.

Pichova. 2005.

Pichova [plus 8 co-authors]. 2005.

Suspicious. If I assessed this I would look thoroughly into it. Nine institutions will not get nine points each. I would toss it out [of the database]. I know these kinds of titles. And at the same time the author also includes her chapter from that book in the database. Very strange. The new paradigm of gender studies … But we have here a real book chapter!

Kotek, Vostry. 2005.

The noteworthy moment here is the double standard employed by the team leader in relation to Vostry and Pichova. While the leader proudly presents his own ‘remake’ as proof of his skill and entrepreneurial abilities to ‘sell’ the results in the national research assessment conducted by civil servants, the action of the junior female author is questioned in moral terms in the academic vocation mode. And he generalises his argument to apply to the whole field of gender studies. The double standard here is even more flagrant given the fact that before Pichova’s book was published the research centre’s director had asked for it from the author so that he could demonstrate the international dimension of the project during an evaluation by the Ministry of Education (interview, the author). What disqualifies (one person or research approach) in the vocation mode, ranks among the virtues (of the other) in the enterprise mode. If quality is mode-dependent rather than transversal across modes, the key issue is who is in a position to switch a particular mode on (or off) in a particular situation. Seemingly clear-cut and unidimensional, science policies still leave significant room for intra-institutional politics.

Social relevance

Current science policies increasingly demand the societal relevance of research. Research should link up with extra-academic actors and actively intervene in both nature and society. The science–society relation is, again, played out differently in different modes. In the entrepreneurial mode as asserted by Czech science policy during the last 10 years, the relation is reduced to the measurable economic profitability of research and the relevant research partners are mostly private companies (Linková and Stöckelová, 2012). Although the White Paper on tertiary education includes public and regional administration as potential partners of universities’ ‘third role’ (MŠMT, 2008, 27–31), the issue of the (social) science and society relation is limited to a few measurable and certifiable types of output (Stöckelová, 2012). Neither the figure of the public intellectual, associated with the visionary mode, nor collaborations with non-governmental organisations and different publics have a place in the concept.

I was able to observe several critiques of this research policy in the department — either for its potential to compromise the autonomy of science by external interests or for the narrow market vision of society and public interest. In spite of the critiques, the research centre quickly adjusted to the policy framework. While the initial proposal for the research centre’s funding was geared towards producing practical expertise, the management later decided to focus on basic research outputs. The type of expertise produced in the centre could not be ‘sold’ in the national research assessment system (interview, researcher). A female researcher who was interested in societal engagement and collaboration with non-governmental organisations and publics told me that ‘if you wanted to do anything which a bit transcended the research assessment you got no support from the institution. Or at least I don’t feel any (…) It has to be your personal interest, you have to find your energy completely from the outside’ (group interview, researcher).

Such accounts might signal that social relevance is enacted in the institution fully in conformity with the entrepreneurial and administrative mode of what can be ‘sold’ and ‘accounted for’. Societal engagement, as recognised by different modes of ordering, nonetheless gets some visibility in the organisation. It is, however, played out selectively in relation to different researchers and lectures. There was an interesting exchange over these issues during our group interview with department members. Female junior researchers pointed to the fact that while the public engagement of established senior professors is discussed in terms of their expert or public intellectual contribution and their appearances in public media are put up on the faculty’s notice board under the title ‘The faculty in the media’, the public activities of junior (and often female) department members, often in the form of collaboration with non-governmental organisations, remained unnoticed or were given the disqualifying cognomen of ‘activism’ (group interview, department members). This again can be interpreted as strategic and selective switching between modes that do and do not recognise non-commercial engagement outside strictly academic grounds as a legitimate and valuable part of the academic profession.

Conclusion: Resistance by ‘De-Identification’

Current changes in science and academia (not only in the Czech Republic) are most often presented and studied as a transformation towards managerial governance in the enterprise and administration modes or at least the strengthening of such approaches at the expense of the ‘traditional’ academic ideals and values of vocation, autonomy and a commitment to ‘higher goals’ rather than immediate economic profits. Resistance to these changes should then draw on these traditional ideals and values. For example, Anderson (2008) phrases her analysis of the everyday resistance of researchers at Australian universities to the new managerial style in these terms. Be it vocal public protests or passive ‘forgetting’ to do required tasks (such as filling in publication databases or ensuring students evaluations), resistance draws upon traditional academic values of individualism, autonomy and an internal notion of quality (ibid., 256, 259). Typically, ‘an academic who said that he ignored institutional requirements to publish, noted that he published when he had something to say, thus upholding scholarly and professional norms, rather than managerial imperatives’ (ibid., 263).

My ethnographic study of an academic institution questions such a clear picture. Newly emerging forms of governance are not constituted by a transition to novel modes of ordering, up to now mostly alien to academia, but rather as an effect of strategic switches between different modes and their specific redefinitions. I exposed these power mechanisms in three cases detailed: (1) the institution switching between relating to department members and Ph.D. students as employees, defined by performance, and as members of the academic community, from whom loyalty and a service to science is expected; (2) switching between a notion of quality understood as the number of national research evaluation ‘points’ obtained and a notion of intellectual quality constituted within a disciplinary community and/or wider public space; (3) re/definitions of the social relevance of research and the selective application of different modes to different faculty members.

Traditional academic values as articulated in vocation and vision thus do not exist in strict opposition to managerial approaches of administration and enterprise. They are sometimes effectively used, in combination with the latter, to steer and control the organisation. Employees are mobilised by appeals to loyalty to the organisation and science as such (When you speak of science you speak equally of time effort, patience, endurance, self-sacrifice …). The modes also legitimise informal relations, which do not necessarily provide equal rights for all. What does this mean for resistance to the managerial policy reforms? I would argue that there are good reasons for resistance to draw not only upon the traditional values but sometimes also upon the rejection of them and the struggle to redefine all the modes of ordering. Let us look for the last time at the organisation under study.

A number of junior researchers of the centre and department members resigned from their position during the course of my study or they talked about the process of ‘de-identification’. Their strong identification with the department and commitment to building (new) study programmes at the institution particularly made them too ‘appealable’ (or vulnerable to ‘appeals’) and as a consequence exploitable by the institution. One of those who left the department put it strongly:

There were a lot of people who did it for a long time regardless of what they personally would get out of that. Just because of the feeling that we are contributing to something good, that we do it for something. Really in this sense. And a lot of people feel disillusioned now, at least those around me, as even a loyalty that is not based on profit and calculation will ultimately lead you to the question, ‘what do I get out of it?’ And the loyalty weakens and finally disappears. This happened to me when I tried to stay here. (interview, assistant professor)

The head of one study programme in the department describes, in the context of some troubles with the further development of the programme, her move from the vocation to administration perspective:

During the summer I went through a period of de-identification with building the study programme as my life goal or my life fulfilment. When we had a meeting with the head of the department today I told him ‘I don’t care what will happen’. The faculty wants this programme, it was their idea, we were actually asked to bring it into existence. We saw it at that time as an absolutely fabulous thing, but today … they need to resolve it. We really don’t need to be here. (interview, assistant professor)

After years of playing the game in modes defined by others, she had the courage to imagine herself switching between modes — with the possible ultimate consequence of her leaving. While actually leaving means vacating the (battle)field, imagining the possibility of leaving may paradoxically be one of the strongest ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott, 1985); a weapon that makes academia, individually and collectively, a liveable place. It enhances the agency of pawn academics.

This is the crucial point of this article: Modes of ordering make it possible to enact and study science governance as a transversal process instead of a top-down, external given. Research policies do not determine research institutions and cannot serve as a simple explanation of what is happening in science. While outlining constraints and possibilities, they are mobilised as a resource and translated into organisations from within, shaping in turn the wider academic and policy environments. It is in everyday research practices and career decisions that the reality and the collective liability of science policy are co-constituted. We are all actors.