Justice and Accountability: Andrew Ross, Intellectual Labour and the New Academic Activism

Abstract

I ended the previous chapter intimating that the patronage model for academic practice appears to be on the demise. For a relatively young discipline like cultural studies, with its history of suspicion towards elitist academic traditions, this development should not prove such a traumatic loss — indeed, as I will suggest in the following two chapters, it is a change that might be welcomed in so far as it expands the opportunities for scholarly work and the functions it serves for the societies which sustain it. At the same time, however, the corporatisation of the university and the insecurity of the labour market signalled in the shift away from normalised academic tenure mean that cultural studies scholars cannot afford to lose sight of the ways that their own working lives now serve as emblematic of wider economic shifts.¹ This is perhaps the key reason I have been advocating a more overt acknowledgement of cultural studies’ investment in the university as the location for its specific political ambitions: at a time when ‘New Economy’ discourse heralds information workers as the archetypal labour subjects, it is crucial that academics recognise the extent of their own implication in forms of exploitation that may not have been as prominent in the university’s previous historical configurations.