Author: Daniel Nehring

My career so far has taken me to a fairly wide range of places, and this has allowed me to experience a wide range of approaches to sociology and social science. In my blog, I reflect on this diversity and its implications for the future of the discipline. Over the last few years, I have also become interested in exploring the contours of academic life under neoliberal hegemony. Far-reaching transformations are taking place at universities around the world, in terms of organisational structures, patterns of authority, and forms of intellectual activity. With my posts, I hope to draw attention to some of these transformations.

Does Sociology Still Matter in Britain?
Higher Education Reform
May 2, 2016

Does Sociology Still Matter in Britain?

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Manufactured Controversy: Adam Perkins, the Psychological Imagination and the Marketing of Scholarship
Communication
March 18, 2016

Manufactured Controversy: Adam Perkins, the Psychological Imagination and the Marketing of Scholarship

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Why Do Academics Matter So Little in Britain’s Corporate Universities?
Higher Education Reform
February 22, 2016

Why Do Academics Matter So Little in Britain’s Corporate Universities?

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The Deskilled Academic: Bureaucracy Defeats Scholarship
Higher Education Reform
February 9, 2016

The Deskilled Academic: Bureaucracy Defeats Scholarship

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New Teaching Excellence Framework Shows the Power of Marketing

New Teaching Excellence Framework Shows the Power of Marketing

The UK’s proposed Teaching Excellence Framework focuses strongly on ‘value for money,’ which, argues our Daniel Nehring, further elides the intellectual dimensions of scholarship and replaced it with the reduction of academics’ labor to the production of a skilled labor force.

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From Agora to Shopping Mall: Tone-of-Voice Policies, Marketing and the Re-making of British Universities

From Agora to Shopping Mall: Tone-of-Voice Policies, Marketing and the Re-making of British Universities

Tone-of-voice policies raise serious questions about the future of academic freedom in Britain and the extent to which academic labour may come to be subject to the financial and political objectives of the corporate managers that form universities’ leadership.

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The Image-Driven University

The Image-Driven University

While academics have not just recently become image-conscious, noted Daniel Nehring, the increasing infiltration by corporate interests into universities is changing the face of what that consciousness results in.

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What Will Happen to the Cosmopolitans?

What Will Happen to the Cosmopolitans?

Despite what he calls the poisonously xenophobic tone of politics and public debates in Britain, our Daniel Nehring still finds it a colorfully multicultural and sometimes, in some places, cosmopolitan society. One place he’d especially like to protect that virtue is in British universities.

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What’s Distinctive About Britain’s New Corporate Universities?

What’s Distinctive About Britain’s New Corporate Universities?

British universities are changing at rapid pace, notes Daniel Nehring in the first of a new series of article on the so-called corporate university. The consequences of these changes are cause of concern for many academics, who worry about their working conditions and the future of academic freedom.

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The Response to Tim Hunt’s Sexist Remarks is Deeply Flawed

The Response to Tim Hunt’s Sexist Remarks is Deeply Flawed

Despite the hoopla over Nobel laureate Tim Hunt’s recent comments, says Daniel Nehring, they will continue to be ignored as long as universities continue to be portrayed mostly as motors of economic growth and their transformative potential in political and cultural terms is forgotten.

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Loony Lefties, Trolls and Public Debates About Higher Education in the UK

Loony Lefties, Trolls and Public Debates About Higher Education in the UK

All the arguments for a critique of the new authoritarian, hierarchical, business-minded corporate universities are in place, says Daniel Nehring. The ways to insert these arguments into public life still need to be found.

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What’s Wrong With Academic Freedom in the UK?

What’s Wrong With Academic Freedom in the UK?

Given the ferocity of the current assault on academic freedom, argues Daniel Nehring, it seems to me that we may be close to a point of no return, past which ‘tone of voice policies’ and similar control mechanisms may become a norm into which coming generations of academics will be socialized as a matter of course.

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