Institutional Accountability and Intellectual Authority: Unconscious Fantasies and Fragile Identifications in Contemporary Academic Practice

Experiences of arbitrary management among Finnish academics in an era of academic capitalism

“…Claudia Lapping (2013) suggests that such changes might offer higher education policymakers and managers a sense of control over otherwise complex research and teaching processes. These policies help them prove their accountability when having to deal with cuts to public expenditure.…”

“…These policies help them prove their accountability when having to deal with cuts to public expenditure. However, it has also produced anxieties in the lower levels of hierarchy, where academics are expected to conform with the new discursive practices (Lapping 2013), which in this case are the regulatory ideals of academic capitalism. The old model of the public good therefore persisted and the organisational culture was thus undergoing an ambiguous phase of transition when the events described in this article took place.…”

The explosion of real time and the structural conditions of temporality in a society of control: durations and urgencies of academic research

“…As opposed to a linear drive forward, these accounts depicted a more suspended, back and forth temporality, without an explicit sense of futurity. Several narratives of this temporality included associations to a sense of retreat, nurture or insulation from other aspects of their practice (Lapping, 2013b). The question suggested by the Lacanian logic of temporality is: in relation to which 'other' is this sense of recursive, nurturing, or narcissistic temporality constituted?…”

“…My analysis of this data has drawn on psychoanalytic and psychoanalytically informed social theory, from a predominantly Lacanian perspective (Lapping, 2013a(Lapping, , 2013b. The analysis offered here also engages primarily with Lacanian ideas.…”

Fantasies of medical reality: An observational study of simulation-based medical education

“…This is (partly) intentional, or performative, to bring out the relationship between fantasy, language, identification, desire, and subjectivity, including in the work of distilling a Lacanian formula for fantasy so as to make sense of various experiences, and be made sense of as (likeable, intelligible -by the right people) researchers. Our argument is intended here to make apparent that fantasy is not 'out there' in other people's minds, but intrinsic to collective sense-making, including research, which also gives desire a goal, such as 'more democratic healthcare' (Lapping, 2013).…”