The emotional labour and toll of managerial academia on higher education leaders

Examining university leadership and the increase in workplace hostility through a Bourdieusian lens

“…An aspect of dean and academic hostility in the new workplace that remains evident in several studies (Heffernan & Bosetti, 2020;Misawa, 2015) is that deans feel their conversations with academics regarding research and teaching generally remain productive as academics know the language and the rules associated with those fields.…”

“…These examples nevertheless highlight a relevant point from the literature (Heffernan & Bosetti, 2020;Misawa, 2015), as deans being hired for management expertise is not restricted to certain disciplines or institutional types. The wider shift in the sector has made good business practices so vital to success that institutions from essentially every area of size, prestige and wealth are participating in the practice.…”

“…Primarily, the deans' field is based on leading and managing the faculty, and the academics' is to research and teach (Heffernan & Bosetti, 2020).…”

“…The fundamental issue that can lead to hostility between academics and deans in the new and evolving faculties that select deans on their managerial expertise (Heffernan & Bosetti, 2020) is that in most fields where deans and academics interact, managerial expertise is not highly valued in shaping one's capital or habitus.…”

“…That is to say, Bourdieu never used theory for the sake of using theory. This paper's author has researched and published about the university sector's managerial shift, institutions adjusting to market conditions, and the implications this has on the administration and academics, and the hostility it can bring to their relations (Heffernan, 2017(Heffernan, , 2018a(Heffernan, , 2018b(Heffernan, , 2019(Heffernan, , 2020Heffernan & Bosetti, 2020;Heffernan & Heffernan, 2018a, 2018b, and while these publications have used theory, they have not all engaged in theory to such an extent as does this paper. The use of theory in this paper has been driven by the data and problems at hand; as Thomson wrote of using Bourdieu, the theory 'must be brought into conversation with particular data and used to make sense of a particular research question and to guide its empirical investigation', because theory 'cannot be draped over data like a tablecloth' (Thomson, 2017, p. 114).…”