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DOI: 10.1177/0961463X10381528

2010 19: 345Time SocietySue Clegg

Time future - the dominant discourse of higher education

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Time future the

dominant discourse ofhigher education

Sue CleggLeeds Metropolitan University, UK

Abstract

The paper presents a critique of the dominant temporality of higher educationpolicy in the UK and globally. It argues that the temporality of employability is whatBarbara Adam and Chris Groves describe as the present future; a conception of

the future as empty and open. Drawing on the work of Margaret Archer, the paperexplores the differing existential temporalities associated with different forms of

reflexivity and explores the complex temporalities of personal development plan-

ning. The increasing tempo of university life makes imagining otherwise, based onan ethical care for the future, increasingly difficult but nonetheless imperative.

Keywordscritical realism, employability, future, higher education, reflexivity

Introduction

This paper explores the ways in which the dominant modality of pedagog-

ical discourses in higher education involves an orientation towards the

future; temporality is coded as future time for the person, their achieve-

ments, and their employability. The type of futures presented in the dis-course of UK higher education policy entails what Barbara Adam and

Chris Groves (2007) call the present future. The present future

[r]efers to approaches to the future from the standpoint of the present through

which we seek to predict, transform and control the future for the benefit of

Time and Society

19(3) 345364

! The Author(s) 2010

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Corresponding author:Sue Clegg, Centre for Research into Higher Education, Carnegie Research Institute, Leeds

Metropolitan University, Cavendish Hall, Headingley Campus, Beckett Park, Leeds LS6 3QS

Email: [email protected]

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the present. It projects the future as a terrain that isempty, openand subject to

colonisation. (Adam and Groves, 2007: 200, emphasis in original)

Policy assumes a future in which students are projected as good, neo-

liberal, employable subjects. This assumed timescape (Adam, 2004) doesnot go beyond the life of the individual and in effect restricts the future to

the active life of the person. The present future implied by the discourse of

employability does not even extend to old age, much less to generations

beyond. The nature of the personal projects described in policy are those of

individual social mobility (DfES, 2003). I offer a critique of the progressive

assumptions involved in these descriptions of mobility by pointing to the

structurally differentiated opportunities stratified higher education presents

(Clegg, 2008; Machin and Vignoles, 2004). More fundamentally, however, I

suggest that at the existential level this is not the only temporality. In think-

ing through the implications of the discursive and material practices of the

present future Adam and Groves (2007) rightly caution against either/or.

They argue that what we are seeing is a displacement rather than a replace-

ment of time as embedded, embodied, contextual (Adam and Groves,

2007: 79). Feminist scholars in particular have extended our understanding

of the embodied, and the spatial metaphor of nomad with the associations

of wandering and circularity (Hughes, 2002) remains powerful in under-

standing the ways in which real embodied persons return and revisit, ratherthan simply move on. Feminist scholarship in particular has emphasized the

power of and/and rather than either/or.

In seeking to disrupt the dominant assumptions about the re-description

of the goods of higher education in terms of individual social mobility and

the valorization of the sorts of reflexivity associated with this goal, the

paper draws on Margaret Archers work on multiple forms of reflexivity

which she details in Making our Way through the World (2007). She iden-

tifies the reflexive work involved in staying put and points out that the

internal conversations of persons do not all take the same form. Highereducation, however, discursively valorizes only certain forms of reflexivity

and limits the ways in which we might think about the future (Adam and

Groves, 2007). In the dominant neo-liberal narrative staying put is

stripped of reflexivity and represented as personal failure, often requiring

punitive social intervention. The neo-liberal project also strips out ethics,

rendering unintelligible the moral choices of Archers meta-reflexives who

move on in nomadic mode rather than upwards and onwards.

The paper, therefore, begins with an outline of the significance of theories

of time and in particular the work of Adam and Groves (2007) on concep-tualizations of the future. The second section offers a critique of the discourse

of employability and the multiple mis-descriptions of practice this involves in

346 Time and Society 19(3)



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terms of the life chances of individuals. The third part of the paper then turns

to the broader conception of reflexivity and the sorts of personhood entailed

within the discourse. This is followed by an analysis of some of the pedagog-

ical technologies, notably personal development planning, involved in posi-

tioning students within the timescapes of employability. I argue that realizingthe self within these technologies is difficult for many students and their

experiences of time are much more complex than implied by the technical-

rationality of planning. The fifth section contextualizes these relationships

and extends the argument beyond the student experience. The nature and

purposes of the modern university have been substantially reworked encom-

passing not just a reductionist discourse of employability but fundamental

shifts towards what Slaughter and Rhoades (2004) describe as academic

capitalism and Marginson and Considine (2000) as the enterprise univer-

sity. These tendencies are complicit in the general speeding up of time in

higher education (Land, 2006; Virilio, 2000) which impacts on academics and

students alike. These pressures make thinking about the future as other than

an empty canvas difficult (Adam and Groves, 2007). The timescapes of the

academy are short term, fast and inimical to reflection about longer term

ethical consequences. In the conclusion I bring these strands together to

think about how we might reframe higher education from the standpoint

of time and reflexivity based on an understanding of the internal conversa-

tion as the basis of social life (Archer, 2003).

Thinking about time and the present future

Barbara Adam (1990, 1995) has been at the forefront of the movement to

take time seriously in social analysis. In her earlier work Adam (1995)

distinguishes different aspects of time and challenges the assumption that

we all live in a linear Western timeframe, which can be seen in contrast

with the cyclical rhythms of an anthropological past. Rather, she argues forthe co-existence and intermingling of different dimensions of time as co-pre-

sent: time as linear divisible clock time; temporality as our being in time;

timing as in when time; and tempo the intensity of time. She synthesizes

her approach in her 2004 book Time which deals historically with the dif-

ferent ways people have lived and imagined time. In her more recent work

with Chris Groves she brings these ideas together to deal with the possibil-

ities and ethics of thinking about the future. In this work they distinguish

the ways historically futures have been told (through divination), tamed

(for example through ritual), and traded (as time becomes commodified).Crucially they point out that contemporary ideas of the future which they

describe as futures transformed involve the subjugation of time to human

Clegg 347



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will whereby the future is presented as open:

Emptied of content and meaning, the future is simply there, an empty space

waiting to be filled with our desire, to be shaped traded or formed according

to rational plans and blueprints, holding out the promise that it can be what

we want it to be. (Adam and Groves, 2007: 11)

They present a compelling critique of this sort of thinking and the moral

vacuity it produces in thinking about the future present which as a stand-

point. . . positions us with reference to the deeds and processes already on

the way (Adam and Groves, 2007: 196). In rejecting the idea of a present

future as open and empty they accede ontological status to the laten-

cies already inbuilt in the actions of the present. Future present practices

and knowledge involve care towards future generations whose futures

are already non-factually but actually entailed in the present (Bhaskar,

2008).

Adam and Groves are at pains to reject dichotomous thinking about

time, pointing instead to the lived simultaneity of time. Similarly,

Nowotny (1996) uses the concept of proper time to highlight the ways

in which there is a time of individuals, but also to emphasize the ways in

which the plurality of time is increasing with different proper times of sys-

tems and social processes. The term time, she argues, is used as if it pos-sessed an independent existence and becomes relatively independent of

individuals (Nowotny, 1996: 147). Remarkably, however, while analyses

of higher education indicate that the tempo of academic life is changing

with an increase in the intensity of academic work, there is little explicit

mention in the literature of time as such (see Clegg, 2003; Lee and Liebenau,

1999). Time and the rhythms of academic life are deeply embedded in the

passage of the academic calendar, and in the uneven temporalities of stu-

dents from neophyte to graduate. The academic teaching year progresses

through terms from admissions to examinations, but superimposed on theserhythms are the new timings of semesterization, modularization, different

patterns of assessment, and the fast time of research contracts and the

scrabble for extra funding. These drives and the pressures on the university

are, according to Marginson and Considine (2000), creating a new form of

organization, the enterprise university, Marginson and Considine prefer the

term to others in circulation because they argue that:

Enterprise captures both the economic and academic dimensions, and the

manner in which research and scholarship survive but are now subject to new

systems of competition and demonstrable performance . . . Money is a key

objective, but it is also the means to a more fundamental mission: to advance




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the prestige and competitiveness of the university as an end in itself.

(Marginson and Considine, 2000: 5)

The university thus projects itself as capable of creating its own present

future and the language of opportunity, innovation and challenge perme-ates its halls. The analysis of time, therefore, seems a rich theoretical

resource within which to think about change in higher education and this

paper takes forward this project as outlined in the introduction by using the

frameworks developed by Adam, Groves, Nowotny and others to critique

the discourse of employability and to show how the lived realities of time

for students and staff are both phenomenologically more complex and nei-

ther ethically nor substantively reducible to an empty time future.

The discourse and practice of employability

The orientation towards the future, and its depiction as ready and waiting

to be filled with the competitive endeavours of individuals and states com-

bined with the evocation of the world as fast changing, is now so ubiquitous

as to be barely remarked. In the UK the Foreword to the 2003 White Paper

The Future of Higher Education summed up the necessity of further changes

to higher education, and in particular the need for students to make a

financial contribution to their own education, as follows:

. . . the world is already changing faster than it has ever done before, and the

pace of change will continue to accelerate.

Our national ability to master that process of change and not be ground down

by it depends critically upon our universities. Our future success depends

upon mobilizing even more effectively the imagination, creativity, skills and

talents of all our people. And it depends on using that knowledge and under-

standing to build economic strength and social harmony.

So that immediately identifies two areas where our universities have to improve.

First, the expansion of higher education has not yet extended to the talented

and best from all backgrounds. In Britain today too many of those born into

less advantaged families still see a university place as being beyond their

reach, whatever their ability.

Second, we have to make better progress in harnessing knowledge to wealth

creation. And that depends on giving universities the freedoms and resources

to compete on the world stage. To back our world class researchers with

Clegg 349



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financial stability. To help turn ideas into successful businesses. To undo the

years of under-investment that will result in our universities slipping back.

But there is also a third challenge. To make the system for supporting stu-

dents fairer. Having a university education brings big benefits and while the

Government will continue to pay most of the cost involved in studying for a

degree, it is also reasonable to ask students to contribute to this. But we need

to make sure that no student is put off from going into higher education

because they cannot afford the cost of studying while they are at university.

(DfES, 2003: 23)

The White Paper goes on to address the need for global competitiveness.

Similar strains and arguments relating to global competitiveness and the

private benefits of higher education have colonized thinking about higher

education worldwide (Naidoo, 2007; World Bank, 2000). Read from the

perspective of time, however, we can recognize that in the speeded-up pre-

sent we are hurtling towards a future that is subject to the requirements of

the competitive needs of the present. The Futureof Higher Education(DfES,

2003, my emphasis) is effectively presented as a world of pure potential that

is subject to human design (Adam and Groves 2007, 55) with potentialities

for business, for national competitiveness, and for individuals in terms of

personal benefit and mobility. The imagination and talent of higher educa-tion is to be harnessed to filling this future. The implied view of science

involved in this vision is a mechanical one which brackets out ethical con-

siderations. I have argued elsewhere that this misrepresents enquiry (Clegg,

2008), and it is a view that discounts the future for present gain. The social

justice agenda presented above is entirely in terms of private benefit and a

temporality in which future rewards are discounted against the present

investment that students are required to make. So pervasive is the discourse

that governments internationally have charged higher education with deliv-

ering employable graduates, and increasing the stock of quality humancapital deemed necessary for economic competitiveness in knowledge-

based economies.

The pervasiveness of the discourse, however, masks the harsh realities of

competitive accumulation. There is considerable doubt about the actual

number of jobs that might be characterized as knowledge-rich and involving

autonomy (Brine, 2006; Brown and Lauder, 2006: Brown et al., 2008).

Brown et al. (2008) argue that the equation of high skills with high wages

is unsustainable and that the dynamic of accumulation means that firms

constantly undercut creativity and attempt to routinize jobs. Yorke (2006),points out, however, that despite such evidence the high skills rhetoric

retains sufficient face validity for governments to remain committed to




8/21

supply-side policies. This discourse is dominant in both the global north

and global south (Boughey, 2007). Under the influence of the World Bank,

governments are no longer expected to provide employment and legislate

for social equity. Rather, they are expected to contrive the conditions

under which individuals can exert themselves to take up the availableopportunities. The future graduate is projected as being capable of

making choices resulting in benefits to the person and providing the econ-

omy with the symbolic analysts (Reich, 1991, 2002), as well as the discov-

eries that the knowledge economy is assumed to require.

It is important to recognize that in practice employability is about more

than just the acquisition of core or transferable skills (Clegg, 2008). It

involves a disposition towards the future based on continuous improve-

ment and self promotion, but the acquisition and valuing of such disposi-

tions are in turn heavily marked by inherited cultural capital and class.

Employability cannot be equated with actual employment, since employ-

ment opportunities are determined by factors at the macro-economic level

outside the control and capacities of the individual (Yorke, 2006). This is

more starkly evident in the current recession, but although governments are

making Keynesian interventions to increase liquidity, their supply-side rhe-

toric is undiminished. The practices involved in obtaining a graduate job

often involve a series of protracted and difficult transitions, and this is made

more difficult by the recession. The timescape of an orientation towardsemployment moves into the future and may involve a lengthy series of

transitions. The relationship between graduate employment and the

achievement of a first degree is often loose, with employers consistently

asserting their preference for good, generic skills and where the procession

of a degree is assumed. Yorke (2006) argues that that the practices of

employability are: . . . evidenced in the application of a mix of personal

qualities and benefits, understanding, skilful practices and the ability to

reflect productively on experience (Yorke, 2006: 13).

Employability thus involves a skilful and self-monitoring self, strivingtowards and filling the present future. Success in realizing these disposi-

tions and capitalizing upon them is, however, limited by the socially struc-

tured potentials for mobility. While the data are complex there is some

evidence that the private returns on higher education vary by social class

with those starting out as middle class benefiting more than their working

class peers (Adnett and Slack, 2007). Overall, social mobility until very

recently has been falling in the UK and appears at best to be static.

What universities appear to achieve is the consolidation of status and

the avoidance of downward social mobility rather than its extension(Machin and Vignoles, 2004). This is confirmed by the very high partic-

ipation rates of middle-class students going into higher education, which

Clegg 351



9/21

has become a norm rather than a choice (Ball et al., 2002). Most of these

students are seeking to reproduce their natal context, not break with it.

Thus the implied promise of mobility in the discourse of employability

depends on, in large part, conditions not of students choosing. It also

assumes individuals whose personal projects are orientated towardsmobility, and an underlying assumption of common forms of reflexivity

and values.

Reflexivity

We have seen that both the discourse and practice of employability involve

a particular orientation towards the future and the competitive promotion

of the self, what elsewhere Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) have described

as the fate of individualization. This vision involves invoking the pervasive-

ness of a particular form of reflexivity in which the self is continually being

produced, cut free from the inherited constraints described through catego-

ries such as class and gender (what Beck and Beck-Gernsheim [2002]

describe as zombie categories). As we have seen above, however, in prac-

tice the zombie categories remain decisive in social mobility. How to theo-

rize structure and agency, therefore, remains key. Despite universities

attempting to cultivate the required dispositions the scope for the exercise

of such agency is limited by social circumstances. Moreover, the evidentialbasis for the universality of these dispositions and the associated forms of

reflexivity involved appears under theorized.

One theorists who has paid close attention to how to theorize structure

and agency and the grounds of reflexivity is Margaret Archer. Of course

many social scientists have been drawn to alternative theorists, most nota-

bly Bourdieu (see Reay, 2004). While the concepts of field and habitus are

powerful there remains a question over the extent to which Bourdieus

sociology can adequately theorize agency. His emphasis on the embodied,

and in particular hexis, seems to limit the space for developing conceptsthat could adequately account for agency and reflexivity. Archer (2000,

2003, 2007), in contrast, has developed a series of concepts, aligned more

recently to empirical investigation, which offer a fuller account of the

forms of reflexivity evidenced in the internal conversations which actors

conduct in their daily reflections on the world about them, and in their

reflections on the nature of their personal projects within that world.

Archer grounds her account of agency in the non-reducible powers of

persons to form their projects (Archer, 2000, 2003). She argues against

the dangers of upwards, downwards, or central conflation: from collapsingsociety into individuals, from seeing persons as societys tools, or conflat-

ing the two, as in the work of Giddens. Her work is particularly sensitive




10/21

to time in analytically distinguishing structure and agency. Giddens

(1979) work on structuration, while apparently being time sensitive

emphasizes the co-constitution of structure and agency and leaves little

analytical space to distinguish the two. Archer in contrast argues the case

for analytical dualism which recognizes the independent powers of societyand persons. Persons deliberate on their always fallible judgements about

the objective conditions, and they act in the light of their concerns and

projects. Her descriptions expand on the capacity, which Adam and

Groves (2007) rightly identify, of individuals to come to ethical decisions

and act even in the light of inadequate information and faced with

complexity and uncertainty. Archers (1995) morphogenetic approach

encourages the careful analysis of historical time and the broader criti-

cal realist literature with its emphasis on the reality of non-factually pre-

sent tendencies and mechanisms eschews any notion of the future as

empty. Tendencies and latencies constrain the future and they are criti-

cal to our understanding of stasis or change in analysing the already

realized past

Archers (2003) philosophical account of the internal conversation is

backed up by empirical work in which she challenges the idea that reflex-

ivity and the inner conversation are the same for all individuals (Archer,

2007). In her investigation of reflexivity she found that the conversations of

the inner subjective life can be described, and are commonplace, but thatnot everyone talks to themselves in the same way. She analyses three dom-

inant forms and hypothesizes a further state of fractured reflexivity. She

argues that communicative reflexives remain anchored in their natal social

context; that autonomous reflexives adopt strategic stances towards con-

straints and become socially upwardly mobile; while meta-reflexives are

contextually incongruous. This latter group are: subversivetowards social

constraints and enablements, because of their willingness to pay the price of

the former and to forfeit the benefits of the latter in the attempt to live out

their idea (Archer, 2007: 98, original emphasis). The three forms of reflex-ivity that she distinguishes have a different orientation towards time. The

form of reflexivity that corresponds most closely to the present future ratio-

nality of the employable subject is that of the autonomous reflexive. The

time of communicative reflexives is that of staying in place; a commitment

to collective continuities, whereas the time of the meta-reflexives more clo-

sely approximates (employing a spatial metaphor) to that of the nomad. Of

course time differs from space in the forms of return. One can never return

in time, but neither can one simply return to the same space; space itself

undergoes transformation (Massey, 2005). The spatial metaphor is helpfulas it points to the non-necessity of linearity. Whether there are more

forms of reflexivity, and whether they are historically, personally, and

Clegg 353



11/21

cross-culturally stable are open question. In her empirical work Archer

(2007) reports that she did not find any clear gender or class differences,

although I would argue that the way autonomy and communicative capac-

ities are discursively understood is gendered (see Leathwood, 2006).

Reflexivity, and the powers of the person to make commitments (althoughnot their capacities to realize them, which are always socially conditioned)

are important. Archers (2007) work suggests that moral choices and per-

sonal projects are significant in social life.

Thus we can see that the temporalities of employability are specific and,

via Archer (2007), question the universality of the forms of reflexivity such

an orientation assumes. I have argued elsewhere (Clegg, 2004) that the fate

of individualization which Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) describe as

inevitable is by no means so. Rather in higher education we are being

incited to produce these neo-liberal subjects through particular pedagogical

practices. Students are not automatically cut free of natal routes and com-

munities; indeed much middle-class effort is expended on staying put. Nor

are there endless possibilities of creating a personal biography. Outcomes

are resultant on the conditions in which people find themselves, but also

crucially on how agents choose to orientate themselves and how they act on

their fundamental concerns.

Pedagogical practices: Technologies of the self

and forms of reflexivity

I have written elsewhere about personal development planning (Clegg,

2004), which in the US context is referred to as self-regulation, a particu-

larly plangent phrase for technologies of the self. These pedagogical prac-

tices are related to broader globalizing tendencies which Edwards and

Usher (2000) suggest involves a replacement of the idea of the enlightened

student with that of autonomous/self-directed/flexible lifelong learners(Edwards and Usher, 2000: 55). Barnett (2003) makes a similar point, argu-

ing that we are experiencing a pedagogical displacement in which the

weight of the pedagogical challenge is shifted from the presentation of dis-

ciplinary culture to an interest in the self-generational capacities of students

(Barnett, 2003: 148). Other authors have pointed to the reconstitution of the

self as part of the broader reflective project of modernity (Giddens, 1990,

1991). At the level of practical pedagogy there have been numerous devel-

opments which have brought the idea of reflection to the fore across a wide

range of contexts. From the perspective of this paper what is important tonote is the way these pedagogical practices imply a temporal orientation

towards the future.




12/21

I became interested in interrogating the assumptions behind the partic-

ular pedagogical practices involved in personal development planning

because this is the site where the discourse of employability is realized.

Personal development planning (PDP) is where the cultivation of per-

sonal dispositions towards the future, based on continuous self-improve-ment, self-surveillance and self-promotion, is most obviously enacted.

Moreover, in the UK it is the one part of the curriculum that is mandated

from undergraduate to Doctoral level. At one level PDP is beguilingly

mundane and obvious. The Quality Assurance Agency in the UK, which

has mandated PDP (rather confusingly defined under the rubric of progress

files) describes the progress file as containing:

. the transcript: a record of an individuals learning and achievement,

provided by the institution;

. an individuals personal records of learning and achievements, progress

reviews and plans that are used to clarify personal goals and can provide

a resource from which material is selected to produce personal state-

ments (e.g. CVs etc) for employers, admissions tutors and others;

. structured and supported processes to develop the capacity of individuals

to reflect on their own learning and achievement, and to plan for their

own personal educational and career development. The term Personal

Development Planning (PDP) is used to denote this process. (QualityAssurance Agency, 2001: 2)

The resources to support such practices offered by the Higher Education

Academy (the professional body for tertiary educators in the UK) are

nested in their employability and enterprise pages as well as having their

own space. The HEA defines PDP thus:

PDP is defined as a structured and supported process undertaken by an

individual to reflect upon their own learning, performance and/or achieve-ment and to plan for their personal, educational and career development.

PDP embraces a range of approaches to learning that connect planning (an

individuals goals and intentions for learning or achievement), doing (aligning

actions to intentions), recording (thoughts, ideas, experiences, in order to

understand and evidence the process and results of learning) and reflec-

tion (reviewing and evaluating experiences and the results of learning).

(HEA, 2009)

PDP thus entails a form of continuing self-surveillance, in which reflecting

backwards is harnessed to the remaking of a more serviceable performative

Clegg 355



13/21

self for the future. Many of the terms and phrases in the QAA and HEA

statement are already familiar and in common usage across higher educa-

tion, and educators across the sector have been developing elements of this

process for a long time (see Clegg and Bradley, 2006a, 2006b). Moreover,

there is large literature on reflection that tends to support the pedagogicalvalue of these practices (e.g. Gough et al., 2003; Jackson and Ward, 2004),

as indeed does the literature on future-selves (e.g. Leondari et al., 1998).

The ability of students to imagine their future appears to be an important

component in learning. Reflection can be harnessed for many purposes

including critique. The language of PDP, however, assumes that students

are always already constituted as purposeful individuals orientated towards

educational and career futures. The vision of purposive human capital fit

for the flexible, global labour market is already inscribed as a fact, rather

than as the outcome of what the policy itself is attempting to achieve. At the

policy level, therefore, PDP can be understood as part of the broader

agenda which focuses on employability and the acquisition of the skilful

practices implied by the idea of generic or transferable skills. As can be seen

from the QAA definition, the idea of progress files combines multiple ele-

ments and the development of a number of related but different capacities.

These capacities are all designated as personal and as residing within the

individual rather than the structural powers and tendencies that might

make their realization more or less possible for different groups of studentswith differential access to social and cultural capital.

A paradox remains, however, as studies repeatedly show that this obvi-

ous temporal framing towards a future is something that many students

find difficult (see Clegg and Bufton, 2008). While reflexivity may be a uni-

versal characteristic of human beings, we know from Archer (2007) that

reflexivity itself is not singular in form, and the capacity to be reflective

and plan in the particular ways assumed by PDP appears to come more

easily to some students than others. There are many reasons for the diffi-

culties associated with reflection including tacit unspoken/unspeakableknowledge or know-how. Tomlinson (1999a, 1999b), Claxton (1998)

and others provide theoretical and empirical warrant for distinguishing

know-how from articulation. Archer (2004) in her arguments concerning

the primacy of practice also defends the capacity to improve without being

dependent on theoretical hearsay, that is without verbal intervention.

The sorts of reflexivity Archer (2007) uses to ground her universalistic

claims depend on the particularly attenuated characteristics of the internal

conversation which are unlike public speech acts. Students as well as tea-

chers (Tomlinson, 1999a, 1999b) get better at doing things without neces-sarily formally reflecting or being able to articulate the basis of that

improvement.




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There seem good theoretical reasons, as well as testimony from lecturers

(see Clegg and Bradley, 2006a, 2006b), therefore, to suggest that the prac-

tices of PDP are likely to fall short of its discursive projection as an unpro-

blematic site where purposeful reflection, planning, and self-elaboration

take place. In order to explore this further a colleague and I undertook asmall study of third-year students which explored how students experienced

PDP and how they thought they had changed over the three years of their

studies, the focus being on their academic work and ways of studying (for

details of the methodology see Clegg and Bufton, 2008). Contrary to the

logic of PDP we found that the timeframes of the student were fluid and did

not correspond to the linear assumptions of a curriculum based on first-,

second- and third-year progression. When students reflected, as required in

the PDP curriculum, they often engaged in subterfuge producing retrospec-

tive and tidied up accounts of processes which at the time of their enactment

were not planned, future orientated, or fixed on the present future. Rather

their enactments were messy, fluid and looked to the past as well as the

future. In attempting to understand our data we drew on the work of

Araujo who points to the ways in which present time is created between

past, present and future (Araujo, 2005). We suggested that the phase

(Araujo, 2005) of the students lives could be understood as a passage

between school and becoming a graduate, in which the present was lived

differently in relation to past and future. In the first year the past was stillviscerally present for students and they were also intensely involved in the

present in ways that made the idea of planning seem remote. By the third year

the future impacted most strongly on their sense of the present, but the timing

of transitions varied between students and the tempo of the second and third

years was contrasted with the timeless time for socializing and personal adap-

tations of the first. Students had a strong sense of the self and being a

particular sort of person, so while they recognized that their practices had

changed, they, nonetheless, felt that there were aspects of self which neither

they nor their tutors could be reasonably expected to influence. Meyer andLand (2005), coming at the issue of student learning from a different per-

spective have also elaborated on states liminality in learning. Once the stu-

dents have crossed over the threshold they suggest that there is no going back

intellectually. Liminality, therefore, also points to the importance of tempo-

rality in the experience of learning. Our own and other descriptions of stu-

dents, therefore, suggest that the particular sorts of future orientations

implied by the employability and PDP agendas are only intermittently pre-

sent for students. This corresponds to the everyday accounts of staff and the

struggles they experience their students facing (Clegg and Bradley, 2006a,2006b). Attending to time as a non-unitary and complex unit of analysis is a

powerful resource for thinking about the experiences of students, and a

Clegg 357



15/21

corrective to the future orientation of the discourse of employability and the

formation of the malleable good neo-liberal subject.

Fast time in the enterprise universityThe salience of a time lens to understanding higher education is not

confined to pedagogical practices and the discourse of employability.

The broader reframing of higher education, marketization, and the univer-

sity as the enterprise university are implicated in a stance towards the

future as the quotation from The Future of Higher Education (DfES,

2003) cited earlier illustrates. All university functions are discursively proj-

ected as orientated towards global competitiveness, whether producing flex-

ible employable human capital or new knowledge and discoveries for

competitive economic exploitation. These pressures give rise to the multiple

timeframes of higher education which are complex, divergent and not infre-

quently conflictual in the lived presents of its workers and students. In

previous work (Clegg, 2003) I have identified the tensions between the

time of the organizational centre of universities and the time of academics.

The centres modes of planning are dissociated from the patterns of most

academic work which is structured around terms, semesters, and modules;

course beginnings and endings; admissions and examinations. There are

different temporalities for basic and contract research on which the prestigeof the enterprise university and academic capitalism depends. Grants are

bid for under pressure and final reports are being produced as new contracts

are being secured to sustain researchers own employment futures.

Sleeplessness in academia (Acker and Armenti, 2004) is real and, more-

over, experienced differentially by its members, with women being especially

affected as they are more likely to shoulder caring responsibilities, and more

likely to be on temporary contracts. One cannot ignore the relative privilege

of academics compared to other workers, but nonetheless reported stress

and lack of care for the self and others is endemic in the system. Thisspeeded up time has made time for reflection on both the part of staff

and students much less likely. Students face their own competing time pres-

sures with paid work increasingly impacting on the patterns and rhythms of

study. Virilio (2000) is among those who have commented on the dystopian

aspects of speed (Land, 2006). The more ruminative slow time of Claxtons

(1998) depiction of the tortoise mind (in counter-distinction to the hare

brain) is increasingly difficult to achieve in both research and teaching, and

what Ylijoki and Ma ntyla (2003) characterize as timeless time is experi-

enced as being increasingly rare in academic life.There is, therefore, a major contradiction in the claims for reflection in

higher education which assumes slow time. The fast time of the academy




16/21

and the empty future of policy imply a very different conception of reflec-

tion. This form of reflection looks to the future as something to be filled

with employable subjects and new discoveries. The forms of planning and

reflection involved are also inescapably competitive, individualistic, and

oriented to exchange value not use value. The question at stake for studentsis assumed in policy to be: do I have the capacities to make myself attractive

to employers, or to establish my own enterprise, or to embark on yet more

future orientated education? The question at stake for researchers is

assumed to be: can I compete successfully in producing the next bid, the

next new discovery, the next new world-leading output? The spectre of

performativity is tangible as a particular set of practices and form of social

regulation and should not be underestimated. The self as understood in

critical realism, however, is an irreducibly ethical self capable of making

choices and commitments, and capable of becoming a corporate agent. It

would be too crude (and romantic) to read the struggles of students with the

technologies of PDP as resistance. Nonetheless, it suggests that there is

nothing natural about the time orientation of clock time and the empty

future. Embodied, embedded subjects experience the now in much more

complex ways. Moreover, Archers (2000) insistence on the primacy of

practice and the importance of the practical order and of persons necessary

relations with material culture and practical knowledge, sets limits on the

extent to which we can understand persons solely in relation to discourse.Getting things, even in higher education, involves practical virtuosity,

and a feel for the task requires practice through time (Archer, 2000,

2004). Higher education is a site of multiple practices, experiences and

embodiments. Higher education policy, however, narrows our horizons;

but it is a mis-description. Students are not only oriented to their employ-

ability, researchers are not just motivated by zero-sum games. The possi-

bility of imagining different forms of practice and making different

choices remains.

Imagining otherwise

It is clear from the previous sections that the sorts of individualized plan-

ning and reflection presumed by the politics of employability, and the

speed-up competitiveness of the enterprise university, involve a mis-descrip-

tion of practice and cannot meet the challenges of thinking ethically about

the future. We cannot simply think about science in terms of global com-

petitiveness in the here and now, the complexity and uncertainty of our

effects into the future have implications for our thinking in the present.In order to imagine higher education otherwise in terms of the experienced

temporalities of both its students and workers, and the already immanent

Clegg 359



17/21

perspective of the future present, we need to be able to think about the

purposes of higher education within a different timeframe and to challenge

the emptied-out timeframe of the present future. We need to challenge the

idea of pedagogy simply as a neutral process and reject descriptions of good

teaching and learning where good is understood simply as technique andinvolving an orientation towards employability. This requires a return

to the question of curriculum, which has been a missing term in much

higher education thinking (Barnett and Coate, 2005). There are existing

resources in the various critical, feminist and other pedagogical approaches

(see e.g. hooks, 1994; Trifonas, 2003) which challenge the purposes, rela-

tions and knowledge inscribed into our current arrangements, and some of

these traditions have been attuned to thinking about time. In these tradi-

tions reflection and reflexivity have been more coherently theorized as prac-

tices which deal with socially situated relations of power, rather than simply

the life plans of individuals as employable or pedagogic subjects.

The arguments of this paper have ranged from the philosophical to the

pedagogical and experiential. I would defend the strategy of knitting

together the mundane and attention to the detail and micro-politics of

particular pedagogies with broader theoretical matters. If changes are to

be made we need to attend to both. Archer (2004), writing about the

contribution of theoretical thinking to practice makes the argument that

in order to have any impact theoretical knowledge has to make a detourthrough applied science or technology in order to demonstrate its worth

(Archer, 2004: 124). If we regard teaching as a practice not an abstract

science, which I do, paying attention to the detail of practice and thinking

about how our theoretical insights might impact on practice becomes

important. I would also defend trying to think about higher education

as a whole and thinking abut science and research alongside pedagogy, as

the sorts of speeding up and the present future imaging of an empty future

applies to both. Understanding time differently requires practices that

create the spaces and time for care to develop through the sorts of ethicalconnections Adam and Groves (2007) advocate in relation to the future.

This involves not thinking in terms of an empty present future, but in

terms of a future which they describe as already living within the present,

and which, drawing on Heidegger, they argue demands an informed,

imaginative and integrated sensitivity to the shifting dimensions of poten-

tial that fringe the present (Adam and Groves, 2007: 128). The unin-

tended complexities and indeterminacy that accompanies technologies

based on the idea that the world is subject to human design makes judge-

ment difficult, but it does not preclude our acting. We make fallible judge-ments and act throughout our lives. My argument for thinking about

the mundane and ordinary is that this is where we act, and where as




18/21

corporate agents (Archer, 2000, 2003) we can (collectively) begin to

change what we do.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the organiser, Paul Gibbs, and the contributors to the Time Work and

Education Symposium. London, 1719 February 2009 for their discussion of an

earlier draft of this paper.

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Sue Clegg holds a Chair in Higher Educational Research. She is a sociol-

ogist of higher education whose interests span close to practice investiga-

tions of the micro worlds of students and staff in higher education, and the

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recent work she has explored the complex temporalities of students involved

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of strategic change. Address: Centre for Research into HigherEducation, Carnegie Research Institute, Leeds Metropolitan University,

Cavendish Hall, Headingley Campus, Beckett Park, Leeds LS6 3QS.


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