Bullying as Intra-active Process in Neoliberal Universities

Abstract

The reformed neoliberal universities, with their micromanagement of ever-increasing productivity, competitiveness, and individualization, have recently been described as unhealthy institutions, creating conditions that incite incivility, workplace bullying, and other forms of employee abuse. In this article, the authors employ collective biography as a form of “diffractive methodology” in order to provide new, theoretically driven insights into workplace bullying in neoliberal universities. Drawing on the concepts of intra-activity and performativity, the authors examine bullying in universities as an intra-active process that informs and is informed by the desire of an individual to be recognized and to perform as a viable academic subject—one who is professional, flexible, and accountable within a neoliberal environment.

Through a Glass Darkly: The Social Sciences Look at the Neoliberal University

“…The result appears to be a culture of increasing acquiescence to intensified management demands, of diminished trust and widespread demoralisation and bullying (Zipin 2010;Vidovich and Slee 2009;Zabrodska 2011). Most worryingly, although the problems resulting from twenty-five years of efforts to transform or 'reform' higher education are now well documented, they remain completely sidelined or ignored at the policy level (e.g.…”

Manipulating practices: A critical physiotherapy reader

“…Next, to allow for depth as well as variation, we conducted a more detailed analysis during which we selected the two interviews we thought best demonstrated the diverse experiences of students' encounters with physiotherapists. Using a diffractive-narrative approach, we developed Celine's and Linda's stories (Zabrodska et al, 2011). In this phase of our analysis, we addressed the following research question: What can Baradian agential realism offer our understanding of evidence-based practice within physiotherapy encounters?…”

Questioning the role of 'faith' in a micropolitics of the neoliberal university

“…Fourthly, there is a micropolitical approach that examines how power is contested at multiple levels and in dynamic, contradictory ways within the neoliberal university (Davies et al 2005;Gillies and Lucey 2007). This set of discourses is often motivated by feminist understandings that conceive of power relationally and emphasise the localised work of ethico-political contestations that may be cultivated via personal interactions and professional duties, like PhD supervision or 'water cooler' conversations about the vicissitudes of academia (Gill 2009;Zabrodska et al 2011).…”

“…'In-here' activism can be pursued via individual discourses like Gill's essay, which folds her own experience into the interrogation of the neoliberal academic regime. Or it can be pursued via group activity, like the experimental exercise of collective biography organised by Zabrodska, Linnell, Laws, and Davies (2011), which examines how bullying is implicated in the processes of subjectification within the neoliberal university. Their study shows that by articulating stories about bullying and then rewriting those stories in light of the encounter with the stories of others, the participants were able to better rewrite the self and recognise that their afflictive experiences of shame, humiliation, and failure are not symptoms of innate personal shortcomings, but are rather the normative effects of power generated by the disciplinary apparatuses circumscribing academic labour.…”