Lost souls? The demoralization of academic labour in the measured university

Abstract

In this conceptual paper I contend that the soul of academic labour is becoming lost in performativity. Performativity, I explain, is a form of regulation and control that deploys technical rationality and judgements to incentivise and punish academics. Indeed, performativity is central to the culture of measurement within contemporary universities. This I contend is demoralizing academic labour as performativity only measures and values those dimensions of academic labour that can be captured by quantitative performance indicators. To critique this process I firstly locate performativity within a moral economy perspective. I argue that the university economy is no longer structured by the moral norm of education as a public good. It is has been restructured, commodified and marketized by neo-liberal capitalism. Secondly, I explore how the reorganization of institutional practices and academic identity within the university by performativity wreaks terror in the academic's soul. Thirdly, I critique the unsatisfying post-structural reduction of the soul to a synonym for subjectivity and offer a sociological conception of the soul as the spiritual dimension of academic labour emerging from deep, rich social relations of production. My conjecture is that the soul is the moral energy and purpose central to species-being: the peculiarly human ability to transform the socio-human world for the good of all. Finally, I suggest that within the soulless technical measure of academic labour that now dominates the university lies the possibility for developing a more soulful normative measure. My aim then is to articulate a dialectical humanist conception of the soul of academic labour in order to critique the reductive positivism of the measured university.

Organisational factors and academic research agendas: an analysis of academics in the social sciences

“…In adopting bureaucratic-led performativity models, which have become central to the functioning of contemporary universities, evaluations and performance rationales become largely driven by simplistic indicators that cannot encompass the complexity associated with academic labour. This complexity includes a creative and serendipitous activity that demands much time and energy: i.e., research (Sutton, 2017). Performativity and its associated indicators become frameworks of judgement that measure the efficiency and productivity of academic labour (Hammarfelt and Rushforth, 2017;Ball, 2012).…”

Giving the invisible hand a helping hand: How ‘Grants Offices’ work to nourish neoliberal researchers

“…The premise is that this ability of the technologies allows them to infiltrate and colonise academic settings so that they become normalised and internalised among academics (see e.g. Sutton, 2017). And further, as such a colonisation of hearts and minds takes place, they are seen as having marked (negative) effects on the identities of academics (Archer, 2008;Englund & Gerdin, 2019).…”

Academic Identities and Institutional Aims: Critical Discourse Analysis of Neoliberal Keywords on U15 University Websites

“…Furthermore, education itself is -rendered a consumer good in which students invest (often by incurring considerable debt) to advance their own prospects‖ (Smyth, 2017, p.31); therefore, students must compete for entry to the most prestigious institutions to guarantee their own success. This logic transforms the labourteaching and research-that occurs within universities, by transforming teaching into a consumeristic exchange and the mobilization of research -outputs‖ a commercial endeavour (Ball, 2012;Chatterton, Hodkinson, & Pickerill, 2010;Peters, 2013;Smyth, 2017;Sutton, 2017;Tuchman, 2009). The result is a relational shift in what it means to be an academic within these institutions.…”