The policy unconscious: educational labor, the research-and-teaching relationship and the unquestioned meaning of higher education

Recent developments in higher education have shown that policies that promote employability tend to be at odds with policies that aim to ensure a close relationship between teaching and research. In this article, we explore how university teachers enact a policy demanding a close relationship between research and teaching. Based on a conceptualization of educational labor practices as policy enactment, we show that teachers enact the policy by using scientific papers in class; by teaching students how to attain a ‘scientific attitude’; by drawing upon one’s own research experiences; and finally, by emphasizing formal competence. As the policy is enacted through educational labor practices, and those practices give higher education its meaning, the policy enactment is enabled by what we term the policy unconscious. This term denotes not only the educational labor practices by which the policy is enacted, but also the dialectics between the particular labor practices and the general meaning ascribed to higher education.