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Producing time and space: academic work after Henri Lefebvre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Maureen Patricia Spencer
Maureen Patricia Spencer*
Affiliation:
Middlesex University
*
Maureen Patricia Spencer, Middlesex University, Department of Law, The Burroughs, London, NW4 4BT, UK. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

In a recent study, the influential theorist of higher education Ronald Barnett suggests that one way for academics to address the pressures on their professional lives is to embrace a multidimensional concept of working time. Drawing on the analysis of space by the French philosopher/sociologist Henri Lefebvre, Barnett advocates conceiving academic practice as a continuum of interrelated strands rather than a set of discrete packages of activity subject to bureaucratic domination. This paper examines whether this approach can reassert agency on the part of academics and provide a site for resistance to the obsession on the part of managers and policy makers with outputs and the quantification of working hours. It sets Barnett's analysis in the context of other empirical studies in higher education literature on the management and allocation of workloads, particularly on tensions arising from conflicting demands of research and teaching. It also examines synergies between Barnett and other scholarship on the professional lives of law academics on the part of Bradney, Collier and Cownie. The paper concludes that a Lefebvrean analysis of how time and space are constituted by human activity provides a rigorous theoretical framework within which to reconstitute the coherence in academic practice which is sought by many in higher education.

Type
Research Article
Information
Legal Studies , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , September 2013 , pp. 478 - 500
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Legal Scholars 2013

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Ronald Barnett, Alan Durant, Penny Kent, Ifan Shepherd and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

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59. Butler (ibid, at 314) writes:

‘Lefebvre was one of the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth century, although his stature and contributions to philosophy, sociology and urban studies have only relatively recently begun to be widely appreciated by scholars outside France.’Lefebvre was particularly influential in Latin America in articulating the rights of city slum dwellers against the encroachments of the wealthy elites.

60. Barnett, above n 4, p 46.

61. Ibid, p 82.

62. Ibid, p 79.

63. Ibid, p 7.

64. Lefebvre, above n 5, pp 89–90.

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67. Ibid.

68. Ibid, p 33.

69. Ibid.

70. Ibid, p 38.

71. Ibid.

72. Ibid, p 39 (emphasis in original).

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79. Cownie, above n 6, p 141.

80. Barnett, above n 4, p 56.

81. Ibid, p 77, quoting Lefebvre (above n 5, p 91) (emphasis in original).

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88. Lefebvre, above n 5, p 12.

89. Barnett, above n 4, p 99.

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130. Barnett, above n 4, p 6.

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133. Department for Business Innovation ‘Students at the heart of the system’ June 2011, available at http://www.bis.gov.uk/Consultations/he-white-paper-students-at-the-heart

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135. Ibid, at 26. The paper notes current differences by discipline at different institutions, with a range of between 44.8 hours and 18.7 hours in law, compared with between 39.5 hours and 14 hours in historical and political studies.

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141. Above n 53, at 29 (emphasis in original). However much they question the extraneously imposed boundaries in academic work, between private and public, research and teaching, qualitative and quantitative accounting of time, there is still little mention in any of the above studies of that most marked of divisions – that between hand and brain.For a powerful plea for academics to adopt manual skills, see Crawford, M Shop Class as Soulcraft: Inquiry into the Value of Work (London: Penguin, 2009).Google Scholar

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