Problematization
Changing face of higher education in the UK: Problematize the different way it has been problematized by key social actors.
In this general context, an apparent puzzle has emerged concerning the lack of meaningful resistance by academics to the new regime of audit practices … Why are higher education audit reforms frequently not abandoned or activetly resisted by academics? … Why are these reforms often allowed to intensify further, becoming even more deeply institutionalized and sedimented. 170
An object of study is constructed. This means that a range of disparate empirical phenomena have to constituted as a problem, and the problem has to be located at an appropriate level of abstraction and complexity. Thus our approach shares a family resemblance with Foucault’s practice of problematization, which in his view synthesized the archaeological and genealogical methods of analysis.
… problematization constitutes the first of three moments in the overall logic of critical explanation. The second moment entails the furnishing of a retroductive explanation that addresses key features which emerge out of our initial problematization.
1. Identifying relevant social (What), political (Why) and fantasmatic (How) logics. We must thus start by characterizing the practices under investigation … this involves the task of retroductively identifying the assemblage of social logics that are currently being installed in UK universitites. There are 4 such social logics:
4 social logics informing the practices of the new regime:1. competition, 2. atomisation, 3. hierarchy, 4. instrumentalization. Which when articulated together enable us to characterize the emergent regime of audit practices (171).
2. The important point to keep in mind here is how, for us, the identification and operation of social logics requires some reference to — or passage through — the self-interpretation of subjects.
3. Having established what the logics structuring the various audit practices in higher education are, we can also ask why and how they came about and continue to be sustained. This turns our attention to the operation of political and fantasmatic logics