Entrepreneurial universities and risk-averse academic practice

This paper examines the tension between institutional ambitions to position universities as entrepreneurial and the performative conditions shaping everyday academic work in post-92 higher education. Drawing on concepts of governmentality and performativity, the study explores how academic practice is organised within marketised environments characterised by audit, metrics and risk management. Sixteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with lecturers across five universities in Scotland and Wales, focusing on how participants encountered institutional expectations commonly framed through the language of creativity, agility and risk. The findings show that practices often described institutionally as entrepreneurial are experienced less as innovation and more as pragmatic responses to constrained working conditions. Creativity was oriented towards sustaining teaching quality and student engagement, frequently requiring additional and unrecognised labour. Agility appeared as a reactive necessity in volatile environments shaped by shifting priorities and resource limitations. Risk-taking was largely avoided, with participants describing organisational cultures that encouraged caution and prioritised visible performance over experimentation. Rather than confirming a shift towards entrepreneurial academic identities, the study highlights a structural tension between entrepreneurial institutional discourse and risk-averse academic practice. The analysis introduces the concept of safe innovation to describe how adaptive practices become oriented towards stabilising performance and managing exposure to evaluation rather than driving institutional transformation. The paper contributes to debates on academic labour by showing how performative governance reshapes professional practice within devolved higher education systems and by identifying implications for institutional leadership, workload governance and policy frameworks seeking to balance innovation with sustainability.