Academic Irregularities

Language and Neoliberalism in Higher Education

Liz Morrish, Helen Sauntson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138673953
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317201816
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

This volume serves as a critical examination of the discourses at play in the higher education system and the ways in which these discourses underpin the transmission of neoliberal values in 21st century universities. Situated within a Critical Discourse Analysis-based framework, the book also draws upon other linguistic approaches, including corpus linguistics and appraisal analysis, to unpack the construction and development of the management style known as managerialism, emergent in the 1990s US and UK higher education systems, and the social dynamics and power relations embedded within the discourses at the heart of managerialism in today's universities. Each chapter introduces a particular aspect of neoliberal discourse in higher education and uses these multiple linguistic approaches to analyze linguistic data in two case studies and demonstrate these principles at work. This multi-layered systematic linguistic framework allows for a nuanced exploration of neoliberal institutional discourse and its implications for academic labor, offering a critique of the managerial system in higher education but also a larger voice for alternative discursive narratives within the academic community. This important work is a key resource for students and scholars in applied linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, sociology, business and management studies, education, and cultural studies.

1 Critical university studies

Defining a field

Introduction

The SMT initiative on Employability is providing OOB with an opportunity to consider enhanced management in the School through use of JOW resource and will therefore extend beyond that specific role to a proposal relating to all transversal management roles in the School.

(Initials changed)

For those who work in a university in a UK university, this kind of language is as familiar as it is incomprehensible. A key element of this book is essentially a discussion about how managerial discourse has contributed to universities losing their distinctive character (Collini 2012) and offers an analysis of the contexts, meanings and functions of this discourse and proposes some means of resistance.

The problem we identify is that, in universities, the conflict between managerial and academic values is primarily a struggle over discourse and the symbolic. It works by forcing the academic to cite discourse which redefines their subjectivity in terms of managerial values. In the past, the university was conceived of as a refuge from market values in its tolerance of risk and failure, because these are commonly seen to be essential characteristics of knowledge-building. Now, universities welcome only entrepreneurial, self-governing and competitive subjects, who are happy to function within the limits and discourse set for them by the managerial project.

It is important to outline the relationship between managerialism, which applies to institutions, and neoliberalism, the political and economic framework within which it sits (Klikauer 2013: 5). Since the late 1970s, neoliberalism has overtaken ‘embedded liberalism’ or interventionist Keynesian economics where entrepreneurial and corporate activities were regulated and constrained (Harvey 2005: 11). Since the 1990s, though, the principles of neoliberal thought have spread beyond economics and penetrated the political sphere (Brown 2015), the social sphere, and has now imposed its logic on the individual, demanding that we all live our lives as ‘enterprise’ (Scarff 2015). Brown (2015: 10) writes:

[N]eoliberalism transmogrifies every human domain and endeavour, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic. All conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even when these spheres are not directly monetized.

Neoliberalism is an ideology, then, which demands that all institutions, experiences and cultures are subordinated to the discipline of the market, and the value system that flows from that. Harvey (2005: 2) defines it thus:

Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can be best advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade.

It is the role of the state in neoliberal economies that is controversial or even paradoxical. Most adherents of neoliberal politics espouse a smaller state and decry government intervention in the rule of the market. Despite this, as Rose (1999) points out, neoliberalism does indeed require the hand of government in ensuring the totality of its reach. It achieves this by assuming a ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) approach to its tenets, and presenting them as general principles of good government. As well as market fundamentalism, essential characteristics of neoliberal thought are the upward redistribution of resources (Duggan 2003: ix), an emphasis on personal responsibility so that citizens are urged to be self-managing, self-enterprising individuals in health, professions and education (Ong 2006: 14), and an emphasis on the ideals of self-interest and competitiveness (Steger and Roy 2010: 12). Rose describes these as ‘regimes of truth’ (1999: 19) which govern the choices of self-managing, enterprising individuals, who all the time believe themselves to be free. These market-based ‘truths’ infiltrate into the domain, not just into the government of states, but are also absorbed into the conduct and value systems of institutions. This process results in ‘neoliberal governmentality’ (a Foucauldian term) which denotes modes of governance based on particular premises, logics and power relations (Steger and Roy 2010).

The term ‘governmentality’ has its origin in Foucault’s notion of biopower, ‘a series of regulatory controls exerted on the population and on individuals in order to harness and extract life forces’ (Ong 2007: 13). If neoliberalism and its market-driven principles are accepted as everyday logic for guidance of all forms of human endeavour, then they can be taken to be acting not just on bodies, but also on subjectivities – how social actors conceive of themselves and their roles in the world. Thus, a number of strategies have proliferated amongst both state and corporate actors in codifying, rationalising and extending the logic of the market as a governing principle.

The 1980s saw new techniques of management in the public sector in the UK, known as New Public Management (NPM) and its close relative New Managerialism (NM) (Deem et al 2007: 3). Neoliberalism has provided the political context in which managerialism, with its shared ethos of competitiveness and anti-state/pro-market, anti-provider/pro-consumer, could flourish. Managerialism is often described as management to excess so that management becomes an end in itself: ‘An ideology which holds that not only can all aspects of organizational life be controlled but that they should be controlled’ (Hoyle and Wallace 2005:68). The theory dictates that techniques of management are not domain specific – they are generalisable. The training (often received on MBA courses, and similar tailored training courses), assumes the exclusive possession of managerial knowledge is necessary to efficiently run corporations and societies (Klikauer 2013: 2).

In universities, managerialism looked very different from traditional leadership and management. Until the 1980s, leading roles, such as dean or head of department, had been occupied by somewhat reluctant managers whose fixed-term positions were rotating and offered the prospect of a return to teaching and research (Deem et al 2007: 35). What new forms of managerialism appeared to offer were ‘unremitting organisational restructuring, sharpening of incentives, and expansion in number, power, and remuneration of senior managers, with a corresponding downgrading of the role of skilled workers’ (Klikauer 2013: 7). This last feature, particularly, has been keenly felt in universities. Whereas formerly, academic seniority had conferred considerable status upon the incumbents, what now emerged entailed ‘the enhanced instrumental/ market rationality which gnaws away at professional autonomy and control’ (Deem et al 2007: 22). In the US and UK, these influences have also manifested themselves in more formalised stratification of hierarchies in universities, and. It is not only hierarchies that have been formalised; this has enabled those in power to intensify the scrutiny and performance measurement of those who labour in universities. Morrissey notes that the ‘science of management’ brings about ‘implicit surrendering to an increasingly accepted rationale for effectively governing academics in what could perhaps be best described as the “managerial” or “bureaucratic” university’ (Morrissey 2013: 801). These changes are often presented to the workforce as necessary efficiencies which, nevertheless, offered personalisation, customisation, empowerment (Deem et al 2007: 10).

It is interesting to note that in their 1997 pioneering work Academic Capitalism, Slaughter and Rhoades refer neither to neoliberalism nor managerialism. These two constructs were not yet part of the authors’ critical vocabulary. The term neoliberalism has become much more ubiquitous since the 2008 banking crises, which, it was thought, had brought the theory into disrepute (Block et al 2012). Indeed, some critics have levelled a charge of a promiscuous application of the term (Clarke 2008).

In 2019, we no longer debate whether this ethic has inflected managerial values in the academy; the takeover has been complete. In order to make sure that notions of efficiency take centre stage for academics, structures of neoliberal govermentality have been implemented to control access to resources. Universities have been obliged to reposition themselves as simulacra of business and to adopt practices traditionally associated with profit-making organisations, such as annual appraisals, audits of teaching hours, transparency reviews of work practices, peer teaching evaluation and teaching and research audits. Many of those who work within these new structures have perceived a degree of alienation and an evacuation of academic values. This new climate has been explored in a number of works (e.g. Canaan and Shumar 2008; Evans 2005).

Harvey (2005) points out that neoliberal institutions open up new fields for capital accumulation. Over the last decade across the UK higher education sector, we have seen the privatisation and commodification of staff and student services. Academic values have been transformed by a strategic manipulation of discourse (Davies and Bendix Petersen 2005). Fairclough (1995) provides one of the first critical studies of this new discourse in universities, referring to a concept he calls ‘the technologisation of discourse’ (1995: 102). This he defines as:

a process of intervention in the sphere of discourse practices with the objective of constructing a new hegemony in the order of discourse in the institution or organization concerned, as part of a more general struggle to impose restructured hegemonies in institutional practices and culture.

In a later article, Chiapello and Fairclough (2002) argue that neoliberal practices and values are instilled in individuals by forceful repetition. Since the profit motive has been seen as the only priority, economies inevitably fall on practices that attract income – the teaching and research functions of the university (Davies and Bendix Petersen 2005: 88). Management and ‘customer service’ are enhanced and funding is shifted to administrators who have an auditing rather than a support function. Mulderrig (2011) notes how these new managerialist discourses have become increasingly evident in UK education policy documents. The extent to which academics may resist inhabiting a neoliberal subjectivity, whilst still compelled to cite its norms, forms the crux of our conclusion.

This book uncovers and critiques the discourses of managerialism circulating in 21st-century universities in the UK and US (a situation also relevant to other international HE contexts such as Ireland and Australia). It is essential to move beyond polemic if academics, and significantly, managers are to be persuaded of the argument. To this end, the book will move the debate to new ground anchored in linguistic evidence. We have a database of texts taken from UK and US universities which originated within managerial functions of audit, marketing and ‘customer service’.

In order to frame our theoretical orientation, we turn to three concepts originating with Foucault: discourse, subjectivity and governmentality (Foucault 1994). For Foucault, discourse is critical for allowing the individual to make sense of experiences. Discourses about certain subjects circulate and structure, even limit, our understandings. In the context of this volume, we outline in Chapter 6 how discourses around change indicate it is something to be managed and controlled. This is what Foucault would recognise as a ‘discursive formation’. These discursive formations are internalised and act to structure the actions and beliefs of those who labour within them. In this way, new subjectivities are constructed, and the discourses render those subjects governable.

‘Governmentality’ was a concept developed by Foucault in a series of lectures in the late 1970s, and is most often associated with the term ‘neoliberal’. In the case of neoliberal societies, the concepts of the market and competition become a kind of common sense which then allows that govermentality to work on labouring subjects. This assumption about the rule of the market can be thought of as a new form of totalitarianism.

The project of neoliberal governmentality in universities is for the institution to produce its ideal employee (Morrissey 2013). The new subject formation works through a destabilisation of established academic practices, and a superseding of existing values of cooperation, collective governance and democracy. In this way, and via the new terms of the discourse, managers hope to produce the ideal employee of the neoliberal university. No longer are knowledge, ideas and intellectual agility the most highly valued gifts in the academy, nor are they seen as the characteristics of ‘promotable’ academics. The only aspiration viewed as legitimate is that of ‘managing’. Indeed, as Docherty (2014a) points out, managers frequently conflate their own status with ‘the university’. Morrish (2014) argues that university management is like a Ponzi Scheme which fraudulently endows investors with riches, not on the basis of enhancing productivity, rather the flow of money is only guaranteed when new investors are persuaded to join the scheme. Charles Ponzi, after whom the scheme was named, realised that all new investors need to have a relationship with the central figure, not with underlings. This exceeds mere audit culture – it is the forcible citation of a discourse which inaugurates a new kind of subject.

Our starting point is that discourse is not merely something which is found in texts and contexts; it also structures those contexts and constrains behaviours and identities within them. Differences in discourse reveal different sets of values, and it can sometimes seem as if academics and managers are occupying different universes entirely. Managerial priorities are reflected in the pervasive audit culture which has in many institutions subordinated academic endeavour. It is as if the real academic work of questioning, debate and contest has to take place in subterfuge, and Docherty (2011) writes of the retreat of many academics to an imaginary ‘clandestine university’.¹ In the terms of our analytical frameworks, this indicates that there are two different communities of practice, situated in a hierarchical relationship, and this is reflected in the discursive resources and linguistic signifiers adopted by the two camps.

The case studies in subsequent chapters are based on real data of managerial discourse in universities, and the analysis proceeds using the CAL frameworks outlined in the Introduction. There are two principles which guide us: first, the examples we use from the data are familiar to our readership; all academics encounter managerial discourse on a daily basis. Second, our analysis, notwithstanding th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Critical university studies: defining a field
• 2 The student as consumer and commodity
• 3 Marketing the goods
• 4 Language and audit culture 1: research and performance management
• 5 Language and audit culture 2: the case of the Teaching Excellence Framework
• 6 Colonising the corporate academic
• 7 Conclusions: possibilities for contesting the discourse
• Glossary of terms
• Index