Academic labour as professional service work? A psychosocial analysis of emotion in lecturer–student relations under marketization

Abstract

The marketization of higher education entails a radical reshaping of the educational relationship as one in which the lecturer is recast as a professional service worker, implicitly or explicitly tasked with ensuring the satisfaction of fee-paying students as sovereign consumers. What does an organizational discourse of high customer satisfaction mean for the emotional experiences of lecturers on the frontline? In this article, we conduct a psychosocial analysis of academics’ experiences of interacting with students in a marketized higher education context. We illustrate how institutional imperatives readily align with lecturers’ internalised professional duty of care for students who are discursively constructed as highly anxious and vulnerable. At the same time, changing power differentials wrought by marketization heighten the likelihood of emotional responses in the relationship that are intense, spontaneous, and sometimes involuntary – and thus appear replete with unconscious meanings. Informed by Freudian psychoanalysis, we illustrate how academics enact various defence mechanisms in response to unconscious feelings of dependence, subordination, vulnerability and resentment of the student as an authority figure. We conclude that organisational imperatives to ‘corporately care’ for students have the unintended consequence of generating acute ambivalence that drastically intensifies the psychological demands on teaching staff.

Strategic Change in a Pluralistic Context: Change leader sensegiving

“…Since the mid-1980s, higher education institutions have come under pressure to increase their market orientation and adopt managerialist mechanisms and structures (Kallio, Kallio, Tienari, & Hyvönen, 2016; Paradeise & Thoenig, 2013). To varying degrees, many universities internationally have thus adopted managerial practices often associated with new public management and performance management, although not without criticism with concerns about their effectiveness in an otherwise pluralistic context (Kallio, Kallio, & Grossi, 2017; Nixon & Scullion, 2022).…”

“…Universities are quintessential pluralist organizations (Brès, Raufflet, & Boghossian, 2018; Spee & Jarzabkowski, 2011), traditionally associated with collegial, decentralized and democratic forms of decision-making (Chandler, Barry, & Clark, 2002; Langley, Denis, & Cazale, 1996; Tuckermann, 2019). Universities have, however, increasingly adopted managerialist models of organizing (Aboubichr & Conway, 2023; Bleiklie, Enders, & Lepori, 2015; Deem & Brehony, 2005; Nixon & Scullion, 2022; Ogbonna & Harris, 2004). This trend is particularly pronounced in the United Kingdom (Bleiklie & Michelsen, 2017; Gjerde & Alvesson, 2020).…”

Talking about disappointments: Identification work through multiple discourses at a prestigious university

“…A traditional discourse focused on values such as the pursuit of truth, knowledge sharing, research rigour and intellectual freedom (McNay, 2007). New, neoliberal, managerialist discourses centre on delivering 'value for money' (Worthington and Hodgson, 2005), 'high customer satisfaction' (Nixon and Scullion, 2022) and rigorous performance management (Aboubichr and Conway, 2021). The neoliberalization of higher education was triggered by various shifts in western governments' higher education policies that encouraged fee-paying (for more detail on triggers, see Fleming, 2022), which have affected academic institutions including those that are 'elite'.…”

“…Our study also builds on growing interest in academic work (Aboubichr and Conway, 2021; Butler and Spoelstra, 2020; Fleming, 2022; McCann et al, 2020; McNay, 2007; Nixon and Scullion, 2022; Ratle et al, 2020) by using a discursive approach to focus on the struggles and consequences of academics operating within contradictory discourses that generate disappointments. We show how the prestige of working in the ‘top’ universities is insufficient to address these disappointments.…”

Editorial: Introducing the Special Issue to mark the 75th Anniversary of Human Relations

“…As Petriglieri and Petriglieri put it, the psychodynamic ‘approach [is] devoted to dismantling defenses, countering authoritarianism, and nurturing development and democracy’ (p. 1431); all characteristics, it seems to me, which might be good ways to encapsulate part of the basic purpose and mission of Human Relations . Furthermore, a significant proportion of today’s scholarship within the journal explicitly values and/or directly employs psychodynamics within their analyses (for some of the latest examples see Brown, 2021; Gilmore and Harding, 2022; or Nixon and Scullion, 2021). Psychodynamics is also, incidentally, if hardly coincidentally, one of the main approaches used by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (the journal’s governing body) in their not-for-profit consultancy activities (Lawlor and Sher, 2022).…”