The compliant environment. Conformity, data processing and increasing inequality in UK higher education
| Date | 14 October 2019 |
| Published date | 14 October 2019 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-09-2018-0284 |
| Pages | 1063-1079 |
| Author | Penny Andrews |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science |
The compliant environment
Conformity, data processing and increasing
inequality in UK higher education
Penny Andrews
School of Information, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to present the concept of institutions as compliant environments,
using data to monitor and enforce compliance with a range of external policies and initiatives, using the
particular example of UK higher education (HE) institutions. The paper differs from previous studies by
bringing together a range of policies and uses of data covering different areas of HE and demonstrating how
they contribute to the common goal of compliance.
Design/methodology/approach –The compliant environmen t is defined in this context and the author
has applied the prelimi nary model to a range of policies and cases that u se and reuse data from staff and
students in HE.
Findings –The findings show that the focus on compliance with these policies and initiatives has resulted in
a high level of surveillance of staff and students and a lack of resistance towards policies that work against
the goals of education and academia.
Research limitations/implications –This is the first study to bring together the range of areas in which
policy compliance and data processing are entwined in HE. The study contributes to the academic literature
on data and surveillance and on academic institutions as organisations.
Practical implications –The paper offers suggestions for resistance to compliance and data processing
initiatives in HE.
Originality/value –This is the first study to bring together the range of areas in which policy compliance
and data processing are entwined in HE. The study contributes to the academic literature on data and
surveillance and on academic institutions as organisations.
Keywords Higher education, Policy, Immigration, Dataveillance, Surveillance, Data
Paper type Conceptual paper
Introduction
The “compliant environment”at the Home Office (Home Office, 2017a) is a rebranding of
then Home Secretary Theresa May’s“hostile environment”approach to immigration
(Travis, 2013), which involves the reuse and processing of data from a variety of sources
(including the National Health Servi ce, employers, housing providers, ed ucational
institutions and social media) and the promotion of unwelcoming messages aimed at
migrants to the UK to support immigration enforcement. This paper argues that a form of
“compliant environment”is what we now see in UK higher education (HE), perpetuated by a
number of different initiatives aimed at staff and students, both at the institutional and
national level. The compliant environment in HE is heavily reliant on the collection
and processing of multiple sources of the data for the monitoring of this compliance, and
also to create new forms of compliance and conformity via metrics and analytics. While
other articles have considered these initiatives separately, this paper is original in rigorously
examining their collective impact inside and outside universities, and their relationship to
other everyday uses of data to monitor and evaluate citizens. This paper explains the
various ways in which data is used in UK HE to comply with outside agendas and conform
with various social and sectoral norms, and suggests a different approach informed by the
resistance work of NHS workers. If UK HE is important to society and is to remain a public
good, this resistance work is needed. Significant claims (Leathwood and Read, 2013;
Lynch and Ivancheva, 2016; Spiller et al., 2018; Teelken, 2012) are made about this collective
impact of compliance initiatives: the combined effect is to enact more oppression on the most
Online Information Review
Vol. 43 No. 6, 2019
pp. 1063-1079
© Emerald PublishingLimited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-09-2018-0284
Received 29 September 2018
Revised 1 July 2019
Accepted 9 July 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
1063
Compliant
environment
marginalised and surveilled people in HE –both underrepresented minorities in the staff
and student bodies –and to erode trust and public good in HE. Support from the public and
finance from the government depends on how the role of HE is viewed: as employment
training or as a public good in itself.
TheconceptofHEasa“public good”is contested. As Nixon (2011) points out in his work on
the topic, so is the idea of the “public”itself,andbothareoftentoonarrowlydefinedandneedto
be more broadly imagined outside the scope of private interests and those with the power
to bestow or withdraw public ownership. If the government’sstateddesireistoencouragemore
privatisation and “challenger institutions”in HE (Department for Business Innovation & Skills,
2016), that indicates that they think they have this power and do not consider the public to be
the current owners. HE and university are not synonymous or inseparable, but the latter is the
main model for delivery of the former in the UK. The experiences of both staff and students
have diversified further and grown in complexity since the student population in universities
has become bigger and more heterogeneous (Wånggren, 2018), and the policy framework
continually changes (Collini, 2017), further exposing the inequalities already present.
Increased professionalisation and privatisation has led some academics to leave their
jobs (Morrish, 2016), finding the demands of “the general distortions required to turn a
university into a for-profit business”(Warner, 2014) intolerable. Others such as Les Back
(2016) have chosen to stay, deploying strategies of non-envious generosity and developing
an intellectual hinterland to survive and thrive. However, academics can be argued to have
been actively complicit in the auditing and marketisation measures their colleagues find so
oppressive, and at research-intensive universities may have sought protection for their
funding and place in middle class society at the price of the public status of the university
(Holmwood, 2017, 2018).
The branding of UK universities, via distinctive design and differentiation of the
“student experience”(Barkas et al., 2019; Lomer et al., 2018), has intensified since the 1990s
formation of groupings like the Russell Group and Million+, which signal both the
institution’s position within the elite hierarchy and their intended focuses and audiences
(Furey et al., 2014) to undergraduate applicants and the wider world. Prestige at institutional
and individual level became more important as the sector became more marketised and
forced into competition by government policy, and the number of qualified academics
applying for jobs increased (Blackmore and Kandiko, 2011; Holmwood, 2018; Tregoning,
2016). To market themselves, academics and universities too are drawn into the data-driven
world of benchmarked data, metrics and indicators of esteem (Coate and Kandiko Howson,
2016) and into conforming with others’ideas of what a successful or high quality brand
might be. Marketing literature from UK universities demonstrates a high level of
homogeneity in UK HE, and institutional expectations are high but explanations of what e.g.
“quality”or “the student experience”really mean are scarce (Huisman and Mampaey, 2018).
Equally, what makes an academic employable is not any distinctive factors but high scores
in standardised metrics (Hall and Page, 2015; Smeyers and Burbules, 2011) and exercises
such internal audits for the Research Excellency Framework (Grant and Elizabeth, 2015;
Marcella et al., 2017; Shore and Wright, 2015) and a high score on a competency framework
that often cannot allow for contextual information or individual circumstances. The “good”
or “successful”academic (Archer, 2008; Van den Brink and Benschop, 2014) and “good”
university or institution (Brown and Mazzarol, 2009; Mountz et al., 2015; Olssen, 2016) are
judged by rankings, research income and prestige, and a very particular idea of what
students need and want (EY Parthenon, 2018).
This paper outlines the concept of the compliant environment in HE. It then explains
how data are used and combined in HE, including for purposes of border control and
othering of staff and students, the reasons why compliance occurs and offers some ideas
for resisting compliance.
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