Abstract
Marketization and managerialism in higher education and its negative implications have been extensively investigated (e.g. Chandler et al., 2002; Czarniawska and Genell, 2002; Kallio et al., 2015; Parker and Jary, 1995; Willmott, 1995). Wood’s book Universities and the Occult Rituals of the Corporate World however offers a fresh and illuminating perspective on the commodified and market-driven nature of the neoliberal university by analysing parallels between occult forms of magic and corporatized practices. Wood aims to shed new light on these developments by focusing on the rituals and enchantments that stem from faith in the extraordinary efficacy of the market and the powers of corporate managerialism and rationalisation.
Wood focuses specifically on the market-oriented restructuring of South African universities, but also highlights comparable developments since the 1990s in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia as branding, cost-cutting and quantifiable performance indicators became the norm. Wood argues that in seeking to imitate the corporate sphere, universities have become sites of the occult. The occult here is defined as ‘shadowy, sometimes perilous forms of magic’ (e.g. witchcraft or sorcery) based on ‘mysterious, esoteric knowledge that may call to mind aspects of the supernatural’ (p. 1). For Wood, one of the most powerful factors shaping the neoliberal transformation of universities is the faith in the magic of the market. Steeped in the realms of the occult, the market is continuously being constituted as an enchanted space of prosperity and success drawing on the elusive and the intangible that stem from a process of mystification and mythmaking. Wood argues that market forces are believed to have a transformative potency that is comparable to beliefs in the efficacy of supernatural agencies ‘in that both are the assurance of things unseen’ (p. 21). This includes the utopian idea that profit-making universities, where knowledge is converted into a marketable commodity, are synonymous with the public good as well as economic prosperity more widely.
Wood shows that the corporatization of academia has relied on this specific form of enchantment based on neoliberal folklore and mythmaking. The ‘fantasy’ is that by ‘imitating corporate models, imposing managerial chains of command and invoking the jargon’, mythologies and ethos of the corporate world, ‘a magical transformation can be wrought’ (p. 67). Thus, with marketization and managerial governance has come a new range of occult rituals intended to instil compliance, foster competition and inspire dread. This involves imitations of corporate practices, such as the ritual ordeals of performance measurement, monitoring and other ‘rites of degradation’ (p. 87) and ‘terrors of managerialism’ (p. 75) that create a climate of fear, stress, intimidation and coercion. Similarly to occult practices such as witchcraft and sorcery, these are harmful forms of magic based on imitations of the trappings and symbols of corporate power.
A key theme running through the book is the comparison between the mystique and rites of the corporatized sphere and the African spirit world of witchcraft and sorcery. The empirical examples from different parts of Africa are however not always very illuminating in relation to Wood’s analysis. What they appear to show is that contemporary African accounts of occult beings and forces often draw on capitalist imagery that constitutes the spirit world as similar to the marketplace. Thus, in various parts of Africa, occult and capitalist agencies have become increasingly intertwined in what Comaroff and Comaroff (1999) call occult economies where wealth is generated by way of magical means. While this is interesting in its own right, it is different from Wood’s core concern with the metaphorical parallels between occult and capitalist agencies. What is important about her argument is that capitalist agencies, like their occult equivalents, ‘seize possession of people’s bodies, productive capacities and sometimes even their existences’ (p. 28) and thus become all-pervasive and all-controlling forces. ‘Wealth-giving spirits’ and ‘corporate divinities’ have infiltrated and poisoned universities, rendering the discourse of managerialism ominous and enigmatic and reducing academics to ‘zombies’ performing endless bureaucratic rituals (p. 188). In a UK context where ever-increasing demands and the metrics of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) loom large in the academic workplace, Wood’s depiction cannot help but resonate. Entangled in the mazes of managerialism and commodification – having lost our ‘freedom of play’ (Derrida, 1983: 19) – we as academics are paying the price, as are our students. Indeed, it does not seem farfetched to argue, as Wood points to, that the damaging effects of market-driven academia are written all over our ‘possessed’ exhausted bodies and ‘distorted’ inner lives.
Wood concludes by asking: Can the malign spell be broken? Where are we to look for the liberatory possibilities? This she argues is closely connected with a broader need for resistance to free-market capitalism and the neoliberal economic approaches that perpetuate it. What we need in universities specifically is intensified organisational resistance by academics (cf. Anderson, 2008) and more effective collective opposition. Wood’s book is if anything a call to action – a call to foster a culture of dissent and derision in academia in order to resist our own ‘zombification’ (p. 192) that is enabled by submissiveness, conformity and compliance. Wood’s metaphorical comparison with the occult has its theoretical weaknesses and limitations, but her analysis contributes to the task of defamiliarization – rendering the corporatized academic milieu unfamiliar and strange. This in turn facilitates a heightened awareness of the perilous powers of the managerialist enchantments and rituals we have come to take for granted. Wood aims to open up new interpretative possibilities to help resist these occult neoliberal forces – forces that she claims, in no uncertain terms, will have us reduced to ‘zombies, corporate acolytes, rule-bound managerial minions and symbolic sacrifices to the divinities of the marketplace’ (p. 195).
However, while this argument may resonate, it suffers from a tendency to cast academics as victims of the occult, possessed and enslaved by capitalist agents who manipulate, enthral and hypnotise – just like the traditional ‘sorcerers’ they are compared with are assumed to do. One of the weaknesses of the analysis is that while Wood acknowledges the role of academic compliance, she leaves unanswered the theoretical question of how magic is constituted and how it becomes efficacious. Marcel Mauss (2001 [1950]) in his theory of magic emphasises that it is socially constituted – a product of collective beliefs and activities – not something done to people. Thus, we are all active participants in the making of the occult forms of magic that Wood shows to be so prevalent in our shared academic milieu. The complex challenge we face is how we might instead become active participants in the unmaking of these collective forces.
