Anxious academics: talking back to the audit culture through collegial, critical and creative autoethnography

The gradeless paradox: Emancipatory promises but ambivalent effects of gradeless learning in business and management education

The negative impacts of grades on students’ approach to learning and well-being have renewed the interest in gradeless learning in higher education, with the current literature focusing on the positive outcomes for students, including the advancement of student learning, reduced stress, increased motivation, and enhanced performance. While the idea of freeing students from the weight of grades sounds promising, grades are so integral to the educational system that the effects of learning without grades may not provide the relief intended. In this article, we present a qualitative case study of how business and management students experienced having gradeless learning in their first year of an undergraduate program. Our data show that students felt true ambivalence about learning without grades. Although gradeless learning was associated with less pressure, higher motivation, and a more collaborative approach to learning, it also engendered feelings of identity loss and uncertainty among students about their own performance and future opportunities. Our study contributes to previous studies on the impact of grades by revealing the ambivalence experienced by students when learning without the well-known metric of grades in a performance culture. Moreover, it provides new empirical insights into how business and management students experience gradeless learning.

Controlling academics: Power and resistance in the archipelago of post-COVID-19 audit regimes

Government response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic promises to entrench austerity politics deeper into the organization of academic life, and audit regimes are the likely means of achieving this. Redoubled efforts to understand the operation of audit as a strategic technology of control are therefore clearly a priority. A distinctly anthropological literature has emerged over recent years to analyse and understand audit culture in academia, but what seems to be missing are analyses capable of bringing the disparate techniques experienced in academic audit together into coherent technologies, and identifying how these technologies thereby constitute a distinct audit regime within the broader audit culture. While the anthropological literature implicitly calls for further historical and conceptual exploration of the rationality to these techniques, what is required is the translation of our understanding of audit rationality into a presentation of the concrete techniques of control as they are experienced, so that more effective counter-conducts and resistances can be conceived. This article indicates how an excursion into the Soviet Gulag, and the political technology of the ‘camp’ that is its principal apparatus, can reveal not merely how the techniques of audit operate, but also indicate how those techniques might be engaged tactically in the academic setting. This kind of analogic analysis can allow us to understand audit in ways more promising for resistance to its idiomatic power, replacing demoralized and helpless resignation with inspirational exempla. Politically, the article argues that ‘techniques of the self’ are not only necessary to engage audit techniques through particular kinds of counter-conduct, but how these counter-conducts are contributory to the organized and concerted kind of resistance that we so desperately desire. The practice of tukhta is singled out and introduced as an illustrative means for combining survival strategies with the development of critical rationality in praxis.

Workplace Injury and the Failing Academic Body: A Testimony of Pain

This article explores how meanings around risk, health/safety, and workers' bodies are constructed in an academic context. I do so through the study of a single academic in Australia who sustained a back injury at work. Through an analysis of in-depth interviews and documents, I attempt to show the embodied experience of an injured worker's struggle for care, recovery, and survival in the neoliberal academy. Writing from the nexus of workplace health and safety and critical management literatures, the raw testimony of this injured academic lays bare the violences that are enabled within a wider culture of self-discipline, individualism, and performativity in the university. The story presented in this article exposes how physiological and psychological injuries can be exacerbated through the very health and safety procedures that are designed to prevent and alleviate harm. Please note that this article contains references to suicide and suicidal ideation.

The autoimmunity of the modern university: How its managerialism is self-harming what it claims to protect

What we critically ascertain in this essay is how the modern university is increasingly drifting away from the key ambitions of its own mission statement, and largely by its own doing. Although the typical university in its mission statement claims to aspire outstanding quality, academic freedom, and to contribute to society, in its daily organization, the modern university has normalized and internalized a neoliberal metrical governmentality, in which quality, freedom, and societal benefit risk being exchanged for quantity, managerial control, and status benefit. In this essay, we stand up against this worrying self-harming protection strategy, what we term—following Jacques Derrida—the autoimmunity of the university. To structure our argument, we will discern the main worrying autoimmune paradoxes of this university policy in the hope to further the debate and potentially remedy the university of this self-inflicted harm.

The Performative University: ‘Targets’, ‘Terror’ and ‘Taking Back Freedom’ in Academia

This special issue assembles eight papers which provide insights into the working lives of early career to more senior academics, from several different countries. The first common theme which emerges is around the predominance of ‘targets’, enacting aspects of quantification and the ideal of perfect control and fabrication. The second theme is about the ensuing precarious evocation of ‘terror’ impacting on mental well-being, albeit enacted in diverse ways. Furthermore, several papers highlight a particular type of response, beyond complicity to ‘take freedom back’ (the third theme). This freedom is used to assert an emerging parallel form of resistance over time, from overt, planned, institutional collective representation towards more informal, post-recognition forms of collaborative, covert, counter spaces (both virtually and physically). Such resistance is underpinned by a collective care, generosity and embrace of vulnerability, whereby a reflexive collegiality is enacted. We feel that these emergent practices should encourage senior management, including vice-chancellors, to rethink performative practices. Situating the papers in the context of the current coronavirus crisis, they point towards new forms of seeing and organising which open up, rather than close down, academic freedom to unleash collaborative emancipatory power so as to contribute to the public and ecological good.

Bullying and the neoliberal university: A co-authored autoethnography

The purpose of this article is to deepen the understanding of academic bullying as a consequence of neoliberal reforms in a university. Academics in contemporary universities have been put under pressure by the dominance of neoliberal processes, such as profit maximization, aggressive competitiveness, individualism or self-interest, generating undignifying social behaviours, including bullying practices. The presented story takes us – a junior academic and his conceptual encounterer – through our remembered experiences and field notes around a set of workday events in one European university reformed through managerial solutions as the object of the study. To do that, we employ co-authored analytic autoethnography to learn how neoliberal solutions reinforce paternalistic relationships as significant in career development, how such solutions enable the bullying of young academics and how neoliberalism in academia prevents young academics from contesting bullying. We are particularly interested in the bystander phenomenon: a person who shies away from taking action against bullying and thus strengthens bullying practices.

Mechanisms of micro-terror? Early career CMS academics’ experiences of ‘targets and terror’ in contemporary business schools

In this article, we apply the concept of ‘targets and terror’, previously used in the healthcare sector, to the audit culture within business schools. We explore to what extent terror, or the inculcation of fear through processes of domination, is identifiable in the micro-level experiences of early career academics. Drawing on an international study of 38 Critical Management Studies early career academics from 15 countries, we develop a theoretical framework combining Bourdieu’s modes of domination and Meyerson and Scully’s Tempered Radicalism, which helps us identify top-down and horizontal processes of micro-terror and bottom-up processes of micro-terrorism, specifically self-terrorisation and counter-terrorisation. In extending the study of ‘targets and terror’ cultures to contemporary business schools, we develop a clearer understanding of how domination plays out in the everyday processes of management and self-management. From Bourdieu’s modes of domination, we discern a dark picture of institutional and interpersonal overt and symbolic violence in the name of target achievement. The Tempered Radicalism lens helps us to understand early career academic challenges that can lead to self-terrorisation but also brings possible ways forward, showing early career academics how to resist mechanisms of micro-terror through their own small acts of counter-terrorisation, providing some hope specifically as the basis for collective resistance.

Who cares for academics? We need to talk about emotional well-being including what we avoid and intellectualise through macro-discourses

This article explores academics’ well-being through analysing published sensitive disclosures, bringing to journal space the pain, rawness and emotional suffering of individuals’ experiences. We confront the taboos of speaking openly about mental health and emotional well-being in academic institutions, with masculine structures and encroaching neoliberal discourses that create hostile atmospheres unsupportive of vulnerability and uncertainty. We also challenge existing discourses about academics’ well-being, implicitly burdening individuals as responsible for their pain and creating walls of shame, rather than building new healthy structures. By spotlighting the voices of academics’ emotional disclosures, intensified by embodied social inequalities, we plead for openness in formal academic outlets for sharing pre-existing emotional struggles and new wounds created by cruelly competitive, winner-takes-all structures, fortified by neoliberal ideals. Led by individuals’ voices and experiences, we make recommendations for supporting academics as an attempt to extract academia from its current perverse state and commit to repair and transformation.