Abstract

The move towards digital transformation by UK universities is altering all aspects of academic life in the UK higher education sector. Beyond highly visible changes to business processes (e.g., online enrolment, online exams), staff-student and employer-employee communication mechanisms (e.g., email and Teams) and the digital student experience (online classes, continuous online evaluations of staff performance), there have been important but lesser-known esoteric shifts in managerial oversight of workers (e.g., worker analytics). These changes can fundamentally alter the relationship between management and workers, and are beginning to challenge long-established worker freedom norms, albeit in ways that can be difficult for workers to pinpoint due to the obfuscation associated with technological transformation. Boosted by powerful discourses rooted in the concepts of progress and digital transformation, digital transformation of work is threatening to disrupt existing worker-management relations in profound ways.

As such, new understandings of how power is mediated, exercised and resisted in the contemporary digital university are needed. Yet, existing research on the digital transformation of the UK HE sector has largely taken a pro-business approach and focussed on the efficiencies and affordances of technology. Few studies have been undertaken from a critical or worker-centred perspective or looked at how digital technology mediates workers’ experiences of agency, a gap this study addresses.

A quantitative methodological approach was adopted, using the survey method. The survey comprised 50+ questions that mapped to key dimensions of academic freedom. The survey was distributed to all UCU (the union for UK academics) members in May 2021. It received 2,100 responses over four weeks, making it one of the largest surveys of its type in the UK higher education sector. The survey design, which had input from the Equality and Policy team at the UCU, was developed to facilitate statistical testing of relationships between demographic variables and perceptions of agency in the digital university.

Drawing on the concepts of digital education governance (Williamson, 2016) and metric power (Beer, 2016), this paper explores the lived experience of academic freedom in the context of the digitally transformed UK higher education sector. Specifically, it applies the academic freedom framework developed by Karran and Mallinson (2018) to examine academics’ experiences of agency in the era of continuous performance management enabled by contemporary digital systems (research metrics, teaching metrics) and the philosophy underpinning these.

This study is one of the first to consider the impact of workplace technologies as a mediating factor in the exercise of academic freedom. The findings show that such technologies often take the form of invisible forces that shape academic working lives and offer little agency for academics to either resist, opt-out or work the system to their advantage. These technologies can re-draw power dynamics by disempowering some groups (workers) and empowering others (senior management).