‘Leadership is a sacred matter’: women leaders contesting and contextualising neoliberal meritocracy in the Indonesian academia

Abstract

Feminist scholars have critiqued neoliberal meritocracy as discriminating against female academics through the persistence of gender-biased assumptions, closed procedures of recruitment and promotion, and patriarchal network connections. While these scholars demand fairer meritocratic competition, we explore possibilities to (re)imagine academic career and university leadership beyond the dominant discourse of neoliberal meritocracy. Based on interviews with female deans in Indonesian universities, we identified two alternative discourses (in)forming their subjectivity as university leaders, which may both challenge and contextualise neoliberal meritocracy. The first is the Islamic notion of leadership as amanah (God-given responsibility), and the second is a view of university as family. We demonstrate that understanding university leadership through these discourses enables and fosters a sense of trust, nurture, harmony, relationality, and spirituality; which are in contrast with neoliberal meritocracy's objectivism, individualism, corporatism, and entrepreneurialism. Nevertheless, neoliberal meritocracy is quick to co-opt these contextual ways of being for its neoliberal agenda.

An Overview of Research Trend on Merit System in Indonesia and International Practices: A Bibliometric Analysis and Visualization

“…Of the 485 articles found, six of them discussed various aspects of the merit system in Indonesia, including leadership, especially female leaders at Indonesian universities (Sakhiyya & Locke, 2019;Wijaya Mulya & Sakhiyya, 2021); police corruption in Indonesia, and four other Asian countries (Quah, 2019); patronage practice of local head election in 2015 (Ngusmanto, 2016); horror film about people's beliefs that are unruly but seem meritocratic (Harvey, 2008); and organizational management model for civil servants (Febriansyah & Athory Ramdlany, 2016). Of these six articles, only one was published more than ten years, while the other five were published in the last ten years.…”

Indonesian women leaders navigating hegemonic femininity: A Gramscian lens

“…The notion that leadership is a responsibility to God (amanah) and a mode of motherhood does not always fit with the Western liberal construction of leadership that assumes the self as autonomous (Fairhurst & Connaughton, 2014). The concept of amanah centralizes spirituality, moral responsibility, and accountability to God (Wijaya Mulya & Sakhiyya, 2021).…”

Excellence in leadership in the Arab world: Islamic principles and tribal values. Evidence from Jordan

“…Their argument was based on the fact that trust allows leaders more attentional resources to be devoted to accomplishing the job. Similarly, Al-amanah requires leaders to hold responsibility for the leadership position by justly allocating the tasks and facilitating the team efforts to achieve the shared objective (Wijaya Mulya and Sakhiyya, 2021; Zaim et al, 2022). Therefore, the following hypothesis is proposed.…”