Insatiable greed: performance pressure and precarity in the neoliberalised university

Abstract

Insatiable greed: performance pressure and precarity in the neoliberalised universityConsiderably increasing competition for academic positions/funding as well as managerial control of academic work are two key features of the contemporary university. Both developments result in and are amplified by increasing performance pressures and precarious employment. Combined with a vocational work ethic, these neoliberal dynamics are turning the academic profession into an increasingly greedy and (self-)exploitative endeavour. While allowing employers/funding bodies to ask for much while offering little in return -that is to siphon off the symbolic and economic 'profit' generated by academics' free or under-paid work -the current working conditions leave early-career academics in particular in a highly vulnerable position.

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

“…As in the camp system (Shalamov, 2004: II/347; Toker, 2019: 112–113), failure to meet the norms of audit brings down upon the academic’s head the wrath of department fellows, whose collective budgets, job security, and pay are threatened by that individual’s failure. It is not just the ‘brigade leader’s fist’ that one need fear, nor the Ministry for Education, but also one’s colleagues and the ‘ambitious demands’ of one’s ‘academic community’ (Rogler, 2019: 75).…”

“…The problem of the corrosive effects of tukhta in the context of Soviet society has been noted (Khlevnyuk, 2003: 126–127). However, in the academic context, it is precisely on the dedications, good will, and social conscientiousness of academics that the technology of audit preys (Rogler, 2019). As with the imprisoned scientists, engineers, and professionals of gulag (Panin, 1976), who often could do no less than work ‘hyperconscientiously’ in their new-found callings (Ginzburg, 1981: 63), so the academic is crushed between the hammer of audit and the anvil of their vocational pride and sincerity by techniques that draw them into grudging complicity with the regime that orders them.…”

Exquisite Corpses and backward glances: European social anthropology 2019

“…Identified and theorised by Strathern (2000), ‘audit culture’ now dominates the European university. Reflecting her experience of the Austrian academic climate, Rogler (2019) identifies increasing competition for academic positions and funding alongside enhanced managerial control of academic work as key features of the contemporary university. Stoica et al (2019) and Loher et al (2019) highlight the increasing number of PhDs competing within a diminishing pool of academic opportunity where tenure, or even its prospect, is scarcer and scarcer, and credit in the attribution of work is frequently denied to subaltern staff within teams, so that early career anthropologists subsist in a climate of what Lauren Berlant (2011) has called ‘cruel optimism’.…”

Precarity without borders: visions of hope, shared responsibilities and possible responses

“…This statement is definitely in line with what Platzer and Allison write about ‘critiquing departments across the discipline for their complicity in the overproduction of unemployed PhDs … [in] a “predatory,” system … unwilling to teach graduate students to do something other than what we do’ (2018: np). For sure, presently there are too many PhDs and not enough tenure‐track positions in a context that could be seen as the ‘death of the public university’ and where ‘collegiality and professional trust are fast being replaced by competition, surveillance and managerialism’ (Shore and Wright : 49; see also Rogler ).…”