Establishing a Track Record in an Age of Precarity

(Im)possible change

“…De Costa et al ( 2019) make the convincing argument that audit culture, when integrated into the policy of institutions or the discourse of communities, functions as an affective regime (see also Wee, 2016) in the sense that it establishes moral imperatives about what it means to be a "good" member of the collective. The focus of De Costa et al ( 2019) was on the way individuals are pressed to act as "linguistic entrepreneurs" and gear their language acquisition to the needs of the job market, but a corresponding notion of academic entrepreneurship can be also envisioned when considering how applied linguists as individuals are pushed by the neoliberal university to act strategically and gear their efforts toward "building up a profile" or "establishing a track record" (McCulloch, 2021). As entrepreneurs seeking to become "good" members of the global applied linguistics community, we are in this way coerced into accepting the moral imperative to compete, not only against institutions other than our own, but against other scholarsan imperative which may be easy to resist on a declarative level, but is much harder to argue against when considering the cold and hard reality of precarity.…”