Abstract
In the summer of 2020, I led a guest editorial for a special issue on the ‘Performative University’, within the context of the Covid pandemic. The articles reflected on the state of our universities, which we framed as ‘Targets’ and ‘Terror’. The emergent response from academics at the time was more around indignation, along with a large dose of complicit resignation and some micro resistance. It certainly did not represent a form of individual and collective agency, which impacted on institutional and structural contestation of the performative practice of universities. This article will follow up on the special issue in a post-pandemic world, to explore what has happened to this academic response. Ensuing articles have illustrated a particular collective, caring form of critical scholarship, paving a path for ‘taking freedom back’. Moreover, what has emerged is the significance of pre-public processual and spatial turn of building a connected, political capital across institutions, disciplines, career stages and nations to then ‘take freedom forward’ in engaging other more intractable, non-academic actors within a public space. This offers some tempered hope in actively changing institutional practice, presenting us with a fundamental challenge to the bounded, managed and measured Performative University.
Introduction
For the 55th anniversary of Management Learning, I would like to reflect on the growing research in the journal around the academics’ role and contestation to the notion of the ‘Performative University’ – the title of an SI (Jones et al., 2020), I co-edited back in 2020. While our collective agency can be asserted through our interaction and actions with crucial actors such as students, journal publishers and local communities and organisations, this article will focus upon how we as academics are coming together. Even back then the articles in the SI recognised how academic resistance is evolving (Bristow et al., 2017; Mumby et al., 2017), recognising the dialectical relationship between control and resistance, around more informal, post-recognition forms of spontaneous, collective, covert academic resistance (Fleming, 2016). Generatively crafted parallel socio/temporal/material/embodied/affective spaces (Beyes and Michels, 2011; Beyes and Steyaert, 2021) were beginning to emerge, offering individual and collective restorative escape (Mumby et al., 2017; Siltaloppi et al., 2022). Through the potential of collective caring (Noddings, 2013) and generosity within such restorative counter spaces and times, it was argued that a reflexive collegiality could be enacted (Gherardhi and Rodeschini, 2016; Smith and Ulus, 2020). We framed this in the SI as ‘taking freedom back’ in the face of diminishing academic autonomy. This anniversary article will specifically initially ask how are we progressing in taking freedom back? Although the SI was written as the pandemic hit, we were hopeful that academics could still find the relative autonomy to leverage their collective agency on their universities and HE sector to move forward together in a more inclusive, equitable and ecologically sustainable way (despite what seemed quite dystopian institutionally). Our two Management Learning co-editors at the time, Bridgman and Sliwa (2021: 5) echoed this sentiment when they asserted, ‘the pandemic has devastated societies and economies, but it has also been affirming to see new forms of care, community, and solidarity emerge’.
So what has been the ‘academic’ journey towards such collective care and has this been purely a tale of survival or something more? How geared up are academics in terms of theory and practice to not only collectively taking freedom back, through such grass-roots collective care, but how are they using any ensuing solidarity to ‘take this freedom forward’ to disrupt and (dis)organise HE practices. This is no mean feat as our HE institutions are ultimately a risk-averse, marketised, instrumental organisational enterprise, using rhetorical, tokenistic care narrative themselves, hypocritically (many would argue) proclaiming platitudes of care manifestos, policies and strategies in various virtuous EDI, wellbeing and sustainability guises. This is acted out, while embedding an entangled institutional and sectoral push around ‘targets and terror’ characterised in the aforementioned SI.
Of course, this added perspective on how we use our freedom, around taking freedom forward by academics could not be more relevant today. The timing of this call is set amid growing geopolitical-socio-economic tensions, when student protests and encampments are rife across university campuses around the Israeli–Hamas conflict. Based on the university response to these protests, multiple formalised, no confidence votes are growing from academics around the world towards senior HE management. In the context of the increased centralisation of the Performative University, disconnected university management is being placed under heightened scrutiny and contestation by students, academics, donors and politicians, in the extent to which they allow and respond to such freedom of speech on campus. HE’s response to such freedoms are certainly intertwined with the drift towards the ‘targets and terror’ of organising more broadly with HE.
Despite what seems a dystopic state, are there any hopeful signs, from an academic perspective, which have the necessary ‘care with teeth’ to affect changes in HE organising – not only taking freedom back to collectively care for and with each other, but in which ways could this be associated with and lead to taking freedom forward to engage and contest the Performative University edifice. This is no mean feat as we must accept our academic complicitness and game playing around the fantasy of aspiring to the excellent, invulnerable, all round auditable academic, productive commodity. So what are the signs of hope or hopelessness? If we assume that the articles published since the SI are more broadly representative of the state of play of HE in the post-pandemic era, on first sight, we could be inclined to air on the hopelessness path.
The unfolding processual, caring story of academics
Several articles share many more accounts of academics collectively taking freedom back tentatively (for the sake of survival through acknowledging and sharing vulnerability, enacting care and embracing generosity with each other), rather than taking freedom forward (to impact on institutional organising) over the past 4 years. However, as we shall see there is a hopeful sign amid this observation, which highlights a possible emergent relationship between each stage of freedom – or a common type of relational care journey towards academic activism, albeit from differing positionalities, theoretical perspectives and methodological pathways. I will now tentatively outline a narrative arc drawn from the articles that endeavour to unpick this relationship between taking freedom back and taking freedom forward.
Paolo Freire: taking freedom back through consciousness raising, critical reflection and cooperation-based dialogue
One such theoretical perspective is by the intellectual activist Paulo Freire. It is quite relevant that a few articles within an SI focused on Freire in 2024 (Barros et al., 2024), with his focus on liberation, justice and resistance in the context politicising and humanising management learning and education. His perspective of ‘banking’ education resonates with the Performative University as it shows how entangled academics are within a hegemonic HE system, desperately trying to cope with geopolitical crises and a resurgence of far-right populism exacerbating hatred, violence, racism, misogyny and xenophobia. A resonating overarching feature of Freire’s (2017: 141) work is his strong ‘commitment to freedom’.
Reflecting on these relevant ML articles within the Freire SI, Cooper and Majumdar (2024) focus on an actor who does not have much freedom to assert their agency, early career, doctoral academics within business schools, who many see as beyond repair (Fleming, 2021; Parker, 2018), holding the reins of profit maximisation from a colonial intellectual perspective. But rather than to acquiesce due to their positionality, Cooper and Majumdar (2024) make the call that such a group has the most to gain from asserting their relative freedom to assert their humanity to not only survive, but change the structure, as they have their entire careers ahead of them. However, they temper this thirst by arguing for a pragmatic approach, more around taking freedom back rather than taking freedom forward. This pragmatic approach is around Freirean consciousness raising, critical reflection and cooperation-based dialogue – a form of awareness raising which questions our role as being totally oppressed and recognises are complicitness – we become more aware of being the sub-oppressor – without such a reflexivity ECAs may be tempted to follow such an instrumental and diminishing career path. In another article in the SI on Paulo Freire, Misoczky (2024) highlights that none of us are free of contradictions in our relationship with the Performative University, which requires that even the most marginalised (not just confined to being male, white, middle-class, heterosexual, northern in origin and able-bodied early career academics (Fleming and Banerjee, 2016)) need to recognise ‘our deeply conditioned fear of freedom and dare to be powerful together’ (Darder, 2016: 70). One more relevant article in this SI by Cavalcanti and Silva (2024) reminds us that Freire offers us an alternative to the desperate need to compete individually, by drawing on the loving nature of critique, building bridges among ourselves to drive social change.
Beyond Freire: making space for wellbeing, queer time, mentoring & identity
Away from the Freirean SI, Hurdh and Singh (2021) follow this reflexive path of consciousness raising in a collaborative process, as two early career women, they reflect on the way they nurtured reflexive spaces for collective self-care for enhancing their wellbeing, in contrast to the individualised, resilience rhetoric predominating in their Performative University. Similarly, another article embraces this caring perspective (Weatherall and Ahuja, 2021) as these authors similarly reflect on their own experiences as ECRs and draw on queer time to understand together how tensions or frictions around ECR expectations can create opportunities to become academics differently, embracing alternative academic identities, learning and career in contrast to the normative, linear view of progress. They recognise that this is not at all easy, but by exploring experiences when ECRs are out of step, out of place and out of time, these moments could in fact open up opportunities to craft an unscripted academic future together, that is not bounded by fixed, scripted expectations of what constitutes a successful academic. Such alterity was drawn out in the article by Ghosh and Chaudhuri (2023) who co-constructed an empathetic, relational, mentoring space to challenge each others’ perspectives about their roles as immigrant mothers and professors and the gendered nature of social forces shaping those roles. Again, they argue that their own transformative learning has the potential for wider learning through the equivalent of Freire’s consciousness raising by making visible the taken for granted assumptions about what success means for academics and as immigrant mothers. Pertinently, they suggest broadening such holding environments to other marginalised colleagues, friends and family and exploring the ensuing social identity tensions and potential learning transformations individually, collectively and at a systems level.
This optimism around alterity is tempered by Callagher et al. (2021), who emphasise the problems and shadow side of such an informal, emergent shared holding environment for ECRs in their compensation of emotional shelter and resources, when discriminatory identity threats occur. Such emergent, well-meaning holding environments ultimately did not support the disruption of the sources of discriminatory identity work threats. However, they did recommend some possible ways forward. One telling recommendation was to embrace not only local but non-local researchers within a more mobile holding, non-territorial environment, as such wider collective care beyond the socio-political institutional bounds develop a wider repertoire of responses that make them feel less insecure within their own institution. This wider cross-institutional collaboration around a liminal, holding environment is a major feature of several articles since the Performative University SI and will be further explored below.
A possible Freirean pathway to moving beyond taking freedom back
Recalling Cooper and Majumdar’s (2024) article, they remind us that Freire’s notion of consciousness raising, cooperation-based dialogue and critical reflection within what could be construed as micro-practices is only part of a wider process that could eventually generate what he calls revolutionary praxis. This is significant as it begins to highlight that such steps are important but require something else to move taking freedom back (for individual respite and collective care of a peer group) into taking freedom forward for structural change. That something else as exemplified in further articles in ML since the SI, which begin to focus on taking collective dialogue and action with others who have diverse positionalities, privileges, institutional bonds and interests. This is significant as all the above articles implicitly and explicitly call for this diversity in their desperate attempts (from different marginalised positions) to understand and find some form of restoration, within a system that does not care for them. The following articles recognise the weaknesses of academics acting alone or in peer groups and whose academic protagonists are involved in different collaborations (with some groups becoming more like friendships) who (in varying degrees and combinations) collaborate across career stage, institutions, disciplines, national boundaries (significant for academics from the Global South) in an organic and generative way. This resonates more broadly with Freire’s focus on the process towards revolutionary praxis, emphasising not only freedom but inclusivity and awareness. Recalling Cooper and Majumdar’s (2024) article, they remind us that such a processual and generative turn has its roots far removed from the centralised and managed calls for managerial collegiality, which co-opt cooperation and care within another seemingly virtuous metric, emphasising productive and efficient collaborative behaviours. This only adds to the precarious nature of academic capitalism and particularly hits marginalised academics who may feel exposed to managerialist agendas. This also reminds us of the article by Gavin et al. (2024) of 10 academics from the same university department, but with diverse ages, length of employment, career stage, work backgrounds, place of birth and family/household circumstances, from early career to a retired academic (which is significant in terms of the roots of care here), coming together to assert a more generative, less institutionally bounded, ‘collective collegiality’ as a counter, ‘caring with’ space in contrast to managerial collegiality, as a way to navigate, survive and even thrive in the Performative University.
In the context of the instrumental nature of the Performative University, one of the main conclusions in an article by Korber et al. (2024) is particularly relevant to this notion of collective collegiality of diverse, more inclusive forms of coming together. Through a processual turn, they highlight the myriad of ways in which togetherness, through building friendships is experienced by mixed career staged academics (across four business schools in the UK and New Zealand), which go way beyond the instrumental form of managerial collegiality. While work prioritising practices are identified as partly facilitating togetherness, they also highlight the entangled relationship-prioritising practices which push instrumental forms of togetherness into the background and meaningfully pull the ‘personalistic focus’ to the foreground. Furthermore, they also highlight future-oriented integration practices of togetherness, which suggest a much more critical shared, prefigurative orientation to work. Moreover, could we contend that by taking a relationship prioritisation path, could a togetherness unfold, through a reflexive and deliberate collective agency to critically contest work goals, practices and structures, within and across institutions (in the context of the resistant turn of ‘taking freedom forward’). Like any worthwhile scholarship, such articles leave us with pivotal questions to explore if we are serious about asserting our freedom, within and beyond the Performative University.
In exploring this ‘caring with’ process of integrating our own humanity (from a Freirean perspective) into our work with a keen eye on our political capital more deeply, several articles have reflected upon the way in which individual and collective care is initially and usually a pre-public, safe, restorative and developmental space for diverse but exclusive group and then transitions into public space to engage and provoke a wider more inclusive audience. Using an Arendtian lens (1967), the contribution of the article by Dyer et al. (2024), which I have been part of, argues that an emergent pre-public time and space is crucial, in which diverse academics (seven mixed career academics, from different institutions, countries (New Zealand, Australia, UK and Canada), disciplines and career levels) are shielded from public judgements in our individual and collective academic storying (often silenced or marginalised), before a wider engagement within a public space can happen. We call it an intentionally slow, circular and organic nurturing of trusting connectedness (recalling the personalisation point above) from the ‘I’, to the ‘We’ within taking freedom back and the ‘They’ in the process of taking freedom forward. The significance of this spatial perspective is that due to the diversity of the group, we were able to share and test out our stories, which often talked about resistance and relational wellbeing (we called our entangled friendship-work togetherness, ‘The Waffle Group’ to be distinctly counter-performative) so that we could feel in a position (for all their diverse positionalities) to then collectively assert and release these adapted stories and actions for a wider audience in public. Similarly, such a preparation for ‘caring with teeth’ is described through a place lens in the article by Nordbäck et al.’s (2022), who explore how the three academic authors (of mixed career stages) shared a desire to look for other meaningful places which become ‘time machines’ to facilitate a temporal reflexivity when they collaborate, to cope and build solidarity amid the demands of the Performative University. They alert us to an appreciation and therapeutic quality of the transpersonal flow of feeling, learning and embodiment (around work, family and national contexts), when such restless, diverse and complex bodies and identities, with different positionalities, come together. They mirror the call for collective collegiality in contrast to managed collegiality, when they argue against a managed interdisciplinarity, with a call for more academics across disciplines, institutions and career stages to craft spaces, places and times which build meaningful academic identities together.
One final reflection is the significance within many of these articles of a particular ontological stance around the primacy of an ethic of collective care (Noddings, 2013), aligned with a common methodological stance around collective autoethnography, combining individual and collective reflexivity with academic activism. Cooper and Majumdar (2024), Nordbäck et al.’s (2022), Dyer et al. (2024), Hurd and Singh (2021), Weatherall and Ahuja (2021) and Ghosh and Chaudhuri (2023) all used collective autoethnography to varying degrees in a transformative and generative way. Similarly, other non-traditional, collective research approaches, such as memory work, were used by Gavin et al. (2024) and a phenomenologically informed, relationally reflexive autoethnography by Korber et al. (2024) highlight how such approached nurtured a collective reflexivity, care and connection. Moreover, as Nordbäck et al.’s (2022) highlight, such research approaches allow an ontological freedom to move beyond individual storytelling and reflections about identity, place, space and resistance. Moreover, the use of collective autoethnography seemed to open up an ontological empathy, sensemaking and learning to care for each others’ vulnerabilities (often concealed), as much as our invulnerabilities (often revealed) (Prasad and Śliwa, 2022; Śliwa and Prasad, 2023). Through this collective becoming, could the articles and authors here open up a pathway to realise our collective agentic power to open up prefigurative, alternative collective stories, spaces and places.
Conclusion
Looking at the HE political and organisational landscape, we certainly could not be blamed for feeling unhopeful, but drawing from the narrative coming out of the Management Learning journal over the past few years, particularly in the last year, I would suggest that the academic response has been hopeful and encouraging from a theoretical, methodological and processual perspective. Resistance is framed here as an evolving incremental and grounded caring process, a productive process that ‘shapes ideas of politics and the potential for HE social transformation’ (Bloom, 2016: 6). What is yet to come is the influence on practice of such a coming together of academics. I would also suggest that senior management (not educated in HE organising) and politicians (who are certainly not educated in HE organising) need to draw from these hopeful (and constructive) responses and finally listen to those whose research and preoccupation is to learn from past organisational mistakes and suggest more inclusive, equitable and sustainable HE futures. Their message is clear from what has been written in Management Learning – as academics they are already reflexively crafting their relatively micro-HE practices together, working alongside a dominant macro ‘academic capitalism’ doxa, which has been asserted so much across liberal market economies such as the UK, Canada, Australia and the USA. Therefore, despite the institutional isomorphic pressure to be those elusive ‘excellent’ academic Uber drivers, many academics here (from early career to senior academics often working across disciplinary, institutional and national borders together) offer this real hope and activism to not only care for each other but also collectively ‘care with teeth’ – to politically chew away at the Performative University edifice, through the process of caring. They are using their relative freedom, to take back and assert their academic collective voice, craft reflexive, collaborative and caring spaces and times with each other, to move beyond only surviving and escaping individually and collectively. They have realised the significance of joining forces in the process of collectively using this freedom to assert other ways of being, so that freedom is more embedded culturally and politically – taking freedom forward. All too often collective cries of ‘bullshit’, ‘bullying’ and ‘bean-counting’ are not heard or ignored. It is my hope that in 5 years, the 60th anniversary of Management Learning reflects a collective set of diverse caring voices, practices and structural ‘bites’, which offers an alliteration worth listening to and caring for.
Could this happen? A notable and parting example is what appears quite hopeless – the article by Hartz (2023), who paints a dystopian picture of a UK university that decided on the spurious basis of being more ‘business-friendly’ to disinvest in the particular research areas of critical management studies and political economy, leading to compulsory redundancies. The picture Hartz (2023) paints highlights the challenge to taking freedom back and most crucially taking freedom forward when the managerial apparatus kicks in and stifles professional autonomy. ‘Targets and terror’ was live and kicking at every turn and justified through censorship, anti-intellectualism, regulation of time, space, information and process of academic isolationism. What the article outlines is a story imbued with incredulity by the author, around how senior management did not desist in their pursuit of their unitarist vision, even when their uniform, childlike justification was untenable. Instead, resistance (by the academics targeted here) within a ‘change programme’ was viewed through simplistic and ideological lenses as unhealthy, self-interested, intransigent – is it any surprise that any research group with ‘critical’ identified as its raison d’être was seen through this simplistic and biased judgemental lens. So you may ask, where is the hope in this story? Hartz (2023) states, ‘everybody knows that the boat is leaking’ and that ‘everybody knows the captain lied’, yet we (academics who care about our profession) still persevere in trying to keep the boat afloat, within a complicit and calculative resignation that somehow the boat is worth saving. Maybe what this case highlights is that critical scholars need to continue the journey to build our political capital beyond the confines of our role, discipline, institution and nation, to counter the exercises of power both within our institutions and through our relationships with national and global ranking, accreditations, publishers and the like. Could we see hope beyond the isolated sinking vessel and draw upon attempts from several academics within this journal, who are coming together, across institutions, nations, disciplines and career stages and building their own prefigurative HE future, that places academic scholarship, reflexive space, place and freedom back in the hands of those who genuinely care for restoring critical scholarship that is being squeezed out. Hartz (2023) concludes on a hopeful air himself, when he reflects on how this story is a lesson Foucault (1980: 99) would remind us of, calling for a greater awareness of the ‘‘infinitesimal mechanism’ of power, the petty but powerful managerial games and tactics’ to make us docile. Put in another way, Paolo Freire’s call for a collective consciousness raising, or as is suggested here part of ‘taking freedom back’. Of course the lessons learnt from the many articles mentioned in this article illustrate the significance of the infinitesimal collective mechanisms of agentic resistant power, emerging from this consciousness. The future challenge I would suggest is to then combine such micro-resistant practices to take freedom forward in systemically changing what we all know, the futility of the Performative University. I believe we are already on this journey, with practices that are seemingly innocuous to the managerial advocates, but have real bite collectively as they carry the legitimacy that only informed organisational and critical scholarship can provide. Could this moment be the beginning of a research journey for many of us, around exploring the resistant nuance, which recognises our hypocritical, neoliberal selves, while imagining and asserting something better? Could the articles reflected upon here provide encouragement for other academics to view care, identity, resistance and career as significant enough, as not only research areas that are personally rewarding to learn from, but as processually entangled in how we all could collectively shape an HE future, that we feel proud of as a public good, rather than disparaging of, as a poor copy of a private bad.
