The model of management in operation in today’s universities - broadly termed ‘managerialism’ – has emerged from the neoliberal modes of governance that have been deployed in the public sector in the eighties (known in the UK as the ‘rolling back’ of the state). These ‘reforms’ have triggered a re-appraisal of the relation between the state, public organisations, and the nation, signalling in particular the beginning of a questioning of the welfare state  (Tapper, 2007; Deem et al., 2007). Neoliberal management practices in universities have emerged in Europe against the backdrop of the massification drift in the sixties and of the social and political crisis of the seventies. In practice, in universities, managerialism translates into systems and processes – greatly enabled by instantaneous computing of information and data - that monitor, evaluate, and display academic performance. This has resulted in academics getting a strong sense of ‘being managed’, or even ‘deprofessionalised’ (Trow, 2002), with significant implications for academic practice and career trajectories (Locke and Bennion 2010).

This paper examines the resulting increasingly ‘performative’ (Lyotard 1984) aspect of the academic role, and the impact on academics of mechanisms gradually put in place over the past three decades or so to control and regulate the performance of academics in European universities initially (as well as in Australia) and now emulated by many countries worldwide. I am particularly interested in examining the positioning of academics towards an environment that deploys an array of measures to monitor, evidence, and regulate performance to determine the degree of agency they are able to deploy within this structural framing of practice.

I examine in particular the agentic responses of the academic as a teacher / researcher in the way she might perceive her role as an educator in higher education. I use the framework of ‘educational ideologies’ (Becker, 1993; Newman, 1852; Saunders, 2000; Schultz, 1963; Trowler, 1998) to capture this agentic stance. In this framework I have identified and I discuss three forms of position including 1) production ideologies which refer to understandings of higher education from within a human capital theory perspective, with a focus on the direct link between higher education and the world of work; 2) reproduction ideologies which convey traditional conceptions of the virtue of education for its own sake, and an emphasis on transmitting the arcane of a discipline to reproduce the next generation of discipline experts; and 3) transformative ideologies with an emphasis on social, personal or human transformation. I show that the prevailing model (production) is contested – albeit marginally – by reproduction and transformative ideologies in the academy. The theoretical framework underpinning this study includes the theorizing of ‘ideology’ mentioned above, and an apprehension of structure and agency adopting Archer’s notion that agency encompasses the natural, the practical and the social domains of reality (Archer 2000), and is therefore multi-dimensional.

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