This presentation draws on a study of academics writing in the UK HE Workplace but claims a wider significance for knowledge workers in European universities and beyond. The inscriptions generated through writing work are at the heart of knowledge production in many cultures, and traditionally, the university has been a pivotal and highly valued site for generating and archiving these inscriptions. In contemporary universities, knowledge work is managed in the context of conflicting demands set up by changes in technologies, governance, internationalism, values, student participation and accountability policies (Barnett, 2000; Lea & Stierer, 2011; Goodfellow and Lea, 2013; Vonderau, 2015). This presentation describes how an STS approach, specifically the key concept of “inscription” (see Callon et al, 2011:51-56) can illuminate the dynamics of these intersecting processes, showing how the academy maintains and renews itself through writing tasks performed as part of the mundane governance that other contributors to this symposium refer to. Our study views academics writing as a set of workplace practices enacted within the university as a tangible, situated organization, which is networked regionally and globally. We refer not just to the monographs and research papers academics produce for journals but attend symmetrically to the routine practices of writing for teaching and supporting students, service writing such as letters of endorsement, engaging with social media and other outward-facing promotional writing (Lupton, 2014). We include the ubiquitous e-mail correspondence that all academics now engage with (Jerejian et al 2013) and the “behind the scenes” production of administrative documents that are an integral part of the knowledge production process, oiling the bureaucratic wheels that allow research projects to be carried out, the quality of student experience to be monitored, lectures to be scheduled and online-sites to function for participants worldwide. I illustrate the approach through the following themes from our interviews and observational data with academics in three UK universities and three different disciplines (history, marketing and maths). Each theme describes an aspect of how knowledge is fabricated and valorised through the writing work of the academics in our study: • New times, new writing genres • Negotiating disciplinary boundaries through writing for the UK Research Assessment Exercise • Digital days and nights - email communication • Networked resources for collaboration and garnering knowledge • Service and the self – maintaining reflective spaces for writing • Offices, seminar rooms, coffee shops and trains - the material spaces and tools of writing work

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