Professional Culture of Lecturers in the Face of Managerialism: The Case of South Russian Universities

Introduction. Classical universities had been created and functioned for centuries as a social institution of culture reproduction. The role of lecturers in the process used to be a leading one. In order to successfully fulfill the mission, a professional culture of the teaching community would take shape within universities, and the former’s preservation was to guarantee the social usefulness of higher education. Managerialist reforms have dramatically changed the internal characteristics of universities and resulted in that target points were shifted from science, education and upbringing — towards the integration into commercial values of market institutions. This has had negative impacts on the teaching community’s ability to maintain and transfer its professional culture to new generations of lecturers. Goals. The paper seeks to reveal the relationship between the managerialist agenda and the deformation of lecturers’ professional culture, which further leads to aggravated asymmetries between the center and regions. Materials and methods. The study focuses on two sources of data — an opinion poll and documents. The opinion poll was conducted in seven regions of South Russia (Krasnodar Krai, Astrakhan Oblast, Stavropol Krai, Kalmykia, Rostov Oblast, Crimea and Sevastopol) and involved a total of 951 lecturers from nine universities. Federal laws, government decrees and orders of the Russian Ministry of Education and Science have been used to explore the regulatory framework of managerialism. Certain statistical data found on the official website of Rosstat prove most instrumental in clarifying some aspects of how managerialism influences lecturers’ professional culture. Results. The work resumes managerialism does destroy the examined professional culture. The teaching personnel have to develop goals and a value system alien to their activity, which entails that participation in paid publications, extramural conferences, publications in ‘rubbish’ journals, grade inflation, false authorship, falsification of empirical data, plagiarism and other negative phenomena become the norm. Conclusions. The deformation arises from the lack of resources to achieve managerialist goals and the loss of academic community’s subjectivity, which makes lecturers indifferent to the destruction of their own professional culture. Finally, the meager resource basis leads to an increase in imitational practices throughout professional activities, which entails further asymmetries between the center and peripheries.