Bullying and the neoliberal university: A co-authored autoethnography

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to deepen the understanding of academic bullying as a consequence of neoliberal reforms in a university. Academics in contemporary universities have been put under pressure by the dominance of neoliberal processes, such as profit maximization, aggressive competitiveness, individualism or self-interest, generating undignifying social behaviours, including bullying practices. The presented story takes us – a junior academic and his conceptual encounterer – through our remembered experiences and field notes around a set of workday events in one European university reformed through managerial solutions as the object of the study. To do that, we employ co-authored analytic autoethnography to learn how neoliberal solutions reinforce paternalistic relationships as significant in career development, how such solutions enable the bullying of young academics and how neoliberalism in academia prevents young academics from contesting bullying. We are particularly interested in the bystander phenomenon: a person who shies away from taking action against bullying and thus strengthens bullying practices.

The Performative University: ‘Targets’, ‘Terror’ and ‘Taking Back Freedom’ in Academia

“…The paper by Wieners and Weber (2020) enquires into the interplay between neoliberalism and gender at two German universities, noting how the qualities of young female scholars are predominantly framed in terms of an ‘excellence’ discourse, exclusively based on performance metrics. In their paper, Zawadzki and Jensen (2020) observe how the introduction of quantitative performance indicators coincided with the appointment of a new ‘toxic’ head of department who soon resorted to bullying and harassing, thus reinforcing the dehumanising effects of quantification with dehumanising behaviour. The paper by Jelonek and Mezur (2020) shows how efforts to increase the quality of research at Polish universities, through a supply-side governmental macro-policy change of tying funding almost exclusively to standardised student–staff ratios led to drastic reductions in student admissions and increased financial instability, but did not produce the desired increase in research quality.…”

“…Similarly, in a ‘co-authored’ autoethnography, the paper by Zawadzki and Jensen (2020) provides the most evocative example of such ‘terror’, through a detailed, ‘lived’ account of early career scholars again, but within a European academic context. It focuses on the experience of workplace bullying by a ‘toxic leader’ and the mixed feelings of harm, fear and guilt these experiences invoked.…”

“…The argument clearly demonstrates the importance of supportive friends and colleagues when a person is experiencing bullying. Zawadzki and Jensen (2020) embed this supportive relationship in their paper through the autoethnographic device of one of the authors playing the role of the ‘conceptual encounter’ – challenging and grounding the account for the wider reading. The article, together with the other papers in the special issue, underlines a series of challenges.…”

“…As previously mentioned, the level of contestation with institutional performative practices varies over the eight papers. The papers by Wieners and Weber (2020), Zawadzki and Jensen (2020) and by Jelonek and Mezur (2020) report on qualitative research projects, but with little evidence of any institutional contestation. Similarly, the paper by Butler and Spoelstra (2020) explores CMS professors’ ambiguous use of the ‘publication game’ metaphor, disclosing careerist tendencies, with a complicity letting the game play them rather them playing the game.…”

Provocation Essays Editorial: On the importance of moving and being moved

“…Management Learning has generated important insights into how the dynamics of organising have contributed to exclusion and exploitation and formulating responses to them. For example, in theorising ethical management research (Driver, 2017) and pedagogy (Perriton and Reynolds, 2018), probing wellbeing and justice in organisations (Zawadzki and Jensen, 2020), developing alternative approaches to academic writing (see Gilmore et al, 2019), and problematising how knowledge circulates (Alcadipani, 2017). In the face of contemporary and future global challenges, and in line with ethical commitments, there is a need to continue to push our field further and to actively resist and break down borders around management knowledge.…”