Timescapes in Academia

Following the implementation of the New Public Management reforms in the German higher education system in the 1990s, the practice of acquiring third-party funds for project research has become a central aspect of the work life of academics. The consequences of this period of organizational change with regard to time norms are, however, largely unknown. “Timescapes in Academia” attempts to close this gap by demonstrating how the funding agency and the academic subject have negotiated particular sets of time norms and by showing what impact these partially fixed standards have on the academic subject’s experience of the present.

Hence, the aims of this study are first to identify the transformations of the discourse on time in academia by investigating the dialogical practice of writing grant proposals between 1980 and 2005 and contribute to the debate on the rise of audit culture in higher education. Second, to identify fantasmatic narratives located in different time dimensions with which the academic subject makes sense of and positions herself in relation to the organization and the funding agency and third, to find out if the assumed unstable experience of the present increases the need for narrating the ‘authentic self’ in two alternative time dimensions, the past and the future. The data pool – consisting of policy documents, proposal guidelines, proposals and interview material – will be approached via grounded theory.