The latest few decades have involved significant changes in higher education. The changes have been ascribed transnational policies that embed transnational standards in national (higher) education systems. While educational scholars have studied these policies and their embedded modes of governance, the simultaneous public administration trends of performance management and their modes of governance have not become an integral part of educational research to the same extent, despite the far-reaching changes they generated in both administrative practices and in the structure and design of education. This project seeks to expand educational research by studying how the contemporary mode of education is affected by public administration practices.
Two current events make university budgeting a useful case on performance management-inspired administrative modes of governance. The first event is the launch of a new university teaching funding scheme, implemented in January 2019, introducing new metrics on graduate employment in university budgets. The second event is the implementation of a new common chart of accounts across the entire higher education sector in 2019-2021, standardising budgets in order to make them comparable across the sector. Not only are these two events interesting as important events in Danish higher education administration, and useful as methodological entry points to study how emerging budget models work compared to previous ones – they also illustrate how administrative performance management practices breed a particular mode of education.
The aim of the project is to contribute to our understanding of contemporary administrative modes of governance in education, and particularly our understanding on how budgeting practices affect the mode, or present configurations (Madsen, 2019a), of university education. By configuration, I mean a particular ‘lay-out’ of a phenomenon (such as education), constituted by particular budgeting practices that are simultaneously discursive (producing particular relations of difference, i.e. distinctions between degree programmes in terms of their performance measured as graduate employment, or between different kinds of teaching) and material (materialising in educational practices such as curricula, resource allocations, organisations of teaching, and digital platforms). The project studies the configurations of education that emerge within and from the budgets through the research field of ‘cultural studies of numbers’. A secondary aim is to contribute to this research field by engaging its conceptualisations of numbers with a new research object: Numbers in budgets.
The project bridges various research fields that approach the issue of (higher) education administration (including budgeting) differently. On the one hand, the research field of higher education governance has contributed with rich notions on modes of governance, such as market making (Komljenovic & Robertson, 2016), status wars driven by rankings (Espeland & Sauder, 2007), and modes of ‘soft governance’ that envokes an adaption to the transnational norm through peer pressure (Brøgger, 2018). In education governance studies more broadly, the increased use of quantified performance data is captured in the notion of ‘governing by numbers’ (Grek, 2009; Lingard, Martino, Rezai-Rashti, & Sellar, 2016). Meanwhile, this research field rarely takes up the question of budgeting or administration more broadly in a systematic way, and if so with a focus on how funding affects research rather than education (see for example Woelert & McKenzie, 2018).
On the other hand, the research on budgeting and other public administration practices is mainly found within political science. This position accentuates that budgeting is mainly analysed as a political and manegerial decision situation, or game (for example Peters, 2001; Seal & Ball, 2011), involving a range of actors (Anessi-Pessina, Barbera, Sicilia, & Steccolini, 2016: 502), and often analysed from a functionalist or neo-institutionalist approach (Anessi-Pessina et al., 2016: 507). For example, the budgeting research has discussed whether budgeting is a rational or a political process, and how it relates to issues of power and conflict (Rubin, 2015). Thus, the perspective of the budgeting research highly emphasises the agency of the participating (human) actors, while the relation between the administrative practice of budgeting and the cultural practice of for example education is invisible. Furthermore, the numbers in the budget remain passive and taken-for-granted entities, which means that the richness found in the policy-oriented education and governance studies is not paralleled in the administration-oriented governance studies.
The emerging research field of ‘cultural studies of numbers’ is a promising approach for expanding the vibrant analyses produced in the area of higher education governance to the area of education administration, and in particular budgeting (as budgets are composed of numbers). ‘Cultural studies of numbers’ is inspired by Barad (2007, 2014) and Deleuze & Guattari (2004). It approaches numbers by studying the techniques, political ideas, cultural practices, and histories they have emerged from (Dixon-Román, 2016: 484; Lather, 2016), and the agencies and materialities that operate within them (de Freitas, Dixon-Román, & Lather, 2016: 432). Thereby, numbers cease to be mere representations of reality. Rather, they become performative entities that configure what they represent in particular discursive and material ways. This configurative agency of numbers (Madsen, 2019a) can be conceptualised as one type of constitutive effect of numbers (Dahler-Larsen, 2007), which emphasises how numbers enable and limit education designs and practices (or in other words co-produce education) in certain ways through the categories and calculative operations used to make education ‘knowable’ to the budget, and thus governable. By studying budgeting from a culture-analytical and performative perspective, it is my aim and ambition to contribute to the field of educational administration with more rich and precise conceptualisations of how budgeting works, and how different budgets work differently in terms of their configurative capacity towards education.
The proposed project differs from the traditional social/political science approaches to the study of budgeting by asking questions about the configurations built into the budgets, including monetised working hours, class hours, full-time equivalents, square meters, and so forth. Thereby, the questions raised are not about the interests of the actors in play or the university procedures for budgeting. The project looks into numbers in budgets and, drawing on concepts from the sociology of quantification (Berman & Hirschman, 2018), studies the processes of commensuration (Espeland & Stevens, 1998), differentiation (Dixon-Román, 2017), classification (Bowker & Star, 2000), and standardisation (Brøgger, 2019) used to craft them, as well as performative effects on education designs and practices.
The project builds on my PhD project (Madsen, 2019b) by employing my approach to the study of numbers and quantification from my study of metrics and their effects on education to the study of budgeting and its effect on education in a novel way. The project differs from my PhD project by bridging these approaches with the underexplored research field that combines administration and education. The novelty lies in the exploration of the effects of administrative practices on education, and in the theoretical development of ‘cultural studies of numbers’ in relation to numbers in budgets.
I will study research questions 1 and 3 through an ethnographic study of one main case and two secondary cases: The current budget model within a particular Danish university, the previous budget model within the same Danish university, and the current budget model from a British university. By comparing the main case with the two secondary cases, the particularities of the main case will become visible. The explorative ethnographic design will allow me to start from central budgeting units at the two universities and follow the budgeting documents and practices downward into a selected educational environment at each university (Faculty, School, and Department levels) with inspiration from multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995). The design includes document studies and observations of the work of the central budgeting units. It furthermore includes interviews with budgeting officers, Faculty managers and budgeting staff, School managers and staff, Department managers and staff, and teachers involved in education design, as well as observations of budget meetings at these various university levels. Finally, the fieldwork will involve interviews with Ministry Officials working on the new university funding scheme and the new common chart of accounts. The focus of observations and interviews will be how numbers in budget are defined, used, and negotiated, and how they enable and limit education designs and practices. I have obtained access to a Danish university, while an agreement with a UK university awaits my presence in the country.
I will study research question 2 through a theoretical and diffractive reading (Barad, 2007, 2014) of my empirical material, budgeting literature, and the ‘cultural studies of numbers’ approach.
The results of the project will be disseminated in three papers: A) Comparative case study paper (European Educational Research Journal), B) Theoretical/conceptual paper (Educational Administration Quarterly), C) Thematical paper (Studies in Higher Education). The preliminary results will be discussed at a seminar at LSE and a lunchtalk at DPU. The results will be presented at the following conferences: CIES (Comparative & International Education Society), EGPA (The European group for Public Administration), and ECER (European Conference on Educational Research). The project includes four dissemination events at various Danish universites.
Scientifically, the project will contribute with insights into hitherto neglected but significant constituents of higher education that affect both students, teachers and administrative staff, for the benefit of national administrative governance, universities, and future generations of students. Furthermore, the project will add crucial conceptualisations to both educational and cultural studies.
Personally and professionally, the research stay at LSE will develop my knowledge on public administration and on the UK higher education sector. My PhD research has mainly focused on metrics and on the Danish higher education sector, so budgeting and the UK case will be completely new areas for me. In addition, the research stay will allow for my theoretical and analytical concepts to become cross-fertilized with public administration and economics research more generally and budgeting research specifically. The theoretical work moves beyond the work in my PhD project, and allows me to contribute significantly to the emerging research field on ‘cultural studies on numbers’, which in my opinion has a huge potential as a new research approach in the cross-over between the humanities and the social sciences. These developments will boost my further career, both in terms of my distinctive research profile; my contribution to the Danish research field of higher education governance and administration; and future teaching in educational public administration. The publicing of papers will enhance my experience with article publication, as my PhD is a monography.
The project runs 1/9 2020 – 31/8 2022. The host university will be London School of Economics (LSE) Jan-Dec 2021, and Aarhus University, DPU Sep-Dec 2020 and again Jan-Aug 2022.
Milestone | Location | Research focus | Dissemination activities |
Sep – Dec 2020 | DPU | Initial theoretical reading Fieldwork in Denmark | |
Jan – May 2021 | London | Fieldwork in UK | CIES conference 2021 |
June – Dec 2021 | London | Analysis of fieldwork Comparative analysis | Seminar at LSE EGPA conference 2021 ECER conference 2021 Submission of paper A |
Jan – Mar 2022 | DPU | Theoretical/conceptual work | Lunchtalk at DPU Aarhus Submission of paper B |
Apr – July 2022 | DPU | Thematical analysis | Submission of paper C Dissemination events in DK |
Aug 2022 | DPU | Final report |
London School of Economics, Department of Anthropology has a unique research environment in the study of management, administration, and economics from a cultural perspective. This department will provide a fruitful environment for the theoretical and empirical work within the project through the interaction with other approaches to international level research and knowledge within the field of administration, including critical and cultural approaches (Bear, 2015; Bear & Mathur, 2015). Specifically, the collaboration will include a) guest lectures for Master’s students, b) participation in Programme of Economic Research Seminars and Friday Departmental Seminars, c) planning and coordiating a workshop on the public good of universities, and d) two sessions of individual feedback.
The research programme ‘Policy Futures: The stakes of democracy in education policy, governance and administration in a transnational era’ at DPU, Aarhus University, will provide a fruitful environment for my return to a Danish context and for the dissemination of my research.
