A Heideggerian Phenomenology Approach to Higher Education as Workplace: A Consideration of Academic Professionalism

Heidegger’s early works provide his most important contribution to our understanding of being, while his discussion of the effects of technology on that being in his later works is one of his best known contributions. I use his phenomenological approach to understanding the workplace and then, from a range of potential applications, choose to describe the functioning of higher education as a workplace for academic professionals. Heidegger seemingly fails to offer a subtle approach to what is labouring, or to whether there is a substantive difference between labouring and working. To find such approaches I draw upon work of both Marcuse and Arendt which specifically relates to these distinctions.