Contextualizing capitalism in academia: How capitalist and feudalist organizing principles reinforce each other at Polish universities

Abstract

In this paper, we show how capitalism and feudalism reinforce each other to enable the former’s success in the higher education context. In this regard, Polish universities are an interesting case due to Poland’s capitalist shock therapy in the 1990s, its Western European membership in the European Union in the 2000s and due to recent reforms intended to modernize Polish academia. Based on 36 interviews with Polish early career academics from urban universities with experience working in watchdogs of higher education, we examine respondents’ perspectives on the current capitalist reforms. They treat ongoing changes as a solution for the problems experienced and defined as “feudal”: political labeling, abuse of power and discrimination against women. Understanding capitalism and feudalism through their organizing principles, the main contribution of this study is that it demonstrates how capitalist organizing principles fix existing feudalist organizing principles to flourish in Polish university. Hence, it is difficult for early career academics to recognize that capitalist organizing principles are in fact reinforcing rather than eliminating (as the advocates of capitalist reforms often claim) feudal problems in Polish academia.

Keywords

Abuse of power capitalism discrimination against women early career academics feudalism Poland political labeling university

Introduction

From a historical perspective, the university has been primarily associated with academic freedom in the pursuit of gaining scientifically based knowledge through research and education (post-truth has not yet crushed this association, see: Fuller, 2018). The freedom for academics to formulate problems and discuss them in classrooms, to use different theories and methods, and to formulate independent conclusions are inscribed into the fundaments of the organization of academia. Freedom in this sense is connected to autonomy vis-à-vis different institutions and organizations, which is recognized internationally (e.g. on September 18, 1988, 388 university rectors signed the Magna Charta Universitatum regarding the “principles of academic freedom and institutional autonomy as a guideline for good governance and self-understanding of universities in the future.” The Charta was updated in 2020 and has now been signed by 904 universities in 88 countries; Magna Charta, n.d).

Because of its association with freedom and autonomy, there is a social expectation that the university will serve as a guardian of progress and justice—a force for good steering society toward a better future. At the same time, however, historical accounts and present debates reveal that this is a rather difficult expectation to fulfill (see, e.g. Horkheimer, 1985; Readings, 1996; Special Issue “Performative University” in Management Learning, 2020). It seems as if the university, its people, and its research and education, are in many ways like other parts of society—facing power struggles, equality problems, absenteeism and careerism, abuse and marginalization, ecological and human exploitation, and so on. The university is thus a place where the ordinary or mundane traits and processes found everywhere in society interfere with academic freedom and autonomy. Consequently, the university is directly affected by societal changes.

Recent studies have shown how capitalist reforms have strengthened functional hierarchy, centralized power and increased the unequal distribution of resources at universities (Bottrell and Manathunga, 2019; Fleming, 2021; Wright and Shore, 2017). Researchers have also investigated how academic excellence, competition, and performance measurement systems have not only negatively affected academic freedom and autonomy but also academics via bullying, stress, loss of meaning or precarious work conditions (see: Loveday, 2018; Maisuria and Helmes, 2020; Moss and Mahmoudi, 2021; Warren, 2017; Zawadzki and Jensen, 2020). Although these reports have strong academic quality and their results are urgently needed (as a counternarrative vis-á-vis the dominant neoliberal narrative on how to organize, or rather manage, the university), there is an important drawback; in their critiques of the so-called neoliberal turn, many authors have appeared to overemphasize similarities at the expense of what we call particularities among different countries and their universities.

As Piketty (2014, 2020) has pointed out, countries have, throughout the history of capitalism, had different conditions from which to make choices, and the choices made have also differed. “Old” capitalist countries (such as the United Kingdom, the USA and France) and newer ones (India, Brazil, Poland) share similarities, but these similarities must not be overemphasized. By emphasizing capitalism rather than neoliberalism, following Piketty, the understanding of capitalism in this study is that for capitalism to spread, it must appropriate, or “fix,” the “place” where it seeks to take root and flourish. From this starting point, capitalism is not treated as homogenous but rather as a divergent phenomenon that will empirically realize itself in different ways due to differences in people, customs, religion, climate and geography, economic policy and socioeconomic conditions, and the degree of unionization in different places. In other words, capitalism’s ability to fix different areas also depends on how it adapts itself to responses in targeted places (see: Harvey, 2001, 2018).

Universities have become the central nodes of contemporary capitalism (Hall, 2021; Heller, 2016), as they are key to succeeding in turning “dead capital,” that is, what is currently not being exploited by capitalism, into useful units for the accumulation of capital. For universities to be used for this purpose, it follows that academic labor must also be fixed; it needs to be turned into capitalist units. In this sense, as Szadkowski and Krzeski (2019, p. 464) observe, “narratives on the capitalist crisis of the modern university that ignore how capital operates within the sector are not only analytically inadequate but also politically ineffective.”

To some extent, accounts of capitalism and universities have emphasized that capitalism has managed to fix universities across a diverse range of regions in the world (Münch, 2014; Roggero, 2011; Winn, 2015). Concerning Western Europe, it has been observed that the capitalistic fix works in Sweden, especially within its historical, but diminishing, idea and practice of a mixed economy (Agnafors, 2017), complements conservative liberalism and the so-called third wave in UK (Collini, 2012; Parker, 2014); capitalist fix is also the case in post-Franco Spain (Villar-Aguilés and Obiol-Francés, 2022). However, overall, there is a lack of studies that pay closer attention to what happens “on the ground” as capitalism attempts to fix universities in different places.

This paper concerns the case of Poland and Polish universities. The country of Poland is an important case regarding capitalism’s spatial fixing within universities due to its postsocialist capitalistic transformation in the 1990s (Ghodsee and Orenstein, 2021; Ost, 2006), its Western European membership in the EU in the 2000s as well as due to recent reforms intended to modernize Polish higher education (Waligóra and Górski, 2022). The starting point is that capitalism has been able to fix Poland (for a description of the process in the nineties, see Klein, 2008; for a recent statistical account, see Piketty, 2020), and the research problem is formulated as follows: How does capitalism manage to fix Polish universities?

The research problem and the composition of this article seem to indicate the use of a deductive approach. However, while the style of this text is, at least to some extent, deductive, the research process was inductive. The actual research process did not begin by focusing on the phenomenon of capitalism and its spatial fix in relation to feudalism; it began as a project on the workplace problems stemming from historical particularities at Polish universities and their ongoing “westernization” (in terms of academic excellence, competition, and performance measurement systems), as well as how this mix has interfered with academic freedom and autonomy in teaching and research. As the project evolved, the need to understand the particular historical feudalist nature of Poland and Polish universities and its relation to the capitalist, ongoing “westernization” became evident.

In the following section, we provide contextual background for Poland’s higher education and universities, which is necessary to understand the particular features of Polish universities. Thereafter, we discuss how previous studies have examined contemporary capitalism and its relation to universities and, more particularly, the Polish academic context, focusing on feudalism. Next, we turn to the method used for this study, after which we describe our case. Finally, the paper concludes with an analysis and discussion.

Poland and Polish universities after 1989

After 1989, when a peaceful democratic revolution occurred in Poland, persons who were state “experts” on communism on one day became “experts” on capitalism on another (Bernhard, 1993). Aided by “the basic idea that markets determined value” (Connelly, 2020: 768), the capitalist liberalization of Poland was the most rapid among all those in post-Soviet countries (the “shock doctrine,” Klein, 2008, was led by the former Communist Party member, Leszek Balcerowicz, supported by USA neoliberal advisor, Jeffrey Sachs; for a discussion about the role of western experts in postcommunist Poland, see: Kostera, 1995). The state was rapidly selling its state-owned industries to private (often foreign) investors, abandoning the planning and subsidization of the economy while refusing guarantee prices (Dunn, 2004). Many people lost their jobs and the inequalities between beneficiaries and “losers” of “shock therapy” became quickly enormous (see: Ghodsee and Orenstein, 2021).

In this new post-Soviet context, while universities were poorly equipped in terms of infrastructure and staff, the new government did not financially support academia, claiming it had other, more important duties related to the economic transformation of the country (Giza, 2021). If Polish universities before capitalist transformation were subjected to the supervision of the communistic state, after 1989 they were subjected to chaotically implemented reforms inspired by New Public Management (Broucker and De Wit, 2015), including the commercialization of teaching, the possibility of running private schools, the distribution of budget money based on quasi-auditing culture and accountability and the decentralization of managerial hierarchies (HE acts in 90s).

Amidst this unregulated context, however, the population of students rose (the number of students increased from 403,824 students in 1990 to 1,953,832 students at the peak of enrollment in 2006; see Szadkowski, 2021: 4), a trend supported by the privatization of universities. Student fees (private schools and commercial study programs at public universities) and state subsidies of enrollment (public universities—free tuition in public institutions is guaranteed by the Polish Constitution from 1997) came to comprise the main economic regulator and controlling mechanism in Polish Higher Education. In fact, as Stankiewicz and Ostrowicka (2020: 63) observe, “In the years 1990–2001, the system was liberal or even anarchic in the sense that neither the state nor any industry organizations were able to build any institutional framework for supervision of organizations belonging to the HE sector, or over their employees or students.” Without supervision from the state, Polish higher education became laissez-faire (one of the strongest in Europe, Dobbins, 2009), and lacking a considerable increase in scholars and financial support, it faced increased problems with overwork and multiple job holding (Stankiewicz, 2018).

During the first decade of the 21st century, demographic decline affected universities, which started losing money via state subsidies for student enrollment, and the government expenditure on higher education (GDP) decreased (see: Higher Education Institutions and Their Finances, 2011). Since the financial algorithm for public universities was related to their number of students, low-paid teaching positions (often part time, precarious, financed from grants) increased. These low-paid positions were occupied mostly by early career academics (ECA): master and doctoral students and so-called junior scholars with doctoral degrees, affected negatively by ongoing changes (see Wagner, 2011; Zawadzki, 2017). Their low salaries forced ECAs to mass-engage in noncommercial and commercial teaching, and thus the conditions for conducting research were severely limited.

In 2004, Poland became a full member of the European Union, and in 2005, it entered the European Economic and Monetary Union. Poland joined not only West European but also North Atlantic institutions: a process “without precedent in the regions’ history” (Connelly, 2020: 763). Consequently, Polish universities underwent an adaptation to international standards (primarily European Union University Education requirements), whereby the new Higher Education Acts implemented between 2005 and 2018 primarily focused on the re-engagement of the state with shaping the politics of higher education (Donina and Jaworska, 2022). A framework for competition among academics was introduced, and new institutions distributing grants were created. Additionally, academic excellence, based on budget allocations that followed research achievements, was implemented, increasing the number of precarious positions at the expense of permanent employment and narrowing the academic career path to research grants and publications (and exposure to the constantly revised list of journals with points defined by the Ministry of Higher Education). As Stankiewicz and Ostrowicka (2020: 71) observe, “This new social agreement between the state and the university, although it did not formally suspend the autonomy of the milieu, made it possible for the ministry to redefine the criteria for academic success and failure, as well as to determine their financial, legal, and institutional conditions.” Due to considerable resistance (however, rather internal and not manifested in public protests) to such changes, which were perceived by academics as an attack on academic collegiality (Shaw, 2019), several watchdogs were formed by students and scholars outside universities to examine Polish higher education as well as the ongoing reforms (see the section on Methodology below, where we explain our selection of participants).

During the empirical collection for this study (from 2017 to 2018), the new Higher Education Act (called the “Constitution for Science” or Act 2.0/Law 2.0; see: Act of 20 July 2018) was discussed and acknowledged in Polish higher education (implementation started from October 2020). This Act mainly addresses the low international recognition of Polish research, including a low number of publications in leading journals, by proposing further solutions to allow Polish academic institutions to become “world-class universities.” The Act discusses the following: competition for funds from external sources; parametrical evaluation of research performance with a strong emphasis on international journal ranking lists; cooperation with socioeconomic environment; strengthening of the power of university rectors; and intensifying the mechanisms of university accountability to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education (see: Jelonek and Mazur, 2020). In June 2018, the planned changes caused students to protest the loss of academic autonomy (this was the first nationwide student protest since 1989), but most scholars as well as their universities’ governments stayed silent (Pacewicz, 2018).

The growing de-democratization of Polish universities (mainly, placing more power in the hands of rectors at the expense of academic collegiality while placing more emphasis on competitiveness than academic collaboration) through the Higher Education Acts has opened the way for ideological interventions (see: Bothwell, 2020). Minister of Higher Education Jarosław Gowin (since 2015)—selected by the Law and Justice conservative and nationalist party with radically Catholic orientation (in coalition between 2005 and 2007; from 2015 as independent party ruling Poland)—influenced the changes made in the Polish Higher Education based on religious ideologization (since 2020, this has continued under the new Minister of Higher Education Przemysław Czarnek, see: Kosc, 2022). Therefore, some research grant programs in the humanities and social sciences founded on nationalistic and Catholic values have received funding at the expense of more progressive research (Leszczyński, 2019). Antileftist propaganda has increased, as has direct police intervention; for example, during a scientific conference on Marx in May 2018, the police investigated whether the conference was promoting totalitarianism (Woleński, 2018). Gowin also declared his intent to eliminate all LGBTQ + academic journals (Dziennik.pl, 2015) and openly supported professors who presented homophobic statements (Onet.pl, 2019; Przemysław Czarnek, professor at the Catholic University of Lublin, defined LGBTQ + people as deviants, comparing them to Nazis, Interia.pl, 2020).¹

The rise of nationalism and sectarian Catholicism in Poland has gone hand in hand with that of antisemitism, which—despite the efforts of historians to rework the difficult past of Polish-Jewish relationships (see, e.g. Gross, 2001; Tokarska-Bakir, 2017)—is still strong in Polish society (EU Survey, 2018). The antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews invented and popularized communism is very common, as is an antisemitic image of Jewish international bankers killing postsocialist populations (see: Ghodsee and Orenstein, 2021). Antisemitism also affects Polish universities; for example, it drove the violent activity of neofascist groups, who interrupted Zygmunt Bauman’s (Polish Jew) lectures and burned his image in public spaces while campaigning for Poland’s exit from the EU and organized violent actions during university debates on the role of Poles in the Holocaust (see: Wagner, 2019, 2020). These, together with other examples, resemble the antisemitic state pogrom organized in 1968 by nationalists in People’s Poland, when approximately 13,000 Polish Jews had to leave the country (Eisler, 2006) and were replaced by “proper Poles”; at that time, as Wagner (2020) observes, many Polish scholars “saw their careers advance rapidly” (p. 371).

Regarding the empirical analysis presented below, it is also worth mentioning that despite the intensive “westernization” of Polish higher education since 1989, it is still essential to earn a habilitation degree (scientific grade established in Prussian universities at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries) at Polish universities, which can be done after obtaining a doctoral degree but before a professorship title. Receiving a habilitation degree is dependent on the review of the academic achievements of applicants, including their publication of monographs or a series of journal papers or their realization of an original (technological or art) project. Habilitation is defined in Polish higher education as necessary to become an autonomous scholar who gets a formal right to supervise doctoral students (as a main supervisor), to review doctoral dissertations or to become a regular member of the Faculty Council; in practice, it is often the only way to secure permanent employment and a salary increase. Life at a university can also be secured, at least temporarily, by obtaining research grants or by leaving the country to find an academic position abroad (see Wagner, 2011).²

Capitalist organizing principles and feudalist organizing principles

Capitalism and feudalism are, of course, two enormous concepts. As we have highlighted in the introduction concerning capitalism, they need to be contextualized to reveal the relevant differences and nuances in the process of spatial fixing. We therefore reduce capitalism to what we call capitalist organizing principles. Given that we explore feudalism with the same level of analysis, we also reduce it to feudalist organizing principles. This allows us to treat both concepts symmetrically.

Research has shown how universities have been intensively reformed through solutions derived from capitalist organizing principles (Fleming, 2021; Hall, 2018, 2021), which might, or might not, contain the same empirical phenomena as have been reported by critical studies on neoliberalization (see Bacevic, 2018; Bottrell and Manathunga, 2019; Ergöl and Coşar, 2017). Such approaches include, for example, a corporate management style (Parker, 2011), a parameterization and quantitative evaluation of academic work (Strathern, 2000), a control of resources (reducing general expenditures, i.e. intensifying the academic work and increasingly directing funds to “needed” areas of teaching and research, Kallio and Kallio, 2014), the appointment of the “right” people (from business or politics) on university boards, the unbundling of higher education (e.g. separation of teaching from research, see: McCowan, 2017), the strengthening of a “top-down” hierarchy, increased pressure to take part in the “publish-or-perish” game, competition for the resources from research grants (Naidoo, 2018) and ensuring that the education of students produces “pro-capitalist, effective workers” skills’ (Hill, 2004: 39; see: Alvesson, 2013; Giroux, 2014).

Feudalism, on the other hand, has been understood as a method of governance (Strayer and Coulborn, 1956) or sociopolitical and economic order (Bloch, 2014) prevalent in Western Europe during the Middle Ages (c. 900–1500), based on the exchange of services between lords and vassals (see Chilvers, 2020; Roach, 2015). Feudalism is characterized by feudal tenure, a system of land holding based on fiefs or benefices and grounded on “ties of dependence” (Bloch, 2014). It rests on the exercise of authority and control of the vassals’ labor and lives by the “feudal lords” (Davies, 1960). Feudal lords grant or deny support and protection for the vassals, who swear loyalty to their masters and pay tribute in goods and services in exchange for benefits (Bloch, 2014). A consequence of this feudo-vassalic contract is the limited autonomy of the vassals and their strong dependency on the will of the feudal lords.

Translating feudal characteristics into feudal organizing principles in the university context it is worth to observe, that historically the organization of university was based on a traditional hierarchies and professional power of academics. Such a system includes feudal social relationships: it rests on the authority of established scholars deciding about the distribution of resources, providing mentorship for less experienced academics and expecting loyalty from them in exchange of protection and career support. Such a mutual obligation between junior and senior scholars is based on strong ties of honor, and the newcomers need to go through a long and intensive process of enculturation to be finally accepted by the power holders (Reitz, 2017: 875–876). The power asymmetries that arise due to feudal principles at universities, lead to unfree labor and exploitation of people, giving the privileged groups a possibility to maximize revenues, privileges and benefits (such as academic achievements) outside the pressure of competition (see Neckel, 2020).

Regarding capitalist organizing principles, their role in “fixing” universities and their relation to feudalism at universities, scholars such as Reitz (2017) and Wieczorek et al. (2017) have reported on the development of corporate “academic oligarchies” (Schulze-Cleven et al., 2017: 798) based on top-down and autocratic approaches to decision making, together with the erosion of collegiality and democracy. Such approaches are an important indication that the contemporary university reformed through capitalist organizing principles is not much different than feudal tenure “in terms of governance and decision-making structures and behavior” (Bergami, 2019: 38). In this sense, universities can be reasonably understood “in terms of transactions and hierarchical dependencies characterized by a medieval feudal order” (Holligan, 2011: 58). As Reitz observes, capitalist organizing principles transform universities into “neo-feudal structures” in which “quasi-markets only change the justifying procedures or produce a shift from mere feudal dependency to courtly status competition” (Reitz, 2017: 876).

Similar feudal tendencies are exemplified by the concentration of power in the hands of state ministries of higher education who—often autocratically and with humble acceptance from the university management—decide on higher education reforms and resource allocation (Bergami, 2019). Moreover, feudalist organizing principles go hand in hand with both the government and university management defining scholars as easily disposable and manageable economic capital (rather than as intellectual labor, Hall, 2018). As in the coercive regime under the feudal social order, contemporary academics’ agency is limited through transformation into low-skilled and often precarious workers who are easily replaced by less costly labor or technology (Gill and Pratt, 2008).

Feudal tendencies seem to be even more prevalent at Polish universities than those in other Western European countries due to the specific role of feudalism in the history of Poland. As some social scientists and historians have recently observed (Leszczyński, 2020; Pobłocki, 2021; Sowa, 2011), during the Middle Ages, Polish society was based on farm relationships and serfdom, with the gentry functioning as the most powerful social group (much more powerful than the king and bourgeoise) and exploiting peasants to an extreme level. Thus, it is difficult to demonstrate that the “contract” between feudal lords (gentry) and vassals (peasants) was based—as in the classical feudal relations visible in Western European countries (Braudel, 1967; Piketty, 2014)—on mutual obligations and protection. It was, instead, a slave system (compared to the Southern part of the US during the Civil War) that devastated the state economy, made Poland a peripheral country economically and delayed the development of capitalism (see Kula, 1976). The latter emerged only after the partitions of Poland in the 18th century.

One of the consequences of the peripheral status of Poland, as well as the weak status of its middle class and king, was strong control over its universities by the Catholic Church (see: Longworth, 1997; Stankiewicz, 2018). The mentality that took root due to this influence, as well as due to exploitation and subjugation as main features of quasi-slavery society was a feudal mindset, which goes hand in hand with the acceptance of an autocratic management style, opportunism, nepotism and putting the interests of one’s own informal network before the interests of one’s organization (see: Hryniewicz, 2007). These characteristics, according to some researchers, have always been part of the Polish academic culture (Connelly, 2000; Finkielsztein, 2022; Kościelniak, 2015; Kowzan et al., 2016; Szwabowski, 2019; Wagner, 2011; Zawadzki, 2017).

Studies about capitalist organizing principles in the university have thus reported that universities have developed some feudalistic characteristics, but these studies appear to rule out the possibility that feudalist organizing principles—for example, at Polish universities—were already present. However, if such feudalist organizing principles were actually present before the entrance of capitalist organizing principles in our case, this might imply that these feudalist organizing principles have been strengthened by capitalist organizing principles (cf. Harvey, 2018). Moreover, feudalist organizing principles, in turn, might strengthen capitalist organizing principles. This is a stark contrast to how capitalism and feudalism are usually understood—as deeply antagonistic (for an example of defining capitalism as a direct solution for feudal problems in higher education, see Aubert et al., 2019).³

Methodology

Studying early career academics

Although recent reforms (neoliberal or capitalist) also impact more experienced academics (Knights and Clarke, 2014; Moriarty, 2019), ECAs (in the early stages of their career, see Sutherland and Taylor, 2011) are especially vulnerable. Research has reported that ECA identities can be politicized by their appropriation of an uncertainty sphere (Archer, 2008; Lucas, 2006). Consequently, the subservience of ECAs is intensive in a university system that “seeks to stifle any thought that might jeopardize the academy’s status” (Maisuria and Helmes, 2020: 46).

Furthermore, it has been shown that more limited access to resources implies that ECAs must “either devise more efficient cultivation techniques or make more effort with fewer resources” (Holligan, 2011: 63). Cultivation means working within the sphere of academic competition to secure careers and resources, which promotes a sense of uncertainty among ECAs (Prasad, 2013; Ratle et al., 2020), not to mention the constant presence of less qualified and less costly scholars who are willing to comply with heavy workloads, precarious contracts and a lack of basic employment rights (Bataille et al., 2017). ECAs are thus vulnerable to exploitation (Robinson et al., 2017) and in danger of developing an acceptance of conformist attitudes regarding the decisions and views of academics who know how to play the game (Bristow et al., 2017; Eddy and Gaston-Gayles, 2008).

Selection of participants

The selection of participants was purposeful; we chose Polish ECAs working and/or studying at state-owned Polish universities located in major cities. Thirty-six (N = 36; 18 male and 18 female, between 24 and 53 years old) in-depth interviews were conducted between 2017 and 2018. A total of 31 participants were working/studying in the social sciences/humanities and 5 in the natural sciences.

Notably, the term “early career academic” is not strictly defined in the literature; it usually includes doctoral students as well as academics within a maximum of 7 years since obtaining a permanent academic position (Sutherland et al., 2013). However, we agree with Bosanquet et al. (2017) that the “successful transition into academia begins during postgraduate study” (p. 891), so in our sample, we decided to include final-year master’s students. As the interviews revealed, all of them were planning to join doctoral study programs. Moreover, at Polish universities, it is common to “use” master’s students in parts of what could be considered regular academic work (teaching, writing academic texts, including research papers). The perspective of this group is important, as it allows the identification of the influence of capitalist organizing principles and how the university is fixed during the prestage of an academic career (see Austin, 2002). As ECAs (junior academics holding doctoral degrees, doctoral students and master students) are also likely to be employed through short-term contracts, the participants included those with temporary contracts as well as those with other types of contracts.

Finally, we followed the conventional distinction drawn between ECAs and senior scholars in Poland, in which becoming an “independent” and senior scholar—in terms of, for example, having the possibility to obtain permanent employment, taking the role of supervisor of doctoral students or reviewer of doctoral dissertations or, even more importantly, becoming informally recognized as a “serious” scholar by the academic community—equals obtaining a habilitation degree (explained above in the section “Poland and Polish universities after 1989”; see also: Zawadzki, 2017). Thus, five interviews were conducted with participants who had recently received their habilitation and who provided a “just recently completed” experience.

In total, the study included doctoral degree holders (N = 16), doctoral students (N = 7), master’s students (N = 8) and habilitation holders (N = 5). The first interviewees were approached through personal networks, and they then shared their contacts with other participants. The selection of ECAs at the universities was also strategically targeted so that all participants had experience with involvement (in the past or at the time of the interview) in social movements, functioning as “watchdogs” of Polish higher education (see the section “Poland and Polish universities after 1989”). The rationale for this selection was based on the assumption that this group had an interest in and a reflexive capacity regarding the pertinent issues framed within this project (freedom and autonomy in teaching and research) and that they would therefore dare to speak.

Three of the interviewed doctoral degree holders decided to leave academia shortly before their interview. We have chosen not only to exclude the real names of respondents in this paper but also to eliminate any descriptions that could reveal the particular workplaces of the interviewees or what kind of watchdogging they were involved with. We understand that this impairs the full contextual understanding that we argue is necessary, but the sensitive nature of the conditions that shape scholars’ work requires the protection of anonymity and confidentiality.

A narrative approach

This study is based on in depth, nonstandardized interviews and is justified by the need to build trust relationships with participants (Jensen and Sandström, 2016). It adopts a narrative approach to management (Czarniawska, 2004), according to which organizations are sites for the continuous construction of narratives by people who ascribe meaning to their actions who can, through conversations with researchers, consciously and sensitively give voice to their experiences and what they mean in relation to the research interest presented to them. Accordingly, we argue that the participants are treated as qualified ethnographers who are capable of making sense of their workplaces (Jensen and Sandström, 2020). As narrative researchers, we do not strive for empirical generalization but instead to give voice to how people experience life at work.

Although the participants, due to their activities as watchdogs of higher education, are capable of engaging with alternative networks to make sense of their harmful experiences in academia (Monk and McKay, 2017), they fail to realize that capitalist and feudalist organizing principles have been working in tandem (affecting but also reinforcing each other). This, we argue, is not the result of ethnographic weakness among the participants. Rather, our case not only shows how capitalism can fix a place but also how difficult it is to discover and to rationalize what happens when capitalism turns “dead capital” into useful units in the accumulation of capital.

In the interviews, three main areas were targeted: the situation in which ECAs find themselves; how they relate to and experience academic labor; and in what ways they try to mitigate, or even resist, the current reforms taking place. Interviews took an average of approximately 1 hour, with the explicitly stated attempt to allow for empathy and joint reflection (Gabriel, 2015; Way et al., 2015). After the interviews, we worked narratively with the data—finding themes and then replotting them—by staying close to the story as it unfolded in each dialog between researcher and participant (Jensen and Sandström, 2016). Two cycles of coding were completed. First, the interviews were marked with inductively emerging sets of subthemes (e.g. academic labor, discrimination, career advancement, “freedom” and autonomy in teaching and research) to prepare them for more detailed coding. Second, as we started to relate the subthemes, two main themes were identified: the appreciation of capitalist organizing principles and the criticism of feudalist organizing principles.

These two main themes, presented below in the empirical case section, are what we understand to be those with which the participants engaged the most through emotional investment, intensity, depth, and repetition (Thanem and Knights, 2019; Thanem and Wallenberg, 2021). Regarding capitalist organizing principles, the participants related these with the freedom and autonomy to produce knowledge and be acknowledged for it, so long as certain standardized criteria were met. Regarding feudalist organizing principles, the participants related these to existing power structures and hierarchies and how they could be punished for acting autonomously and enacting academic freedom. However, the participants, as noted earlier, were not able to realize that capitalist and feudal organizing principles could act in tandem. While we were prepared for the participants’ negative evaluation of feudalist traits in the organizing of their workplace, we were quite taken aback by their general positiveness toward capitalist organizing principles. Even though we sought rival explanations (Antin et al., 2015) that would, if not counter, at least nuance such appreciation of capitalist organizing principles, this general, and overall, positive attitude was maintained throughout the interviews.

Empirical case

Capitalist organizing principles

When the ECAs involved in this study narrate their lives at university, they explicitly relate them to the modernization of universities—primarily to performance management systems. They discuss how they, through performance management, identify a chance for “normality” and for taking back control of their labor once they are successful in fulfilling the requirements. As one of the female habilitation holders observes,

The current reforms were beneficial for me, you know; as a young doctor, I was able to see that I have a real influence on what is going on with me; that my work, and the effects of my work, define me, not arbitrary decisions or other factors (Monika).

ECAs show a strong willingness to follow the “rules of the game”: “If there are quality standards imposed, I need to show that I am able to fulfill them” (Piotr, male doctoral degree holder). In the stories, ECAs rotate between talking about “them-us-we” and “me-myself-I.” This tension is found throughout the interviews but is skewed toward “me-myself-I”; in relation to “them-us-we,” competition is more essential to their stories than joint collaborations: “When no one is working, I try to work; I can get a competitive advantage over the rest in this way—my attitude is very rivalry-oriented” (Marek, male doctoral degree holder).

To be successful, it is essential to publish in internationally renowned peer-reviewed journals and to secure research grants:

A fat grant would be a great bargaining card, I would secure my career (Sebastian, male doctoral student).

Thanks to getting a research grant, I would be able to win a good position at a prestigious university (Robert, male doctoral degree holder).

The best guarantees of security at universities are strong publications and research grants. [. . .] It doesn’t really matter if I like it or not, but research grants are those elements that describe our reality, and it is not really possible to have an academic career in Poland without being engaged in the research grant system (Adam, male doctoral student).

Furthermore, ECAs perceive research grants and publications as a chance to finally establish fairer labor processes at universities:

Research grants are a positive outcome of reform, giving a chance for normality to people who would probably not have a chance for academic work through regular recruitment and competition due to nepotism (Karina, female doctoral degree holder).

The best way to secure your academic position is to cumulate your achievements in your CV. For many years I was collecting research grants and publications, you know, when you get one grant, then it is easier to get another one (Joanna, female doctoral degree holder).

Continuing the rotation between “them-us-we” and “me-myself-I,” ECAs normalize the milieu of “cutthroat competition” as necessary to a fair and objective game:

I am a part of a very strong group that brings a lion’s share of money to the faculty; I fulfil all of the obligations, and I am an editor in two journals (. . .). I really don’t like tight, stuffy systems based solely on the inflated ego of some academic warlords (. . .). And if those competition-based changes would eliminate me from academia—because I wouldn’t be able to follow this tempo, I would leave with those people who have professors’ titles but who only published a couple of chapters or monographs printed in their printing houses, and who know nothing about science—I would be satisfied (Karol, male doctoral degree holder).

Competition in academia makes perfect sense to me, research grants give a possibility for normal functioning (Anna, female habilitation holder).

Quite harshly, those who do not demonstrate excellent academic achievements are described as “small” and deserving of punishment:

No one received any research grant in our department; nothing like that, not even a grant from NCN [National Science Centre] or even the smallest one, right? (. . .) They behave as small people (Anita, female doctoral degree holder).

I think that poor academics without achievements should be hit and eliminated by the system (Monika, female habilitation holder).

Since I have my own research grant, the others can eat my dust (Sara, female doctoral degree holder).

The ECAs talk about their potential to “have a voice”; they argue that it is within this competitive environment that they have a chance to raise their voices. The possibility of competing for research funding is perceived as a chance to finally conduct critical research:

My research on gender studies was always ridiculed and embarrassing for the university, but then a possibility to compete for research grants from the European Union appeared, and my research received recognition (Barbara, female doctoral degree holder).

Academic achievements, that is, research grants and highly ranked publications, work as both a legitimization and a justification for having a critical stance toward the university:

The most efficient way to criticize the system is to win the game and then to say that you do not take part in [the flaws in the systems] (. . .) To be able to win, you need to be the best. If you do something the others do not like, but at the end of the day you publish an article in a highly ranked journal, then the perception is different, and you satisfy the conservatives (Marek, male doctoral degree holder).

At the same time, there is a present awareness that being critical will cause some trouble in attaining academic achievements:

If I publicly criticize the Minister [of Higher Education] in the press, on this or that side, I am also aware that it will make it difficult for me to get habilitation or research grants (Adam, male doctoral student).

The main narrative related by ECAs is that the only way (together with obtaining research grants and publishing in top publications) to be secure is to get a habilitation, a claim that is supported by the habilitation holders in the study, whose work reality changed dramatically. One woman who already has her habilitation says, “You become human only when you get a habilitation” (Anna). This perspective on habilitation as the Holy Grail of job security is shared by doctoral students and doctoral degree holders as well. A male doctoral degree holder, when asked about his feelings about security and safety at his university, says, “The moment after getting a habilitation, when you have a safe position, is the moment when no one can hurt you” (Karol).

As evidenced by these statements, ECAs express the need to successfully fulfill the requirements of a performance management system, to survive academic competition and, finally, to be able to obtain a habilitation. They also perceive that the reforms of universities and their university’s work with “more modern systems” result in their work and career being more “objectively” evaluated and that there is fairness in work processes.

Feudalist organizing principles

Without exception, the interviewed ECAs crave to be “modern” and part of the “West,” and for them, their university is important to this desire: “We are closer to Western universities than to universities in small Polish cities” (Anna, female habilitation holder). Furthermore, and again without exception, ECAs positively view Poland’s membership in the EU and the changes made after 1989, which affected the universities: “Capitalism is better than feudalism; it is a step forward (. . .). Through competition and academic capitalism, you can push through; you can reach the standards of Western science” (Karol, male doctoral degree holder).

Feudalism is perceived as the main problem in Polish academia: it is said that it generates many pathologies. The basic problem with feudal organizing principles is related to their dehumanizing actions:

The Polish university is feudal; it is necessary to keep people on the ground floor and tell them how shitty their work is to not give them the opportunity to look up. You know, you need to be proud for revolution, but here people rather cling to the side, to not sink (Magdalena, female habilitation holder).

One of the prevailing aspects of undignifying actions mentioned by ECAs are work expectations without appropriate remuneration: “In a feudal relationship you get nothing, but everything is expected from you” (Karol, male doctoral degree holder).

Dissent with feudal academic principles concerns the power that senior scholars have, for example, over the career promotions of ECAs, which seems a mandatory and “obvious” part of universities, even to persons who do not—yet—belong to a faculty:

What discourages me the most is the promotion of mediocrity, of people who have friends in high places (Julia, female master’s student).

I do not like academia when you need to walk on your knees in front of supervisor, where you need to subordinate yourself to university administration because university has a right to do whatever it wants with the students (. . .). We shouldn’t agree to be treated like cannon fodder that generate financial income for the Ministry (Marta, female master’s student).

This feudal subordination is also a problem for those already in the system:

I work in a faculty that is very Byzantine, and it means that when someone is a head [of department] and he has a higher degree, then he has power over someone else’s academic promotion, so it is not possible to tell him that he is doing something wrong. (. . .) Relationships are very feudal; title-mania is bothersome (Sara, female doctoral degree holder).

ECAs tell us that they have regularly been told by senior scholars that they need to follow suit and work for free:

During recruitment talks, I was told that it is a sort of scandal that I haven’t published anything for the last two years—even though I haven’t been working during that time at university, being on maternity leave (. . .). This is exploitation; the research and didactic passion is being used, and people must sacrifice themselves and work for free in order to reach this mythical career. They are told that at one point in time, they will earn money for sure—now, however, they only need to show that they are the appropriate candidates for being hired at a university (Karolina, female doctoral degree holder).

Exploitation, as observed by another ECA, goes hand in hand with unethical behaviors related to advancing the careers of senior scholars:

A head of department forced younger academics to add her name to publications, to research grants applications, even if she did nothing; younger academics were conducting teaching instead of her, but it was she who got money for this; all of those unethical actions, however, were being treated by all as a natural obligation (Ewelina, female doctoral degree holder).

The expectation of and noted by ECAs is to pass a loyalty test. Otherwise, the chances of securing permanent employment or even obtaining a part-time job are limited. Faithful and obedient people are the most “precious resource,” and in the stories, supervisors primarily function as students’ patrons, promising a realization of their career goals (the defense of a master’s or doctoral thesis, enrollment in a doctoral program, an academic job, etc.). In exchange, the students further their supervisors’ careers:

Students are cheap labour for writing publications (. . .) You can publish something very quickly that is not good, but it goes through. Today, it is your bibliometric indicators that matter; it doesn’t matter if you do anything valuable. And this is the simplest way: to find a couple of students working under your protection, but in reality, on your account and then, you know, your habilitation is ready (Julia, female master’s student).

Through feudalist organizing principles, ECAs are placed in a close relationship with their supervisors; they are aware that they rise or fall with them: “A university scandal with my supervisor was a sign for me that this is the end for me as well. He was formally accused of the sexual harassment of students” (Barbara, female doctoral degree holder). After the scandal, this ECA failed to find a university job and decided to leave academia. Thus, even after completion of the PhD program, supervisors are still essential to ECAs’ careers.

Feudalist organizing principles also force ECAs to engage in fraudulent actions. Some examples include partaking in a “faked distribution of research grants” and “faked recruitment processes.” ECAs also discuss the damage this fraud does to their careers:

What makes me very nervous is that this university structure, based on feudalism and acquaintances, makes open competitions into prearranged ones, and it is known who will win (Ewelina, female doctoral degree holder).

As in many other universities, the universities in this study have tightened their organizational hierarchies and centralized power in the “managerial top.” The implications of this increased hierarchical power among decision-makers are narrated by ECAs:

Student councils make decisions according to personal benefits, which is corruption; they get promises of getting places in the doctoral programme—even people without any academic achievements—only because they support the dean during an election (Marta, female master’s student).

I am not a big fan of conspiracy theories, but I haven’t received any research grants for a very long time (. . .) My boss [head of the department] hasn’t agreed to sign an agreement when I planned to work for external company—but he signed similar agreements with other persons (Stefan, male habilitation holder).

The ECAs also indicate different forms of mobbing/bullying as a prevailing problem of power abuse:

I experienced mobbing, my boss [project leader] had unlimited power, controlling research results and deciding about publishing those results or not, about whether I will make PhD, or not, whether I will get recommendations from my postdoc period, or not, etc., and on his good will and relationship with him, not controlled by anyone, depends my academic career (Karolina, female doctoral degree holder).

I personally witnessed a situation when my female colleague started crying during a meeting at work. It was classic mobbing (Robert, male doctoral degree holder).

Working in a system pervaded by chronic power abuse has negatively affected the mental condition of ECAs: “I used to lay in bed every day, stare at the ceiling, felling that I am no one” (Daniel, male doctoral degree holder); “My supervisor used to laugh at me because of my critical attitude in my research. This was terrible, I was depressed” (Barbara, female doctoral degree holder).

Feudalist organizing principles are also related to discrimination and sexism; these stories center predominantly around male superiors and male powerholders:

Clear-blood Polish chauvinism, a manifestation of relations of power, for example, is calling someone ‘sweetheart’ in an official situation with invited guests in a conference. Well, quite simple gestures, which seemed to be patronizing. Or saying that someone is moody (Ewa, female doctoral degree holder).

One of my female colleagues applied for a habilitation based on her academic achievements, and one of the male professors expressed his indignation, stating that she is too young, so it is not time yet (Natalia, female doctoral student).

Discrimination and sexism and in the classroom are also prevalent in ECAs’ narratives and are explicitly related to male academic teachers:

Teachers used to tell sexist jokes (. . .). The whole first year of studying was like breaking our [female] wills (. . .) I remember when one of the male academic assistants told a female student that she was stupid and that it is not possible to be more stupid. We were all totally frightened. That girl started crying, but we put our noses into our books, trying to avoid a trashing (Julia, female master’s student).

Lecturer made a lot of homophobic and transphobic jokes, he showed some memes on his slides with old male persons who realized that they were females, he showed some talk-shows with males having small penises. (. . .) On another occasion, some male doctors were laughing and saying that there is no reason for lesbians to visit gynaecologists, since they are not women (Klaudia, female master’s student).

One of the professors said that suicide rates are higher among homosexual individuals. Why? Because they know that something is wrong with them, since homosexuality is not natural. (Agata, female master’s student).

Sexism and discrimination are also visible at the level of doctoral education:

Sexism and discrimination are enormous among our faculty; for example, they make comments during lectures that women (. . .) are not able to understand this or that. Or not inviting women to do field research because since they are not able to row, they are not able to row on a lake to collect plankton (. . .). I was often called, by male teachers, by my name to answer their questions, but male students were called ‘gentleman’ (Karolina, female doctoral degree holder).

Lecturers were often addressing female students in an inappropriate way; they made jokes about their motherhood or their gender. They were often saying that the ladies here came to find a husband and that doctoral studies are an addition to that (Adam, male doctoral student).

In regards to the repression of their activism and critical thinking, ECAs discuss how feudalist organizing principles are manifested as political labeling. For example, they are called “communists” or “leftists” by senior scholars because of their critical engagement in social movements:

I was labelled a communist in my department (. . .) My department has always been [politically to the] right. That is why our engagement [in social movements] has not been perceived as something good. (. . .) All of our activities fell into the ‘leftist’ bag (. . .) We have never had any support from the university government since we have been perceived to be people related to the leftist environment (Jan, male doctoral student).

If you mention that you do research on women or use critical analysis, it is perceived to be Marxism, Stalinism, or Leninism (Barbara, female doctoral degree holder).

A critical stance toward the university is also related to direct institutional repression:

‘Less travel budget, a lack of permission to travel, a lack of support in the publication process and my habilitation, and a higher workload’ (Ernest, male doctoral degree holder). As another respondent observes:

One professor attacked me and said that I was questioning his speech and criticizing him, and [he also questioned] how I could [speak] so badly [about] my own university (. . .) Some professors say directly: ‘you will not get a scholarship, I don’t like you; you are too active’ (Anita, female doctoral degree holder).

Political labeling is related to direct harassment and bleak prospects when embarking on a research career:

There were some unpleasant situations; I was being targeted. (. . .) They were saying ‘She is a strange leftist-feminist person.’ Our faculty is conservative [and] this was a traumatic time for me. Some professors were saying that I am stupid, leading dark forces. I had depression, anxiety; I felt alone in this battle (. . .) And they will probably reject me during the doctoral studies recruitment procedure in order to not have an uncomfortable doctoral student (Agata, female master’s student).

The message by academic power holders to ECAs is clear: “Lie low, otherwise you won’t get your habilitation” (Anna, female habilitation holder).

Discussion and conclusion

Polish ECAs describe a working life that is highly problematic for them. They aspire to successfully fulfill the requirements for obtaining their habilitation, and their stories reveal their frustrations and anxieties, their hard work and fear, as well as a kind of trust that stems from capitalist organizing principles. At the same time, it is striking how competitively ruthless and uncaring toward “underperforming” others our respondents are. Such views are not uncommon; in many parts of the world, these are prominent and natural features of any modern, capitalist society (Berardi, 2019; Fisher, 2009), and more specific research on academia has discussed this tension (Hall, 2021; Hansen and Nilsson, 2022; Lund, 2020).

In this study, ECAs consider capitalist organizing principles both a promise and a means to eliminate the problem of feudalist organizing principles. The ECAs in this study are “fixed” in these two versions of the same promise—capitalism as a “good end per se,” feudalism as a “bad end per se,” and capitalist organizing principles as a “good means” to overcome bad feudalist organizing principles.

This is, then, an important part of our understanding of how capitalism fixes universities; it is always perceived by the ECAs to be both a good means and a good end but what is happening is that the capitalist organizing principles take root and flourish, not by being at loggerheads with feudalist organizing principles but by specifically facilitating the latter to suit the purposes of those who practice them. In other words, capitalist organizing principles enter a context by facilitating the already present feudalist organizing principles.

This is an unrecognized possibility in contemporary studies on universities; empirically, it seems that the interviewed ECAs have failed to understand that their harmful experiences, which they think originate from feudalist organizing principles, are interwoven with capitalist organizing principles. Indeed, the main contribution of this paper is our demonstration of how critical scholars and scholarship have become positioned in disadvantaged ways, not just by capitalist organizing principles (often critiqued in Western European scholarship) but by how that these principles fix feudal structures and reproduce the disadvantaged position of particular kinds of knowers. This dual pressure limits ECAs’ understanding of their own context.

One example of the failure to realize the dual pressure of capitalist and feudalist organizing principles on the academic work context is political labeling, which was experienced by our respondents as a strategy of marginalization. Participants blame senior scholars and university power holders for feudal thinking and action, but they are not able to grasp that such labeling and marginalization are strengthened by the performance measurement evaluations that reinforce these power holders’ capability to shut down “defiant” scholars (see Zawadzki and Jensen, 2020; a similar process appears to take place at the University of Leicester; see Toner, 2021). In contrast, as mentioned above, the interviewed ECAs maintain their hopes that capitalist organizing principles can provide a possible solution to their “feudal” problems.

Another example is the patriarchy, in which female ECAs are deeply vulnerable and exposed to male power holders and are especially aware of men’s control over financing and academic positions and their discriminative and chauvinistic actions, not to mention sexism and sexual harassment. Despite such awareness, the critical opinions (of both sexes) lack any recognition of how the performance management system or ideology of excellence is a force that strengthens male competition and domination in academia (see Lund and Tienari, 2019). Instead, they maintain their belief that meritocracy is a possible outcome of the reforms to Polish higher education.

In summary, ECAs maintain their hope in capitalist organizing principles without understanding that feudalistic organizing principles have become a part of the toolbox of capitalist organizing principles.

In our study, rather than arguing that universities have developed feudal characteristics transforming academia into neo-feudal structures, we demonstrate that capitalist organizing principles continuously fix existing feudalist organizing principles to enable the former’s success. Moreover, we shed light on the possibility that this fixing process affects and changes both capitalist and feudal organizing principles, indicating the possibility that capitalist organizing principles are strengthened by feudalist organizing principles, for example, by making ECAs loyal and obedient to the apparent winners of the capitalist game of academic excellence.

These findings have relevance that extends beyond the Polish case. They suggest that different countries, and indeed perhaps different universities, will differ; that is, as capitalism’s spatial fixing will contain different “particularities” that “are already there,” it is possible such particularities might be reinforced as the process of spatial fixing continues. Consequently, when capitalism fixes places, it is necessary to ground this process and to study how this is done. As a young Marx (and Marx and Engels, 1970) pointed out, general guidelines for how society ought to be studied cannot be used as a “scheme” to which the history of capitalism can be adopted. Nothing was given, so Marx hunted for clues (Liedman, 2015).

Therefore, the broader significance of our study is located in the double effect of the capitalist spatial fix. First, fixing implies intertwining with historical particularities; second, it entails the development of a reinforcing mutual process. Theoretically, there is the clear possibility that this dual pressure is indeed a good means and has a good end—that capitalism and its “particularities” could result in greater freedom and stronger autonomy—but it is our standpoint that this seems to be rare.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Michał Zawadzki

Notes

Author biographies

Tommy Jensen is Professor in Business and Administration at the Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University and holds a PhD from Umeå School of Business and Economics. His research interests are in the areas of organization theory, sociology and moral philosophy with a focus on the intersection between ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres and the social and environmental dilemmas that this intersection gives rise to. Jensen is currently working on two projects: “Capitalism, inequality and nature”, and “Racism and the labour market”.

Michal Zawadzki is Associate Professor in Industrial Engineering and Management at the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Management, Uppsala University. He researches in the field of organization studies, focusing on sociology of work and critical perspectives on higher education. He is currently working on a project about workplace bullying in universities.

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