Marketization, Performative Environments, and the Impact of Organizational Climate on Teaching Practice in Business Schools

Abstract

Marketisation of higher education has emerged as a global trend in many countries and in the UK, students are now paying amongst the highest tuition fees globally. Marketisation is synonymous with performative management practices that require universities to report on an expanding range of metrics designed to demonstrate value to students and the general public. It is also changing the way educational provision is delivered and managed, including the way in which teaching practice is managed to meet the challenges of marketization, managerialism and student demand. This paper uses the concept of Organisational Climate (OC) to examine the challenges facing UK Business School academics in their teaching role in particular, focusing on the factors shaping the climate for teaching across different institutions. Using focus groups, the paper identifies the determinants of OC for teaching practice in order to explore how academics perceive their role and the effect of marketization and performative systems on the changing conceptions of teaching in higher education. The paper has wide ranging implications for business schools globally in understanding how marketisation affects teaching practice, where managerialism and metric outputs are already impacting other key agendas facing the delivery of academic subjects with a strong business orientation.

Educational Project Management and Competitive Advantages of Educational Programs

“…The theory of B. Latour focuses on the sociality of new knowledge and interaction, which acquires a new value in the context of the educational system. This system is currently designed not only to transmit knowledge and provide new generations with cultural and historical knowledge but also to produce new knowledge, work to update and transform educational practices [8,9,10]. Within the framework of educational programs, new educational practices are emerging that change the perception of the educational system.…”

COVID-19: accelerator or demolisher of the RME agenda?

“…Its identity is shaped by the way business schools govern themselves, how they set strategic priorities, how they communicate and embody core values and how they deploy their professors in the learning space (Fleming, 2020). Many faculty members were stretched across their different roles even before the pandemic (Vos and Page, 2020). COVID-19 has layered new pressures onto them such as the rapid make-over of content for online delivery, quick up-tooling on educational technologies and exploration, as well as the adoption of pedagogical techniques that activate students in a virtual environment (Clarke and Lynes, 2020).…”

“…The rapid adoption of online learning can replicate forces that have hampered RME advancement so far (Clarke and Lynes, 2020). Meaningful change requires degrees of freedom for faculty to explore and to harness the potential of RME (Vos and Page, 2020), with the support of their institutions. This kind of consensus can be developed with tools such as SDG mapping to bring about the expression of clear objectives upon which action can be based (Storey et al, 2017).…”

Post-pandemic responsible management education: an invitation for a conceptual and practice renewal and for a narrative change

“…The beginning of 2010s marked the first publications of work about the resentment of business faculties "regarding the changes to their love of academic labour with the inevitable divisions that an elite system of evaluation and judgment entails" (Clark et al, 2012), their loss of passion and commitment, under the pressure of hypercompetition and the productivist paradigm (Courpasson, 2013), the surrendering of their autonomy (Alvesson and Spicer, 2016) and the mounting insecurities they are confronted with, against the backdrop of a proliferating culture of audit, accountability and performativity (Knights and Clark, 2014). More recently, accounts of business scholars' (most of whom are junior) encounter with the hardship and even ingratitude of academic labour, in today's neoliberal business schools and the disheartening realization that one cannot enact, with equal level of excellence, the taken-for-granted academic roles (Prasad, 2016;Alakavuklar, 2017;Robinson et al, 2017), as well as autoethnographies from those who succumbed to or acted as silent accomplices to or resisted Potemkin-esque promises, those who enacted critical performativity and creative resistance to contest higher education managerialistic terror, and those who were victims of or witnessed bullying in the academic workplace (Manning, 2018;Bowes-Catton et al, 2020;Lund-Dean et al, 2020;McCann et al, 2020;Ratle et al, 2020;Vos and Page, 2020;Wieners and Weber, 2020;Zawadzki and Jensen, 2020), vividly signal that the assault on the quietude of the business schools' work climate is real and persistent.…”