Scholarship as Cultural Production in the Neoliberal University: Working Within and Against ‘Deliverables’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article focuses on the idea of scholarly work as cultural production to help understand how the tensions of precarious, early-career academic employment are articulated on a day-to-day basis in the context of pressures to efficiently produce monetizable ‘deliverables.’ Using a political economy of communication framework and an iterative methodological approach, the authors mobilize examples drawn from a collaborative set of activities they undertook as part of a broader research group of emerging Canadian scholars working in different international contexts between 2012 and 2015. The research conversation began in academic roundtables in 2013, and was furthered through a content analysis of articles collected from scholarly and general interest blog posts, newsletters, and magazines published online from July 2012 to April 2014. In this article, the authors explore emerging themes and document pressures to conform to neoliberal practices within the corporatized university, as well as suggest pathways for dissent and reinvention of academic labour.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.029 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.146 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.037 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.025 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".