Abstract
This article explores the dismantling of professional autonomy during a change management programme at a business school in the United Kingdom. The change programme proposed the disinvestment from research in Critical Management Studies (CMS) and Political Economy and resulted in compulsory redundancies. The study reconstructs the managerial processing of this ‘case for change’ with a particular focus on the mechanisms behind the dismantling of professional autonomy. Specifically, three mechanisms of degradation are highlighted: first, a managerial attitude of censorship and anti-intellectualism that serves to demean academic scholarship, second, the regulation of time, space and information that deprives academics of the means to defend themselves and, finally, the isolation of professionals and the creation of docile academic subjects. By focussing on the micro-physics of power and understanding the mundane processes through which it takes effect and circulates, the ways in which it routinely undermines the autonomy of those it wants out, the article offers further avenues to discuss ways to resist the dismantling of professional autonomy in the managerial university.
Keywords
Introduction
On the final pages of Warwick University Ltd., E. P. Thompson (1970: 164) apologizes for the ‘obsessions’ with the conflict at Warwick. In what was later coined the ‘Warwick files affair’, students occupied the Registry to protest against the broken promise to build a union building. During the occupation, they came across documents demonstrating the close surveillance of staff and students. For Thompson (1970), the obsession with the ‘Warwick files affair’ was justified due to the far-reaching nature of the conflict, whose outcome ‘will decide not only whether this University can become a good, technologically well-equipped and intellectually alert, self-governing community . . . or whether it will become simply “the Business University” from which all other aspirations fall rapidly away’ (p. 164). This apology mirrors our own ‘obsession’ with the conflict over redundancies and the ‘disinvestment’ from critical scholarship at the Global Business School (hereafter GBS), a conflict which informs this article. Many academics and other professional staff might feel rather alienated by an obsession to hold a university leadership to account for its decisions and behaviours in the context of a change programme. Should not those affected move on and try to do their best at other, hopefully better places? Might it not be better for their health and well-being and their academic career to leave all this behind and, finally, to ‘forgive and let go’ (Śliwa and Prasad, 2022)? This may be the case, but our obsession was fuelled by our disagreement with senior management that this place should turn into exactly that ‘Business University’ from which all other aspirations fall away. Maybe it is time to accept that the search for ‘better places’ and a decent niche in academia might be an understandable individual strategy, but it does not change the overall dire picture and, as our case demonstrates, does not save us from a management which has the power to dismantle whole research fields and traditions in the future. Quiescence or even compliance is understandable for many reasons, but it makes us complicit in the decline of the faculty and the dismantling of the idea of university education.
It is important to highlight that this article is written from the perspective of scholars who were affected by and engaged in this process. The involvement in such a struggle brings about emotional exhaustion, a huge amount of stress, anger and frustration. What is more, it leads to a general reflection, self-education and questioning of current developments in higher education. Writing about and trying to analyse what happened is one way to deal with and to overcome the anger and frustration. It can be a cathartic act, which, at best, transforms and translates individual experience into scholarly analysis. Nonetheless, such an approach bears the danger that it will be read as ‘reflecting a privileged sense of outrage’ (McCann et al., 2020: 436). However, what I am trying to do is to follow Cunliffe’s (2022) call for theorizing from a more human and reflexive perspective, which hopefully resonates with similar experiences in higher education institutions and helps to ‘connect, reverberate and provoke others into reflecting on an issue’ (p. 7). Thus, this article is an attempt to transform our anger and frustration into an intervention in the broader and ongoing struggle about the future of the university as a critical institution and it is taking sides in questioning the future of the university as a business and ‘knowledge factory’ (Aronowitz, 2001; see also Bowes-Catton et al., 2020), which are run by authoritarian would-be CEOs. Following a long tradition of critical inquiries, I share the belief that a university that is losing or loosening its ties to the legacy of the ideas of reason, enlightenment, education, academic freedom and emancipation erodes the status of the university as critical institution (e.g. Collini, 2012; Docherty, 2015, 2018; Fleming et al., 2022; Giroux, 2014; Jones, 2022; Morrish and Sauntson, 2020; Readings, 1996). Substituting this status with a vacuous discourse about excellence is nothing more than a ‘simulacrum of the idea of university’ (Readings, 1996: 46; see also Butler and Spoelstra, 2012). Consequently, the fundamental questions are whether we have to accept that universities are being transformed into business-like institutions, whether many of those working in universities have already accepted the death of the university and whether we have to accept being led by a management that can decide at will which parts of the business it will invest in or disinvest from.
Last but not least, the case at hand as well as other similar cases are not only relevant for the university landscape in the United Kingdom or the United States. Higher Education Institutions in the Global North are widely acknowledged and promoted as world-leading institutions whose discourses, practices and transformations have a significant impact on a global scale. In particular, the rise of business schools and of the MBA as dominant models for management education on a global scale highlights the global impact of what is going on at universities and business schools in the Global North (e.g. Banerjee et al., 2009; Cooke, 2004; Currie, 2007; Ghoshal, 2005; Parker, 2018). Thus, there is every reason to be worried about the signals that are sent by the managerial dismantling of professional autonomy, the ‘disinvestment’ into critical scholarship and the hollowing out of academic freedom in institutions of the Global North.
Against this backdrop, the specific aim of this article is a detailed exploration of the managerial attempts and mechanisms to dismantle our professional autonomy as academics, which can both exceed and enrich the discourse about the marketization and managerialization of higher education. In doing so, I will focus on three important aspects or mechanisms in this process. The dismantling of professional autonomy works first through a managerial attitude of censorship and anti-intellectualism, which serve to demean what had once been central to academic autonomy and subjectivity: scholarship. Second, it functions by depriving academic subjects of the means to defend themselves or argue back by controlling time, space and information. Third, this undermining of professional autonomy is fostered by isolating staff and creating docile subjects.
The article proceeds as follows. First, I take a closer look at the discourse on the shifts in the landscape of universities with a particular focus on the situation in UK and US higher education. Afterwards, I will give some more information about the context of our struggle at the GBS. In the remainder, I will focus on the three mechanisms of degrading professional autonomy before I finally draw some conclusions from the analysis.
The university in ruins
What are universities for? asks Stefan Collini (2012), arguing that it is more important to ask this question than to present a single, defining answer. Arguably, this question was at the heart of the dispute at the GBS. For Kant (2008 [1798]), the university was the institutionalized site of critique and reason. This devotion to critique and reason is a plea for academic freedom and to limit the control and the censorship of academic work by state authorities. Humboldt (1969 [1851]) argued that a university should transgress vocational training and that it should foster a certain cultivation of the mind and character, that is, a holistic or liberal academic education. Until today, this reference to critique, reason and liberal education were powerful defence lines and lines of legitimization of the modern university, built on the idea of education as a public good, with universities seen as crucial for civic education and democracy and as places of professional autonomy and academic freedom (e.g. Collini, 2012; Docherty, 2015; Giroux, 2014; Ingold, 2020; Nussbaum, 2010; Readings, 1996). Also, the idea of the university as a progressive institution which should uphold academic freedom is echoed in, for example, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), the Leiden Manifesto for research metrics or the UNESCO declaration concerning the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel, which demands that its ‘Member States should take all necessary measures to ensure that . . . higher education is directed to human development and to the progress of the society’ and that academic staff ‘are entitled to the maintaining of academic freedom’, that is the freedom of teaching and research and the ‘freedom to express freely their opinion about the institution or system in which they work’ (UNESCO, 1997).
Nonetheless, the numerous attempts to defend the idea of the university are based on and are motivated by a diagnosis of a fundamental crisis of higher education, which Giroux (2014) describes as the ‘slow death of the university as a center of critique, vital source of civic education, and crucial public good’ (p. 28). As Collini (2012: 3; see also Jones, 2022: 1) notes: ‘Never before in human history have [universities] been so numerous or so important, yet never before have they suffered from such a disabling lack of confidence and loss of identity’. For Lyotard (1984), this lack of confidence is linked to the decline of the meta-narratives of the speculative spirit, that is the idea of Bildung and the emancipation of men, connected to the idea of critique and reason. Lyotard believes that reason and education are becoming the objects of scepticism and have lost their persuasiveness and that they will be substituted by the principle of performativity. Under the regime of performativity, reason and Bildung are no longer ends in themselves or function as the foundational ideas of the university. This implies that the effect of the performativity principle ‘is to subordinate the institutions of higher learning to the existing powers’ (Lyotard, 1984: 50; Fournier and Grey, 2000) and to whatever they define as useful for the aim of performativity. Regarding life in academia, this ends up in conversations with managers like the following, recapped by Marina Warner (2014) in ‘Why I quit’: When I tried to talk to her about the history of the university, its hopes, its ‘radical innovation’, she didn’t want to know. I told her why I admired the place, why I felt in tune with Essex and its founding ideas. ‘That is all changing now’, she said quickly. ‘That is over’. (p. 3)
In a similar vein, Readings (1996) argues that the idea of the university is in ruins. He highlights the increased market orientation and managerialization of universities. Both interconnected tendencies stand against the function of the university as critical institution. The dismantling of this critical function makes the university ‘no longer participate in its historical project for humanity’ (Readings, 1996: 5–6).
In following this trajectory, the regime of performativity and managerial dominance is accompanied by a decline in professional autonomy. As Trank and Rynes (2003) put it for the field of business education: ‘signs of deprofessionalisation seem to be everywhere’ (p. 189). For Trank and Rynes, indicators are frequent curriculum changes to follow market trends and fads, a deflection of resources from research activities in favour of MBA and executive programmes and the ‘dumbing down’ of courses to assure high student satisfaction ratings. Thus, what is at stake here is the changing nature of knowledge, forced by a shift from a professional to a market rhetoric (Trank and Rynes, 2003), which dismantles professional knowledge systems and therefore professional autonomy (Abbott, 1988). In a similar vein, Klikauer (2013) connects the rise of managerialism to a ‘downgrading of the role of skilled workers’ (p. 7), whereas Deem et al. (2007) conclude that market rationality ‘gnaws away at professional autonomy and control’ (p. 22).
If the university is an institution in ruins, characterized by a forced deprofessionalization, then we should ask ourselves what it means to dwell in these ruins (Readings, 1996: 169). One inconvenient truth is that academics seem to fit the neoliberal demands for autonomous, self-motivated and self-responsible subjects all too well. Academics seem to be ‘model neoliberal subjects’ (Gill, 2016: 52; Marinetto, 2019; Morrish and Sauntson, 2020: 23). Thus, the lack of resistance to the marketization and managerialization of the university is caused by divisive practices which create exhaustion, insecurity and stress (Morrish, 2019), but also by academics succumbing to the seduction of supposedly autonomous working lives, which can easily be exploited by management. Similarly, Webb (2018) states that ‘we live in the era of the corporate-imperial university’, where the academy presents itself as a combination of a marketized sphere and apparatus of managerial control and where we can observe the erosion of academic freedom and the disciplining of dissent combined with a lack of the will to fight on the side of the academics. For Webb, the question of ‘breathing spaces’ and of possible forms of academic resistance becomes urgent when ‘governing one’s tongue’ (Docherty, 2015: 107) is the order of the day. Moreover, in what Fleming (2021a: 5) calls the ‘boss syndrome’, we can observe a degradation of academics to a flexible workforce and, even more worryingly, a self-identification of academics as replaceable human capital governed by a ‘detached cadre of managers’ who ‘circulate within the higher education industry, moving from institution to institution’ (Fleming, 2021a: 8). Fleming’s (2021b) ‘ghost university’ is the outcome of a transformation of universities into large business enterprises with a haunted/haunting faculty. For Fleming, an authoritative turn has replaced academic collegiality and collective decision-making and is accompanied by a massive proletarianization and precarization of academic labour as well as a mass processing of students in the Edu-Factory (Federici and Caffentzis, 2007) and a massive growth of student debt. This results in a mental health crisis of both staff and students. Moreover, the financialization of universities installs the metrics, values and tools of financial capitalism into the heart of the universities’ operations (e.g. Engelen et al., 2014; McGettigan, 2013). Courses and teaching are evaluated based on employability, which makes STEM subjects thrive while the humanities seem to face extinction, and the pressure is on universities to demonstrate their importance for big business. Fleming (2021a) is very clear about our own complicity in these developments, with many academics trying to game the system. In this spirit, Marinetto (2019) speaks about the ‘neoliberal’ academic and their careerist strategies, driven by professional egoism and the praise of competitive individualism. However, autonomy remains a fantasy or as Alvesson and Spicer (2016) argue: ‘apparently autonomous professionals can get so tightly wound up with the playing with power relations, they stop thinking outside the game, they avoid asking questions and just enthusiastically comply’ (p. 30).
Business schools are, in terms of student numbers and income generation, a powerful player within universities and play an important role in this drive to a marketization and a more ‘business-like’ transformation of universities. Somehow paradoxically, they are both subjects to this drive and providers of the accompanying language and concepts. As Parker (2021) puts it: ‘Not only do these schools teach students about finance, consumers and markets, they have also enabled this to become a dominant form of language and strategy within the institutions that they are part of’ (p. 1112). For Tinker (Dunne et al., 2008: 275), business schools are best viewed ‘as the Trojan Horse of modern capitalism, that is to say the vent for transforming the University Institution from within’. What is more is that both the status of knowledge produced in business schools are often criticized for its hubris or self-eulogy, its irrelevance or for its dysfunctional or even disastrous effects on business and society (e.g. Gioia and Corley, 2002; Parker, 2018; Pfeffer and Fong, 2004; Tourish et al., 2010). The prominent role of business schools in terms of income generation aggravates the situation of critical scholars within business schools, if critique seems only valuable if it secures income or status for the university. In consequence, some authors highlight the contradictions of the articulation of critique (Rowlinson and Hassard, 2011) or argue for the development of post-Critical Management Studies, aiming to transcend the opposition of ‘mainstream’ and CMS ‘to give criticism back its positive and creative capacities’ (Deslandes, 2023: xiv).
Furthermore, recent case studies about the restructuring of universities and business schools highlight the dismantling of critical scholarship. For example, Parker (2014) discusses a top-down change management process at the ‘Euro Business School’ and highlights the construction of a discounted past which makes it hard to argue against the imposed changes, which aimed at re-focussing research towards journal rankings and job cuts in the administration. Those who were opposing the changes were accused of ‘living in the past’, for not understanding the situation of a fast-moving and competitive environment and for their ‘self-interested’ behaviour. Asking critical questions was becoming dangerous, the collective email list was closed, a post-doc was disciplined for critical comments and a feeling of paranoia and distrust became paramount. In consequence, many academics and other professional staff saw the exit option as the only viable path. Raising the voice seemed pointless and loyalty seemed inconceivable. In a similar fashion, McCann et al. (2020) discuss the case of a recent restructuring programme at ‘Civic University’ and argue that universities increasingly turn to forms of total administration that manages to subdue resistance through the successful marginalization of so-called ‘dissidents’, a technocratic handling of the change programme by the administration, a use of language that does not explain but communicate decisions, dictum, command and which plays out as a ‘systematic assault on meaning’ (Gabriel, 2012: 1142). Moreover, feelings of fear, low self-esteem or anxiety were widespread and were limiting resistance (McCann et al., 2020: 441). Although the restructuring ended without compulsory redundancies, management reached its target of staff reductions. Of particular importance for the case at hand is that scholars from the more critical and humanities side of the business school were attacked in a disproportionate way (McCann et al., 2020: 445).
In a broad sense, the case of the GBS does not differ from these rather disheartening case studies. In a nutshell, the attack on critical thinking is linked to the overall process of precarization, an ongoing corporatization and managerial attempts to discourage dissent and to create a culture of fear and subordination, for which Hall and Bowles (2016, see also Morrish, 2019) coined the term of higher education as an ‘anxiety machine’. This attack is also connected to the diagnosis of an authoritarian turn of university leadership. Behind the façade of diversity and inclusivity lurks authoritarian leadership and intolerance. All of this is gloomy, and while you read about the latest round of redundancies, the closure of departments and the intimidation of colleagues on Twitter, it feels odd that others celebrate their latest publication and share pictures of conference dinners at the same time. Maybe one way to overcome this state of desperation is to better understand the subtle and mundane mechanisms of managerial power that produce the very state and feeling of desperation when one is confronted with a managerial ‘elite’ running (and maybe ruining) the university. This being said, this article aims to enrich the extensive literature about the decline of the idea of university with a case study that focusses on what Foucault (1980) called the ‘infinitesimal mechanism’ (p. 99), the capillary and local forms of power (see also Clegg, 1994; Knights and Vurdubakis, 1994) and their interrelatedness to the reframing of the university as business enterprise which is led by a managerial elite dismantling professional autonomy. Focussing on the micro-physics of power sheds light on the mundane processes through which managerial power acts, circulates, routinely undermines the autonomy of those it wants out, but opens a space to reflect on how it can be resisted too (Anderson, 2008). By understanding the processes and everyday practices through which universities are being transformed in the way outlined above, and are, thus, being ruined, we can obtain a glimmer of hope that these trends are not inescapable but are the products of mundane acts by mundane people. It is with this intent that I engage in the analysis of the dismantling of academic professional autonomy.
Reshaping the GBS – the case study
The following reconstruction of the case is written by someone who was involved in its unfolding and who was affected by its direct outcome. Thus, the following reconstruction wasn’t based on a preplanned research strategy (McCann et al., 2020). The account is shaped by this entanglement and firsthand experience, and it is obvious that other actors involved, for example, members of the senior management team, are interested in presenting a different story which, for example, evolves around resistance to change or the necessary transformation of higher education in the 21st century. In following Parker (2021), who himself refers to Howard Becker, I am clear ‘whose side I am on’ (p. 1112). I am aware that this is not the only possible account of the events at GBS and that my writing doesn’t ‘mirror’ the reality ‘out there’. I am also aware that the focus of the article doesn’t allow to give a comprehensive account of the whole change management programme. However, whereas the reconstruction of this case is based on firsthand experience and close proximity to its ‘object’, it draws on extensive notes, documents, emails and numerous, invaluable conversations and discussions with friends, ‘affected’ and ‘non-affected’ colleagues as well as supporters within and outside the university, which were essential to develop and critically reflect this story about the degradation of professional autonomy. Last but not least, this firsthand experience led to an in depth-exploration of the extensive literature and critical reflections about the transformation of higher education which helped to frame and shape the overall direction of the analysis of the case, resonating with Anderson’s (2006) proposal of an ‘analytic autoethnography’. As already noted in the ‘Introduction’, the hope is that this account echoes similar experiences within higher education. Finally, I hope that this account reflects the early spirit of CMS, which understands CMS at a basic level as a ‘political project in the sense that it aims to unmask the power relations around which social and organizational life are woven’ (Fournier and Grey, 2000: 19), a spirit which was no longer acceptable for the management of GBS.
Setting the scene
Like it or not, this is a competitive environment.
GBS had been an internationally recognized school for Critical Management and Organization Studies for about 15 years. With the support of the Vice Chancellor (VC), it was possible to build up a Critical Management School and to attract several national and international scholars. For several years, the school had been highly successful in relation to conventional criteria, that is, in terms of growth, recruitment, income, ranking and league table positions. Things started to change with the arrival of a new VC, increased financial pressures and accusations that the school was not acting enough in a ‘business-friendly’ way. These accusations were fuelled by the long-lasting hostility of several managers who had seen the school as an ‘anti-management’ school and as a nest of Marxists and postmodern thinkers. The arrival of another VC and two Deans in quick succession aggravated the situation. The new VC announced a university-wide restructuring programme, and the school was one of the several targeted areas, which encompassed both academic departments and professional service units. A few months later, senior management announced redundancy consultation for different parts of the university, linked to different ‘business cases’ and rationales, which, it can be argued, made it more difficult to develop a coordinated attempt to question the managerial position. In a nutshell, the overall ‘rationale’ was that to strengthen some areas of expertise it was necessary to ‘disinvest’ from other areas of expertise.
In the case of the business school, the subsequent managerial communication of the planned changes framed the change programme within the narrative of global competition, excellence, and the aim of becoming a top 25 business school and competing on a global level. This announcement was followed by a staff survey and the publication of a summary of its findings. This summary, produced by senior management, claimed that the critical heritage of the school was standing in the way of a ‘genuine diversity’ of thinking and that ‘relatively few’ mentioned the critical heritage as strength. Two months later, the author of this article and several other members of the so-called ‘management side’ of the school – several of them were active union members too – received a letter explaining that they were at risk of being made redundant, because their research interest in CMS and Political Economy did not align with the future strategic direction of the school. From that day onwards, we were occupied with the fight for our jobs and the legacy of the school. In the end, it took 9 months to demolish the critical legacy of the school. I am turning now to the dismantling of professional autonomy to outline three mechanisms deployed by management to achieve this.
Mechanism 1: an attitude of censorship and anti-intellectualism – on being demeaned as scholars
Academia looks like an admirable profession and could, certainly, be one of the best jobs in the world. If you are lucky enough, you can travel (again) to conferences around the globe, you have time to teach, to think, to write and read books and you can meet many clever and globally minded people. Thus, it might come as no surprise that the public perception still upholds the fantasy of an ‘ivory tower’ and a ‘dreamy picture of scholarly life’ with certainly little to complain about (Fleming, 2021a: 21). However, beyond this perception lies a different, more ordinary reality where the world of academia is under attack because of a diminishing of professional autonomy in higher education and the rise of managerialism in university settings (e.g. Alvesson and Spicer, 2016; Alvesson and Szkudlarek, 2021; Clarke and Knights, 2015; Ginsberg, 2011; Knights and Clarke, 2014). As Gabriel (2010) puts it: ‘I doubt that there are many professions whose members are so relentlessly subjected to measurement, criticism and rejection as academics, exposing them to deep insecurities regarding their worth, their identity and their standing’ (p. 769). In this sense, the events at GBS are another example of the degrading of scholarly work and a stripping away of professional autonomy in the managerial university. Despite our long-standing experience with the managerialization of the university, this process of devaluing our professional autonomy was nonetheless a shocking experience for most of the scholars who were ‘affected’ by the managerial attack on their work; an experience which was stressful and unhealthy too, sometimes resulting in the inability to do other meaningful work or to find sleep at night. In a nutshell, we were confronted with an attempt to dismantle our professional autonomy via the devaluation of our scholarly work and the heritage of the Critical Management School. Two phenomena of this process are of particular importance, that is, a managerial attitude of censorship and anti-intellectualism throughout the redundancy consultations. This attitude of censorship means a disregard of the conditions of scholarly work and academic freedom itself, in particular, the freedom to publish and the freedom to conduct research. Both censorship and anti-intellectualism were fuelled by an obvious bias against anything which appeared to be ‘critical’ in a broad sense. This bias against ‘critical’ work saved management from the need to deal with our work. First and foremost, this was visible in the lack of engagement with our work. This is exemplified by the so-called ‘basket of indicators’ which was created by senior management, and which was used for a so-called ‘screening exercise’ of our research to decide whether our work is of any value for the future direction of the school. Among the indicators were the title and the abstract of the publication, the journal of publication, the membership of research centres, or information on the staff web page. What can be called a managerial attitude of censorship is best explained with the help of a few examples. Thus, we were told that a book about ‘alternative organizations’ was no longer deemed to be in line with the school’s strategy because it deals with ‘alternative organizations’. About another article, it was said that it focussed on ‘propaganda which suggests it is more concerned with politics than with business’. A further piece discussed ‘entrepreneurship and finance from a sociological perspective’, which was not in line with the strategic priorities of the school. Finally, an edited collection of writings about a well-known organization theorist was deemed inappropriate because this celebrated author ‘introduced postmodern ideas’ to the field of organization studies. Furthermore, publications in several journals, namely ephemera, Culture and Organization, Organization, and Critical Perspectives on Accounting, were deemed problematic. Publications in Critical Perspectives on Accounting were deemed debatable because the journal, ‘as the title suggests’, offers critical perspectives. Publications in the other journals did not align with the new strategy because the journals were ‘mainly targeted’ by CMS scholars. The result of the screening looked more like an exercise in combining snippets to make the case against us. As one colleague puts it: ‘The case seeks to find the devil’s work everywhere and like that of most witch-hunters, it but glances anywhere and finds it’. Furthermore, a fundamental lack of care was visible in the handling of research written not in English which, in some cases, was ignored first or screened, based on a translation of the title or abstract, later on. The managerial attitude of censorship was also observable in the back-pedalling from some of the most egregious allegations. In one of these cases, it was argued (and later retracted) that a colleague was ‘highly cited’ in other works of critical scholars, which was seen as another proof that the work did not align with the future strategy of the school.
In addition, we had to learn that management was indifferent or ignorant about the public outcry and the voice of academia at large, which, keeping in mind the importance of professional associations for the functioning of a profession (Abbott, 1988), is another indicator for the hollowing out of professional autonomy. This experience matches the events described by McCann et al. (2020), who also noted that petitions and open letters had no effect or were simply ignored by senior management. The visible expression of this kind of ignorance of the profession was the boilerplate responses to these letters, lacking engagement with the arguments against the dismantling of critical scholarship. One might even wonder why, in some cases, it took months to send out a response.
Whereas the managerial attitude of censorship about scholarly work and the ignorance of the voice of professional bodies was striking and shocking, we further believe that the devaluing of our work was linked to a deep-rooted managerial anti-intellectualism. Following Hofstadter (1963), we can define anti-intellectualism as a ‘resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it’ (p. 7). The purge at GBS combined all three kinds of anti-intellectualism (Hofstadter, 1963; Rigney, 1991). First, we witnessed anti-rationalism. Anti-rationalism frames rationalism as sterile and cold. In our case, the perceived scepticism of critical scholarship seemed to stand in the way of a vision of a compassionate community of loyal university staff. It seems that the creation of such a community is a serious issue and that its founders do not really appreciate the playfulness, scepticism or the irony they probably see in the habitus or the work of critical scholars. The second aspect of anti-rationalism is the fear of relativism. From a managerial viewpoint, it was obviously a problem that we seemed to question the authority of mainstream management thinking and practice. Throughout the process, they were forced to reactivate a Manichean worldview that comes close to the description of evangelicalism by Hofstadter, where fundamentalist leaders believe that the ‘absolute good and absolute evil were locked in a struggle to the death’ (Rigney, 1991: 437). Thus, CMS were framed as ‘anti-management’ thinking, which has no place at a contemporary business school. A second major component of anti-intellectualism is anti-elitism. It is safe to argue that anti-elitism was visible in the unwillingness of management to engage in a serious scholarly discussion about our work which was discussed above. Throughout the consultation, we had the impression that we were construed as arrogant, intellectual snobs, who were whining about the wrong articulation of their names and titles and who were writing obscure stuff without business relevance. In contrast, senior management was down-to-earth and aware of the changes in the world of business outside the ‘ivory tower’ of critical obscurantism. This leads directly to the third aspect of anti-intellectualism, that is, an unreflected instrumentalism. For the relevant managers, it was obvious that our work did not meet the needs of business right here and right now. In the eyes of management, it did not pay off immediately and it was necessary to transform the school into something which was doing exactly that.
In sum, a managerial attitude of censorship and anti-intellectualism worked as two major devices to dismantle our professional autonomy and to show us the place of critical scholarship in the brave new world of the GBS.
Mechanism 2: depriving academics of the means to fight back
We are the only ones with all the information to make the changes we need to make as a university.
In the following, I will highlight the control of the flow of information and the regulation of time and space as mechanisms to deprive us of the means to fight back. The control of information was visible throughout the entire process. We received no prior information about the content of the so-called pre-change engagement sessions. During the sessions, management talked us through an extensive PowerPoint presentation that mixed ‘insights’ from McKinsey, PWC and a LinkedIn blog post about the future of business education, slides about league table positions and buzzwords such as ‘global competition’, ‘excellence’, ‘future challenges’, ‘research-led education’ or ‘practical relevance for business’. Finally, we were reminded of the strategic ‘ambition’ to be a top 25 business school and to be competitive at a global level. At the end of the session, there was no room for a sensible discussion of the framing, the numerous claims and the ‘evidence’ that was used to justify the need for a change. Next, we could ‘engage’ with the survey mentioned above. The summary which was produced by senior management painted CMS as a domineering force that was standing in the way of ‘genuine diversity’. We were told that ‘relatively few’ in the school mentioned CMS as a strength, but that ‘many more’ were keen to emphasize the importance of diversity. The access to the raw data of the survey was denied, first on the grounds of confidentiality and later for ‘commercial reasons’. The control of information extended to the ‘business case’ that was drawn up some weeks later and remained confidential throughout the entire process. Only the people directly affected received the document, the so-called non-affected staff members had no access to it and depended on the bits of information given by management and the reports produced by the group of affected people. Finally, the flow of information was characterized by constant delays: delays in sending slides, delays in responding to queries, delays in providing information about the responsibilities and composition of a review group in charge of overseeing the validity of the screening process, to mention just a few examples.
Time was not on our side, either. It was obvious that management was keen to proceed with the restructuring as quickly as possible and to present this ‘case for change’ as an on-off exercise which needed to be done to thrive (again) afterwards. ‘It needs to be done but we will not do it again’ was the message to those who were framed as ‘non-affected’. As in the case of the European Business School, the change process was rolled out with ‘speed and violence’ (Parker, 2014: 284). Here, the loopholes and ambiguities of the redundancy ordinance played an important role. Whereas the ordinance defines non-negotiable deadlines for staff at risk of redundancy, it is much more ambiguous about the duties and actions of the employer. Here, the adverb ‘normally’ plays an important role to deflect any challenge on procedures. For example, the ordinance states that collective consultation will normally begin 7 months before the first effective date of termination. In our case, this was reduced to 6 months. A second example from the ordinance concerns the regulation of appeals. Whereas employees are obliged to lodge an appeal against the notice of redundancy within 10 working days, the appeal hearing should ‘normally’ be arranged within 15 working days after the appeal was lodged. In our case, the appeal hearings took place more than 30 or 40 days after the lodging of the appeal, senior management feeling they could depart from ‘normal’ practices because of the difficulty in ‘coordinating diaries’ (due to annual leaves or the many hearings to organize).
The control of time was not restricted to the formal procedures of the ordinance. It was also visible in the arrangement of the meetings and consultations with affected and non-affected staff. For example, the first collective group consultation was scheduled to last 50 minutes. Thirty-five minutes were used for a PowerPoint presentation by senior management, leaving 15 minutes for those threatened with redundancy and the union representatives to ask questions. This made it impossible to have a meaningful discussion about the ‘business case’. This case, which was written down in a document of about 50 pages, was sent to us 30 minutes before the meeting. Our request for a follow-up meeting was denied, indicating that it was possible to send in questions in writing. On this and other occasions, we learned a lot about the art of stretching out time, for example, using slow verbal articulation, the point for point reading out of slides or monologues about technical difficulties (all these meetings were held via MS Teams). This pattern was visible throughout all the other meetings of the process. Some of them ended with the announcement that managers had to go to another meeting – the managerial life is a busy one and there is much more to be done than to answer the questions of staff who are at risk of being made redundant.
Another characteristic of the processing of authoritarian leadership is the attempt to regulate actions and behaviour through the regulation of organizational space (e.g. see Clegg and Kornberger, 2006; Dale and Burrell, 2007; Van Marrewijk and Yanow, 2010), which includes both real and virtual spaces. First, the dismissals took place during the pandemic, which made it nearly impossible to have direct interactions with others during or after the meetings. Every participant was sitting alone in front of a computer screen at home. Furthermore, the regulation of space was closely linked to the managerial attempt to divide and rule. One striking example is the arrangement of meetings. In our view, it is no coincidence that all staff meetings had been cancelled for an indefinite period before the announcement of the pre-change engagement period. Following the announcement of the ‘business case’, we asked the Dean, supported by dozens of staff members, for an all-staff meeting. This call was rejected by senior management with the argument that an all-staff meeting was not an appropriate place to discuss the case and to give voice to every member of the school. Instead, divisional meetings were arranged in line with the narrative of ‘affected’ and ‘non-affected’ groups or staff members. This regulation of space made it difficult to organize any collective response to the ‘business case’ and, more importantly, allowed senior management to send different messages to different groups. It is one of the ironies of the entire process that senior management arranged an all-staff meeting to discuss the future development of the school after our final day at the university. The regulation of space was also manifest in the use and non-use of the all-staff list. Throughout the process, the all-staff list became a major space and communication channel for affected staff. However, this space remained a one-way street in the sense that management remained silent on the all-staff list and did not respond to our numerous communications with one another. Instead, management sent individual responses to the individuals who communicated via the all-staff list. This made it impossible to have a meaningful conversation via the all-staff list, the main forum of public debate available during the pandemic.
Mechanism 3: isolating the dismantled academic and the production of docile citizens
Finally, let me turn to some attempts to isolate the dismantled academic, attempts that are closely linked to the production of obedience and docile citizens. One of the questions we need to ask ourselves is: How can there not have been more of an outcry from staff at what was a serious attack on the traditional academic values of truth, reason, democracy, freedom and the public good? This incredulity at academics’ compliance has been expressed in various studies on the neoliberal university and its authoritarian management (e.g. Parker, 2014; Smyth, 2017; Woodman, 2016). Parker (2014), for example, expresses his ‘surprise’ about the quiescence of many staff members at the Euro Business School in the face of the ‘earth-shattering’ change programme, given that this workplace was a university populated by responsibly autonomous professionals, and . . . a particular group of these people were invested in these critical traditions as well as being members of the relevant trade union. [Therefore] one might have assumed that this was a place in which resistance was more, not less, likely. (p. 290)
While the regulation of information, time and space partly explains the lack of resistance, there are further conditions that help explain docile conduct on the part of academic colleagues who remained silent while the careers and livelihood of their colleagues were threatened and the very principle of academic freedom was under attack. To understand this docility, I will look at three further mechanisms through which staff were disempowered, that is, intimidation, the pathologization of dissent and the use of a unitarist discourse.
The first tactic of disempowerment was the creation of a climate of threat and intimidation (West, 2016). Throughout the process, various members of the senior leadership team contributed to creating an environment, where a climate of fear, threat and surveillance all became commonplace. Despite claims to the contrary, social media activities from ‘targeted staff’ were monitored and occasionally threatened with sanctions. It later transpired that the university had hired an external agency to do its work of staff surveillance and to closely monitor the Twitter postings and social media activities of various members of staff deemed troublemakers. Information from Data Access Subject Requests revealed the daily reports on the social media activities of several members of staff. For example, it was noted about a staff member that they ‘has been active this morning’, ‘continues to negatively engage on Twitter’, ‘was active on Friday’, ‘tweeted this morning thanking [a journal] for their support’ or ‘notes he is being monitored’. In this context, the university’s Dignity and Respect policy was also pointed out by senior leadership in a hardly disguised threatening fashion to silence a ‘small number of staff in breach of the policy in their social media communications’. It is plausible to argue that such an announcement had a chilling effect on other members of staff.
However, we must also assume that several colleagues accepted the managerial understanding and ‘clarification’ of what is an ‘appropriate’ or ‘acceptable’ critique. I believe that this acceptance works through the implicit linking of ‘appropriate’ or ‘healthy’ critique to ‘professionalism’ or professional behaviour. Ironically, ‘professionalism’ was invoked and instrumentalized by management (in terms of appropriate conduct, obeying the ‘Dignity and Respect’ policy) only to undermine our professional autonomy as academics.
Pathologization was another way of disempowering dissenting staff by depoliticizing their protest and placing it on the terrain of emotions and feelings. One way to undermine dissent is to infantilize it, turn it into the (understandable and curable) psychological reactions of lamenting or hurt individuals or reduce it to an understandable form of ‘self-interest’. Throughout the process, we repeatedly received condescending messages from the senior managers responsible for our redundancies that they understood that ‘feelings were running high’, and that they appreciated that these were difficult and unsettling times for those affected. All individual consultations started with management stressing that this was very much a ‘listening exercise’ and ended with management thanking us for our professional conduct in these difficult or ‘incredibly emotional times’. We were repeatedly reminded that various opportunities for staff support and well-being programmes were available to soften the blow of our likely redundancy. For example, at the end of every individual and collective consultation, we were offered ‘employee support’ along the following lines: ‘We do not underestimate that this is a very unsettling time for you and your colleagues and wish to reassure you that management will listen and take into account all feedback’. We were also told that the university had developed a series of workshops to provide support, and that support was also available through a confidential Employee Assistance Programme and a staff counselling provider. All these messages of support and appreciation of our distress reduced dissent to feelings and emotions that could be managed and appeased; therapy conveniently replaced politics. All in all, we were both witnesses and victims of the operationalization of change and change management in several universities nowadays. The term change management implies that change is something that can and should be managed. As the change management principles of the university inform us: Change is an ever-present and essential part of life, and the University is a constantly evolving organisation. While this can make it a dynamic and vibrant place to work, change can present challenges for individuals and groups, and needs to be expertly managed if we are to realise the benefits of making changes at any scale.
Furthermore, the underlying conceptualizations of change present change as something which inevitably creates negative emotions (that need to be overcome with the help of counselling, etc.) but which is inevitably a good thing (Morrish and Sauntson, 2020: 196–200). In line with these assumptions, the change management principles refer to the popular ‘change curve’ by Kuebler-Ross. Whereas it is recognized that this curve was introduced to understand the ‘grieving process’ and that it is ‘much abused and misrepresented’, it is claimed that it ‘nevertheless proved valuable in understanding and helping people who are experiencing change’. A management that refers to such an approach frames resistance to change as a state of mind which can be overcome, and which should be overcome with the help of change management tools. The framing of resistance in terms of negative emotions (shock, denial, anger) deliberately ignores any possible substance of the articulated critique or the right to exist of a different vision for the university. Everyone must move on to the stages of acceptance and integration. As Morrish and Sauntson (2020) put it, Resistance from those with institutional memory . . . is framed in terms of their self-interest and intransigence. Those who leave are recast as not sharing the vice-chancellor’s vision. The discourse creates binary options of compliance or exit, entrepreneur or whiner hankering for the ‘good old days’. (p. 199)
What we could observe is what West (2016) calls the ‘the implicit pathologization of those who complain’: ‘Healthy individuals conform, oppositional individuals are maladjusted’ (p. 5).
The discourse about change leads me to the third aspect of fostering obedience, that is, the use of a unitarist discourse. Not long before the announcement of the restructuring programme, staff and students were informed about the ‘launch’ of the ‘new identity’ of the University. We were told that this new identity is not just about how things look, but this is also about how we tell our story and our outstanding research and student experience. We were invited to initiate change towards creating a better world but were also deprived of the power and structural conditions to make change that would depart from the new direction determined unilaterally by senior leadership. In this unitarist perspective, a community of docile staff members was invoked, where conflict had been ironed out and dissent stigmatized. Throughout the process, senior leadership tried to invoke a community of interests according to which we were all in the same boat, and, hence, should all act in the imagined common interest. In effect, the message was ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you’, a message that served to vilify resistance.
I have looked at the mechanisms that produced docile citizens and compliance from staff. Yet it should not be assumed that all staff had to be made to comply. Some seemed to willingly collude with management strategy and authority; and maybe it is not surprising that in a neoliberal university, many academics have embraced the rules of the game and turned into neoliberal subjects ready to turn their career into enterprising projects and to compete with colleagues for rewards and recognition (Marinetto, 2019). As Michael Power, among others, noted, many academics have turned into ‘sole traders’ using universities for their own career development: ‘Rising individualism is hollowing out departments’ (cited in Havergal, 2015). It is one of the ironies of this imagined and forcefully introduced new community of staff that it creates its own category of ‘sole traders’. The instrumentalism that increasingly prevails in universities incites academics to move between places as steppingstones for their careers, making any form of attachment to the research culture of a university department, to colleagues or even to the idea of academic freedom something that holds little sway over conduct.
For the neoliberal academics eager to advance their own interests, the case for change and the redundancy programme may have presented a golden opportunity to eliminate some of the competition and gain greater hold on rewards. Thus, it seems that the exclusion of a few ‘troublemakers’ is another path to personal aggrandizement.
Conclusions
This brings me to the end of the journey through the change programme at GBS and through the attempts to dismantle our professional autonomy, to move us swiftly through a redundancy consultation and to isolate us within the university. Looking back, the events resonate with a few lines from Leonard Cohen’s song Everybody Knows. On the one hand, there is this strong feeling that ‘everybody knows the fight was fixed’. In the end, the whole story could be framed as a biased attack on critical thinking at a business school, with a management who thinks that preparing students for the ‘world of work’ does not require CMS and that the mission of a business school is to serve business needs. On the other hand, there is this quite different impression that ‘everybody knows that the boat is leaking’ and that ‘everybody knows the captain lied’, where the dismantling of critical thinking was an attempt to get rid of some troublemakers to demonstrate agility and servility without any clear strategy.
If we delve into the relevant critical literature about higher education, it is hard not to despair. One could argue that the discussion about the decline of the idea of university demonstrates the vitality of the sector. However, all the critical interventions seem negligible compared to the ongoing neoliberal deconstruction of ‘the space in which professional autonomy is exercised’ (Olssen and Peters, 2005: 325). Against this backdrop, this article is nonetheless another attempt to highlight the severity of these destructive trends in universities. Its primary aim is to outline a distinct number of mundane mechanisms of the dismantling of professional autonomy. Thus, it was motivated by the belief that the reconstruction of such cases and embedding them within the wider political and ideological landscape of higher education is useful, because such cases force us to reflect on the ‘infinitesimal mechanism’ (Foucault, 1980: 99) of power, the petty but powerful managerial games and tactics that are degrading professional autonomy and that are an attempt to show us ‘our place’ in the managerial university. I tend to believe that a re- and deconstruction of these mechanisms is helpful for others who are occupied with similar struggles now and in the future too. Thus, while there are good reasons to despair if we look at the university landscape at a macro-level and consider its well-documented neoliberalization, marketization and managerialization, trying to understand the micro-practices, the mundane processes through which ordinary managers bring about these trends might be, somehow paradoxically, empowering too. Such a shift to the micro-level of analysis helps to understand the processes that go into the exercise of power, and, hopefully, from there, what it would take to fight it, the points where it could be resisted, the acts that could be undone. Thus, the intention of detailing the processes through which professional autonomy is dismantled and academics are ‘put in their place’ is not only to understand the machinations of power but to foster a discussion of how to resist it. Just as power does not simply occur but requires mundane work and the deployment of various tactics, resistance can also resort to innumerable tactics. Some may be confronting power directly in open defiance, others may involve more hidden tactics (foot-dragging, feigned ignorance) and yet others may be more about avoidance or escape, abandoning the battlefield altogether. Each of these tactics is associated with cost and risks, but the point is that we have a choice; to keep silent, comply and play the game is the result of a choice too. On this backdrop, it is possible to see this article as a small act of resistance too. A kind of forgetting and breathlessness is built into the neoliberal academy, where those in power have an interest in spreading their own story and sidelining critical accounts. In the case of GBS, someone who isn’t aware of the history of the business school will rarely find any trace of its critical past on its official pages. Despite its very limited impact, writing against this kind of forgetting seems a sensible and necessary task. Finally, it seems obvious that the re-imagination of the university is both an urgent and collective task. The critical diagnoses and reports are numerous, the damages of decades of marketization, managerialism and the hollowing out of the idea of the university as place of education, critique, academic freedom and enlightenment are obvious, but attempts to re-invent the university as a public institution and education as a public good seem scarce. There is much work to be done, against all odds.
