Contextualizing capitalism in academia: How capitalist and feudalist organizing principles reinforce each other at Polish universities

In this paper, we show how capitalism and feudalism reinforce each other to enable the former’s success in the higher education context. In this regard, Polish universities are an interesting case due to Poland’s capitalist shock therapy in the 1990s, its Western European membership in the European Union in the 2000s and due to recent reforms intended to modernize Polish academia. Based on 36 interviews with Polish early career academics from urban universities with experience working in watchdogs of higher education, we examine respondents’ perspectives on the current capitalist reforms. They treat ongoing changes as a solution for the problems experienced and defined as “feudal”: political labeling, abuse of power and discrimination against women. Understanding capitalism and feudalism through their organizing principles, the main contribution of this study is that it demonstrates how capitalist organizing principles fix existing feudalist organizing principles to flourish in Polish university. Hence, it is difficult for early career academics to recognize that capitalist organizing principles are in fact reinforcing rather than eliminating (as the advocates of capitalist reforms often claim) feudal problems in Polish academia.

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.

Decolonizing journals in management and organizations? Epistemological colonial encounters and the double translation

Increasingly, academics worldwide need publishing in international journals. Various events and articles aim at teaching others how to write, and they spread ideas and skills to help newcomers. However, we tend to neglect the specificities of periphery-based academics, engaging with “international” journals. Drawing from our experience as academics from Brazil, we argue that publishing in top-academic journals in management and organization studies demands more than knowing a language and goes beyond style. Periphery-based academics willing to publish in “international” journals engage in a colonial encounter. They need to develop their ability to perform a double-translation, writing ideas in another language and for another audience. Besides, they need to deal with financial costs that are often invisible to others. We claim that decolonizing international journals is challenging and must be an ongoing process, of which some steps we highlight here.

The courage to teach with compassion: Enriching classroom designs and practices to foster responsiveness to suffering

Recognizing the prevalence of suffering among management teachers and students, we raise the importance of compassion as central to the practice of management teaching. To aid in understanding how suffering and compassion arise in management teaching, we call upon a theoretical view of their rhizomatic structure, which conveys the widespread, complex, and largely unspoken spreading of suffering and corresponding need for compassion in the work of management teaching. To meet this suffering with compassion, we propose two clusters of practices central to teaching that lend themselves to helping management teachers see possibilities for more skillfully intertwining suffering and compassion. The first focuses on how management teachers can design the context for teaching in ways that make compassion more likely, focusing specifically on roles and networks. The second draws upon Honneth’s recognitional infrastructure to focus on how teachers can approach the relational practice of teaching with emphasis on enriching human recognition of suffering. We conclude with a caution about overly simplistic approaches and overly individualized views of compassion in the work of management teaching. We call for systemic approaches to action that will enrich our imaginations as we approach management teaching and its role in our collective responsiveness to suffering.

In praise of holistic scholarship: A collective essay in memory of Mark Easterby-Smith

This collective essay was born out of a desire to honor and remember Professor Mark Easterby-Smith, a founder of the Management Learning community. To do this, we invited community members to share their experiences of working with Mark. The resulting narratives remember Mark as a co-author, co-researcher, project manager, conference organizer, research leader, PhD supervisor, and much more. The memories cover many different aspects of Mark’s academic spectrum: from evaluation to research methods to cross-cultural management, to dynamic capabilities, naming but a few. This space for remembrance however developed into a space of reflection and conceptualization. Inspired by the range and extent of Mark’s interests, skills, experiences, and personal qualities, this essay became conceptual as well as personal as we turned the spotlight on academic careers and consider alternative paths for Management Learning scholarship today. Using the collective representations of Mark’s career as a starting point, we develop, the concept of holistic scholarship, which embraces certain attitudes and orientations in navigating the dialectical spaces and transcending tensions in academic life. We reflect on how such holistic scholarship can be practised in our contemporary and challenging times and what inspiration and lessons we can draw from Mark’s legacy.

Post-pandemic responsible management education: an invitation for a conceptual and practice renewal and for a narrative change

Purpose

This essay makes the point that the corona crisis should motivate business schools and scholars to reflect on their interpretation of responsible management education (RME). It suggests both a conceptual and a practice renewal of RME, by respectively highlighting the relevance of the constructs organizational climate (OC) and professorial roles (PR) and calling for an enactment of business schools’ employer responsibility. It also argues that beyond mere techno-pedagogical and strategic developments, business schools’ post-pandemic challenges should encompass a narrative change.

Design/methodology/approach

Review of recent studies on the neo-liberalization of business schools and the implications of the latter on management educators and management education.

Findings

The corona crisis carries the risk of putting center stage and amplifying the entrepreneurial narrative in business schools. Such a narrative is deeply rooted in neoliberal assumptions. However, the corona crisis is also an opportunity to renew RME and to favour critical studies, encourage moral imagination and embark collectively on systemic activism.

Originality/value

Like other recent work, this paper reflects on what RME should mean and how business schools should set and fulfill their RME agenda in the aftermath of the corona crisis. To complement those former work, this paper proposes that the constructs of OC and PR be invited into the conceptualization of RME and insists that business schools acknowledge their employer responsibility.

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.

Academic identities and sense of place: A collaborative autoethnography in the neoliberal university

Neoliberalism, precarious jobs, and control of work have multiple effects on academic identities as our allegiances to valued social groups and our connections to meaningful locations are challenged. While identities in neoliberal universities have received increasing research attention, sense of place has passed unnoticed in the literature. We engage with collaborative autoethnography and contribute to the literature in two ways. First, we show that while academic identities are put into motion by the neoliberal regime, they are constructed through mundane constellations of places and social entities. Second, we elucidate how academic identities today are characterized by restlessness and how academics use place and time to find meaning for themselves and their work. We propose a form of criticism to neoliberal universities that is sensitive to positionalities and places and offer ideas on how to build shared understandings that help us survive in the face of neoliberal standards of academic “excellence.”

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.