Liz Morrish contemplates the legacy of Foucault's concept of governmentality in this piece on the construction of managerial identity in UK universities.
In UK universities, the conflict between managerial and
academic values is primarily a struggle over discourse and the symbolic. It operates
by forcing the academic to cite discourse which redefines their subjectivity in terms of managerial
values. We have seen a
destabilization of established academic practices, and a superseding of
existing values of cooperation, collective governance and democracy. Whereas, once the university was once
conceived of as a refuge from market values in its tolerance of risk and
failure, they now reward only entrepreneurial, self-governing and competitive
subjects, who are happy to function within the limits and discourse set for
them by the managerial project.
This paper draws on an ongoing project to collect and
analyse data to support the argument that university management is like a Ponzi
Scheme which is having a malign effect on the character of British higher
education institutions
. These
schemes only succeed when you can persuade new investors to join the scheme,
and so the internal priorities of universities are distorted away from teaching
and research, towards feeding the managerial Ponzi.
I am fortunate to be able pursue my research as an outsider
on the inside by embedding myself in the rich environment of managerial
apprenticeship now offered by most universities. The project of neoliberal governmentality
is for the institution to produce its ideal employee (Morrissey 2013) and there
can be no rejection of the new subjectivity. Our professional lives are
dominated by the need to provide discursive evidence that we are compliant with
the managerial regime in the form of performance management reviews, teaching
evaluations, student satisfactions surveys, research excellence frameworks. Failure
to enter into the discourse results in illocutionary silencing. A kind of
biopower is exacted by compelling academics to undergo dressage training (Bendix
Petersen and Davies 2010) in the new ratified behaviours and discourses. Linguistic data supporting this analysis emerges from management training programs such as: Leading High
Performance Teams, Succession Planning, and Supporting Gold Standard Customer
Service.
I argue that those who pursue management roles in higher education are in the
grip of a cult. Their identification with others in that tier, and their search
for community, demands that they police the borders of the in-group while compelling
subordinates to cite their norms. It is precisely because a fiction has been
constituted, that management has to work so hard to maintain this precarious
identity by discourse. Academics, however, are very aware that the official
university culture of transparency and access to information is a perverse
parody, retreating to what Docherty (2011) has called the ‘clandestine
university’ within to pursue meaningful teaching and research.
References
- Bendix Petersen, Eva and
Davies, Bronwyn. (2010) In/Difference in the neoliberalised university. Learning and Teaching in the Social Sciences.
3:2. 92-109
- Docherty, Thomas (2011). The unseen academy. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/418076.article
- Morrissey, John. (2013). Governing the academic subject:
Foucault, governmentality and the performing university. Oxford Review of Education. 39:6. 797-810.
