The social organisation of boasting in the neoliberal university

Abstract

This article unpacks the social construction of the "ideal academic" in the context of major shifts in the governance of academia that have introduced managerial practices, standardised notions of excellence and accounting logics with the aim of increasing the efficiency and quality of higher education and academic knowledge production. More specifically it explores how the enacting of this ideal involves practices of boasting and explores how people are differently positioned in that regard. Drawing on a three-year ethnographic study at Aalto University in Finland the article shows how boasting involves the (re)production of gendered and classed social inequalities. I draw on the resources of Institutional Ethnography which enables me to analyse social relations of gender and class and show how culturally and situationally specific forms of boasting, become textually recognised and encouraged as appropriate behaviour for the "ideal academic".

Music students’ experienced workload, livelihoods and stress in higher education in Finland and the United Kingdom

“…For instance, Lund (2020) argues that neoliberal university reform in Finland (see e.g. Pekkola 2009) has led to the reproduction of gendered and class-based social inequalities and also to an everwidening gap between the people who succeed and those who fail to perform in line with the new quality standards.…”

New masculinities in universities? Discourses, ambivalence and potential change

“…Capitalist societies, and Nordic countries among them, are characterized by middle‐class notions of the ‘good life’. A distinctly middle‐class notion of the ‘ideal’ academic dominates in universities (Thidemann Faber, Prieur, Rosenlund, & Skjøtt‐Larsen, ; Lund, ; Tyler, ). Social class can be understood as material and relational: it is material in that it is related to economic and educational inequalities and divisions and it is relational, or sociocultural, in that it is rooted in struggles over what counts as valuable in life.…”

“…This is especially so in the experience of those who are in precarious positions such as junior female scholars (Lund & Tienari, 2019). Extant research illuminates how discourses of merit and gender are mutually constitutive and how the evaluation of merit in universities is based on taken-for-granted assumptions about what constitutes the 'ideal' worker (Acker, 1990) or, indeed, the 'ideal' academic (Harding, Ford, & Gough, 2010;Lund, 2012Lund, , 2018. This is problematic for women (Katila & Meriläinen, 1999, 2002Morley, 1999), but it is arguably so for many if not most men, too (Tienari & Taylor, 2018).…”

Chasing Funding “To Eat Our Own Tail”: The Invisible Emotional Work of Making Social Change

“…The Montréal organization "use[s] creativity … for the social inclusion of people who experience (d) or are at risk of exclusion" and "use[s] both practical approaches … and systemic approaches inspired from social innovation, as motors of social transformation." These two organizations are focused on because neither is formally connected to a university-universities are not unaffected by neoliberal restructuring, though they may see these effects in different ways (Lund, 2018;Nikunen, 2014;Pain, 2014). Also, neither are solely doing front-line service work-for which there is also extensive literature (Baines, 2004;Baines, Charlesworth, & Cunningham, 2015;McPhail, 2004)-which plays another, different role in the restructured social service sphere, where the state increasingly relies on front-line organizations for the provision of basic, life-sustaining services.…”

“…Within nonprofit sector social service work, scholarship on how "care" work fits into neoliberal restructuring suggests that this work is organized along gendered lines (Baines 2004;Lund, 2018). The majority of scholarship focuses on care work within social services, where individual caring is increasingly being "strip[ped] out … replac[ed] with flexible, routinized, and standardized models of work organization," with workers adapting and carrying out unpaid or unvalued labour to "fill the 'caring' gap" (Baines, 2004, p. 286).…”