The labour of words in higher education: is it time to reoccupy policy?

Hayes, S ORCID: 0000-0001-8633-0155 (2019) The labour of words in higher education: is it time to reoccupy policy? Brill, Leiden, pp. 113-128. ISBN 9789004395350

Abstract

As Higher Education has come to be valued for its direct contribution to the global economy, university policy discourse has reinforced this rationale. In this book two globes are depicted. One is a beautiful, but complete artefact, that markets a UK university. The second sits on a European city street and is continually inscribed with the markings of passers-by. A distinction is drawn between the rhetoric of university McPolicy, as a discourse that appears to no longer require input from humans, and a more authentic approach to writing policy, that acknowledges the academic labour of staff and students, in effecting change. Inspired by the work of George Ritzer on the McDonaldisation of Society, the term McPolicy is adopted by the author, to describe a rational method of writing policy, now widespread across UK universities. Recent strategies on ‘the student experience’, ‘technology enhanced learning’, ‘student engagement’ and ‘employability’ are explored through a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Findings are humourously compared to the marketing of consumer goods, where commodities like cars are invested with human qualities, such as ‘ambition’. Similarly, McPolicy credits non-human strategies, technologies and a range of socially constructed buzz phrases, with the human qualities and labour activities that would normally be enacted by staff and students.

Item Type:	Book
Divisions:	School of Education
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004395374_006
Date Deposited:	24 Jul 2023 09:00
Last Modified:	24 Jul 2023 09:00
URI / Page ID:	https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/id/eprint/15547

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