Discipline and workplace learning in practice: researching academic work in a historical context

This paper reports on a study currently in progress, which explores the everyday practices of academic work in the UK in two social science disciplines, looking in particular at how the complex relationships between the discipline, the department and the university are enacted in the everyday practices of academic work and ‘learning in practice’, and how these practices and relationships vary over time, discipline and institutional setting. The two strands of the study focus on contemporary academic work since 1997 , and the experience of academic work in the period 1965-1983. Both periods have been characterised in Britain by years of optimism, expansion and investment in HE, followed by economic crisis, funding cuts, policy change and a degree of pessimism in the sector. These are periods of great change in academic work and in the organisation and functioning of higher education institutions. The project set out to explore how the experience and practice of academic work varies across time, disciplines and institutional settings. This paper considers themes emerging from the recent-historical strand of the project.