Deepening understandings of Bourdieu’s academic and intellectual capital through a study of academic voice within academic governance

The role of bibliometric research assessment in a global order of epistemic injustice: a case study of humanities research in Denmark

“…As participants in the game struggle to accrue the most valuable capital, they become positioned hierarchically within a field (Bourdieu, 1986). Intellectual capital, the product of academic research (Bourdieu, 1984), takes the form of scholarly renown or reputation and can sometimes be exchanged for economic capital in the form of research grants, or income from government funded and fee-paying students (Rowlands, 2018). Hence, intellectual capital is valuable to researchers for the status it bestows within disciplinary fields and to universities for the economic capital it generates.…”

“…While competition between academics and disciplines is not new, the degree and the stakes of that competition are now higher (Rowlands, 2018). Geopolitical competition, in the form of university rankings, reflects that higher education has become a global commodity 1 (Naidoo, 2018).…”

National Research Assessment Frameworks, Publication Output Targets and Research Practices: The Compliance-Habitus Effect

“…Capital comes in various elemental (social, economic, cultural, symbolic) or compounded forms (journalistic, political, juridical) with a value specific to the field or fields within which it is held (Bourdieu, 1986). Different forms of capital are produced and accumulate within different fields arising from the specific practices that take place there; for example, academic, scientific and intellectual capital or power accumulate in response to managerial, scholarly, scientific and research practices (Bourdieu, 1988;Rowlands, 2017b). In play as oppositional forces, Bourdieu named academic capital as being generated through holding a senior position within the organisational hierarchy of a university and exercising the financial and hierarchical power that this position inherently brings.…”

“…In contemporary terms, academic power equates to holding a managerial role and thus to managerial practices. In contrast, intellectual capital reflects reputational power produced through scholarly and scientific (including the social sciences) research practices (Bourdieu, 1988;Rowlands, 2017b). Fields are intersecting social spaces that operate as sites of struggle over which species of capital is dominant and in relation to efforts by agents to increase their share of the dominant capital, such as is the case in relation to the often fierce competition between academic and intellectual capital (Rowlands, 2013).…”

“…Contemporary academic work requires practising academics to generate intellectual capital in the form of research outputs but also to wield considerable academic capital (in Bourdieu's terms) or management capital (Rowlands 2017) in order to respond to the requirements of performance monitoring and measurement associated with academic workload models and other similar mechanisms generated by the higher education field. Thus academics must not only juggle these two competing forms of capital but they must also straddle two different fields: the university or higher education field currently dominated by academic capital and where intellectual outputs are counted and ranked; and the global disciplinary field within which much intellectual capital is produced and to which many academic researchers seek to belong (Rowlands, 2017b). However, the logics of practice of these two fields can be quite different.…”