‘Risking the University? Learning to be a Manager-Academic in UK Universities’
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper explores the extent to which Heads of Department and Pro-Vice Chancellors, or manager-academics, in UK universities are aware of and prepared for the so-called ‘risk society’. It draws on a research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council concerned with the management of UK universities and the extent of permeation within universities of recent ideologies about new practices for managing public services. Recent debates in social theory about the concept of a risk society and risk cultures, and how these might be applied to higher education, are considered. Key features of a rapidly changing environment for the conduct and management of academic work are also outlined. The focus and methodology of the ESRC research project are explained. Interview data from Head of Department and Pro-Vice Chancellors are then used to illustrate a range of responses to notions of risk made by manager-academics. Finally, the paper examines how the learning of manager-academics could be better supported, in order that post-holders can acquire the flexibility and reflexivity which living in a risk society and culture seems to demand.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it