Academic Work Cultures: Somatic Crisis in the Enterprise University

‘Luck, chance, and happenstance?Perceptions of success and failure amongst fixed‐term academic staff inUKhigher education’

“…Academia valorizes the individual successes of ‘superstar’ academics (Knights and Clarke : 338) through narrowly prescribed – and often unrealistic – measures of esteem; meanwhile certain forms of labour remain ‘hidden’ from authorized public performances of capability (Miller and Morgan : 135), and competent academic selves must relentlessly be promoted for purposes of public engagement, ‘impact’, student recruitment, and career progression. In tandem with the celebration of individualized success, comes a creeping responsibilization in the event of failure: suspicions that if only one had worked harder, had the foresight to anticipate and negotiate setbacks, or produced better work, then success might have been possible (see also Sullivan and Simon ). These tendencies are then undoubtedly amplified for those casualized academics who find themselves at the ‘sharp‐end’ of the sector and whose ‘capacity for action’ (McNay : 179) has been diminished.…”

“…‘Imposter syndrome’ and feelings of fraudulence are already well documented within research on HE (see for example Barcan : 191–216; Gill ; Knights and Clarke ; Sullivan and Simon ), and Barcan (: 192) argues that ‘recent decades have produced conditions that have greatly intensified’ the phenomenon of feeling like a fraud. She contends that while ‘experienced as a sense of personal inadequacy’, fraudulence can be ‘linked to the social positioning of the academic and/or to a critique of institutional organization, pedagogical framework, or disciplinary orthodoxy’ (2013: 195).…”

“…However, in tandem with the propensity to take recourse to ‘chance’ in the case of success is the tendency of the participants to individualize failure. It has been argued that the experiences of academics have become increasingly individualized (Coate, Kandiko Howson and de St Croix et al ; Gill ; Gill and Pratt ; Leathwood and Read ; Sullivan and Simon ), as has ‘the management of risk’ (Reith : 397). While the casualized academics in this research often neglected to take credit for success in the telling of their academic stories (even if they did acknowledge hard work), failure to succeed – for example, in job‐hunting, interviews, or publishing – was often attributed to a personal shortcoming, or miscalculation.…”

Conceptualising Doctoral Writing as an Affective-political Practice

“…I found that research on the contemporary conditions of academic labour has offered some of the richest accounts of the ways in which the neoliberal university shapes the affective lives of its inhabitants (Barcan, 2013;Bryson, 2004;Burrows, 2012;Court & Kinman, 2008;Cvetkovich, 2012;Davies, 2006;Davies & Petersen, 2005;Ditton, 2009;Gill, 2010;Grant & Elizabeth, 2014;Hartman & Darab, 2012;Hey, 2011;Kinman, 2014;Leathwood & Hey, 2009;Lynch, 2010;Pelias, 2004;Saltmarsh & Randell-Moon, 2014;Sparkes, 2007;Sullivan & Simon, 2014). Within current higher education debates, it is routinely observed that the neoliberal reconfiguration of universities has resulted in significant changes to the nature of academic work.…”

“…This surveillance has been enacted as a part of a broader trend toward new managerialist models that have been imposed on universities and other public organisations, in what is sometimes called the rise of the 'enterprise university' (Bansel, 2011;Davies & Petersen, 2005;Ditton, 2009;Sullivan & Simon, 2014). Increasingly, the 'scientific-technical' (Bansel, 2011, p. 546) approaches of business management dominate, with a focus on 'quality assurance, audit and evaluation [and]… metrics to determine both the value and impact of knowledge' (Bansel, 2011, p. 546).…”