MG, & Çağlayan, H. (2017), 'Micro-political practices in higher education: a challenge to excellence as a rationalising myth? Critical Studies in Education dx.

Academic capitalism is an outcome of the interplay between neoliberalism, globalisation, markets and universities (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997; 2001). Universities have embraced the commercialisation of knowledge, technology transfer and research funding as well as introducing performance and audit practices (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2000; 2004). Academic capitalism has become internalised as a regulatory mechanism by academics who attempt to accumulate academic capital (Morley, 2014). Universities are traditionally gendered organisations, reflecting the societal gender order. Despite fears regarding the feminisation of the academy, Thornton (2013, p. 128) argues that the embrace of academic capitalism is contributing to its re-masculinisation and exercises an incidental gender effect. Practicing is the means by which the gender order is constituted at work (Martin 2003, p. 354). Three practices in which academics engage are examined as exemplars of the way academics increase their academic capital stock in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) faculties in four European universities, in Bulgaria, Denmark, Ireland and Turkey. These practices tend to be more achievable and likely to be engaged in by men, thus, career practices are the mechanism through which the gender effect of academic capitalism is achieved, academic capitalism perpetuated and the gender order maintained in STEM in academia (200 words).

Using Webb's (2008) concept of stealth power and a critical realist perspective, this article identifies leadership practices that obscure the centralisation of power, drawing on data from interviews with 25 academic decision-makers in formal leadership positions in HERIs in Ireland, Italy and Turkey. Its key contribution is the innovative operationalisation of stealth power and the inductive identification of four practices which obscure that centralised power i.e. rhetorical collegiality, agenda control, in-group loyalty and (at a deeper level) the invisibility of gendered power. The purpose of the article is emancipatory: by creating an awareness of these leadership practices, it challenges their persistence. (101 words)