The growing orientation of public universities towards the corporate sector has had a sign ficant impact on higher education governance, management, and discourse. The rhetoric of the free market, man fested most tangibly in business-related lexis, is now firmly established in the discursive repertoire employed by academic leaders, politicians, and the media, as well as parts of higher education research. Within this rhetoric, enterprise and enterprising, as well as entrepreneur and entrepreneurial, stand out as keywords carrying sign ficant ideological loads (...) that reflect the colonisation of academia by the market. The organisational and policy-making implications of academic enterprise have received considerable attention from higher education researchers, while discourse analysts have identified general discursive features of the ‘marketised’ higher education landscape. What the present paper adds to the existing debate is an in-depth study of a set of keywords in which processes of adaptation and appropriation crystallise, thus showing how macro-level social phenomena are mirrored, on the micro-level of linguistic detail, in the collocational behaviour of individual lexical items. The textual data that this paper is based on, gleaned mostly from the Internet, show that entrepreneur, entrepreneurial, enterprise, and enterprising are ambiguous in denotation and rich in connotation, making them susceptible to processes of semantic appropriation to suit particular agendas. Prevailing motfs and representations are ident fled through a combination of the computer-supported survey of Web-based material and the qualitative analysis of sample texts. (shrink)

Whereas epistemological debates raged in educational administration during the Theory Movement, or inspired by intervention from Thom Greenfield, Richard Bates or Colin Evers and Gabriele Lakomski, epistemology and the quest for the scientific study of educational administration has somewhat diminished in the era of managerialism and the pursuit of research that has a direct impact on practice. Theoretically informed by the work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, I seek to re-engage with the epistemological preliminaries of scholarship in educational leadership, (...) management and administration. In doing so, I argue that administration is central to our way of seeing the social world and raise questions about the embedded and embodied nature of the educational administration scholar and what this means for scholarship. A social ‘scientific’ approach to educational administration, as advocated for in this article, must break free of the ambition of grounding in reason, the arbitrary division of the social world and instead, take for its object, rather than getting itself caught up in, the struggle for the monopoly of the legitimate representation of the social world. (shrink)

This book is an invitation to academic administrators, at every level, to engage in reflection on the ethical dimensions of their working lives.