Neoliberalism has become a highly dominating and taken‐for‐granted way of organising the university sector around the world. In the critical educational literature, this market‐based rationality has been scrutinised in detail over the past decades. However, rather scant attention has been directed to how university managers and administrators, apart from setting up quasi‐markets, may intervene more directly to give the invisible hand of the market a helping hand. Aiming to address this lacuna, the purpose of the current article is to develop an empirically grounded taxonomy of different types of such interventions, and to theorise them in terms of the different facets of the neoliberal milieu that they reproduce and the various forms of subjectivising work among academics that they seek to engender. We do so by means of a qualitative study of so‐called ‘Grants Offices’ at three Swedish universities. The findings arguably add to and problematise our understanding of how neoliberal markets work in academia in three different ways. First, while extant research has noted that university managers and administrators may intervene beyond the setting up of neoliberal markets per se, our study is to our knowledge the first one that identifies and systematises a broad array of such interventions. Second, it problematises the view of neoliberal markets as a form of monolithic entity that produces a uniform competitive pressure on academics. Third, and related, it furthers our understanding of the type of subjectivity that competitive milieus are assumed to bring about.

中文翻译：

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为看不见的手伸出援助之手：“资助办公室”如何养育新自由主义研究人员

新自由主义已成为组织全球大学界的一种高度主导和理所当然的方式。在批判性教育文献中，过去几十年来已对这种基于市场的合理性进行了详细审查。然而，除了建立准市场之外，大学管理者和管理者如何直接干预以使市场的无形之手有所帮助，却鲜有关注。旨在解决这一空白，目的本文的目的是开发一种基于经验的分类法，用于不同类型的此类干预措施，并根据它们所再现的新自由主义环境的不同方面以及他们试图寻求的学者之间的各种形式的主观化工作来对其进行理论化。我们通过对瑞典三所大学中所谓的“拨款办公室”进行定性研究。这些发现无疑会以三种不同的方式加深我们对学术界新自由主义市场运作方式的理解，并给我们带来了问题。首先，尽管现有研究表明大学管理者和行政人员可能会干预，而不是建立新自由主义市场本身，但据我们所知，这是第一个识别和系统化此类干预措施的系统。第二，它质疑新自由市场作为一种整体实体的形式，对学者产生统一的竞争压力。第三，并且与此相关，它使我们进一步了解了竞争环境被假定带来的主观性类型。