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The paper reports on an empirical study based on qualitative interviews with staff from four Australian universities. These universities are shown to be undergoing significant social change as processes of marketisation impact on the everyday practices of academic workers. The universities are analysed as sites of contestation between the new professional managers and the established academic profession over the control of the conditions of work, the production of expert knowledge and the worksite itself. The theory of academic capitalism is examined, and the relevance of Bourdieu's work for the analysis of a university sector in a context of marketisation is assessed. Bourdieu's interlinked concepts of capital, habitus and the field are employed to investigate the nature of the contestation, revealing a dynamic process in which academics innovatively respond to threats to reduce their autonomy, to increased levels of surveillance and other constraints on practice. In addition, the study illustrates the processes through which actors within the sector, through acts of both conformity and resistance, contribute collectively to the growth of academic capitalism in the neoliberal university.

The relationships between disciplines and the institutions within which they are situated is a fertile area for researching the shaping of sociological knowledge. Applying theoretical insights from the sociology of knowledge, this article draws on an empirical study of research publications in the sociology of health and medicine to show which institutions in the Australian context are most likely to use sociological theory. When the institutions are positioned within the global university ranking system, an inverse association between sociological theory and the relative wealth and prestige of the originating institution becomes evident. Some of the implications of this finding are discussed with reference to the on-going viability of disciplines.

The paper reports on an empirical study based on qualitative interviews with staff from four Australian universities. These universities are shown to be undergoing significant social change as processes of marketisation impact on the everyday practices of academic workers. The universities are analysed as sites of contestation between the new professional managers and the established academic profession over the control of the conditions of work, the production of expert knowledge and the worksite itself. The theory of academic capitalism is examined, and the relevance of Bourdieu’s work for the analysis of a university sector in a context of marketisation is assessed. Bourdieu’s interlinked concepts of capital, habitus and the field are employed to investigate the nature of the contestation, revealing a dynamic process in which academics innovatively respond to threats to reduce their autonomy, to increased levels of surveillance and other constraints on practice. In addition, the study illustrates the processes through which actors within the sector, through acts of both conformity and resistance, contribute collectively to the growth of academic capitalism in the neoliberal university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]