Qualitative Inquiry in Neoliberal Times

Norman K. Denzin, Michael D. Giardina

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138226432
• eBook ISBN: 9781315397764
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Psychology

Qualitative Inquiry in Neoliberal Times is written from the perspective that the scholarly lives of academics are changing, constantly in flux, and increasingly bound to the demands of the market – a context in which the university has increasingly morphed into a business enterprise, one that treats students as consumers to be marketed to, education as something to be purchased, and research as something to be capitalized on for financial gain. The effects of this market-orientation of scholarly life, especially on those in the social sciences and humanities, are ones that demand serious examination. At the same time, qualitative inquiry itself is changing and evolving within and against the rhythms of this 'new normal'.

This volume engages with these emerging debates in qualitative research over new materialism, 'data', public policy, research ethics, public scholarship, and the corporate university in the neoliberal age. World-renowned contributors from the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Norway, Australia, and New Zealand present a global perspective on these issues, framed within a landscape of higher education marked if not marred by efficiency metrics, accountability, external funding, and university rankings.

Qualitative Inquiry in Neoliberal Times is a must-read for faculty and students alike interested in the changing dynamics of their profession, whether theoretically, methodologically, or structurally and materially.

This title is sponsored by the International Association of Qualitative Inquiry, a major new international organization that sponsors an annual congress.

SECTION II

Ethics, politics, and resistance

6

FEMINIST POSTSTRUCTURALISMS AND THE NEOLIBERAL UNIVERSITY

Bronwyn Davies, Margaret Somerville, and Lise Claiborne

In this chapter, we enter into conversation with each other about what new modes of thought and being have emerged from feminist poststructuralist thought and how these modes of thought and being are positioned within the neoliberal university. Our discussion is oriented around these three questions: (1) how might we understand the neoliberal university?, (2) what is the position of poststructuralism in a neoliberal university?, and (3) how can they work together and/or apart?

How might we understand the operations of the neoliberal university?

Bronwyn: I first became aware of the creep of neoliberalism in the mid 1990s when I’d been appointed Professor and Head of School at James Cook University. Strategic Plans were the new thing and my School had to produce one. Conveniently, a consultant’s name was provided by management, and, in good faith, she was appointed.

Meanwhile, although I didn’t like the idea of a future limited by what we could imagine in the present, I initiated conversations with my new colleagues about what they wanted our future to look like; I sought an engagement in collaborative thought that would enable us to imagine a future that would be the very best future we were capable of, that would allow the things we were passionate about to flourish; that would allow new things we dreamed of, collectively, to flourish. When the consultant arrived with her bag of tricks for our two-day workshop, she explained to us that all we had been doing was irrelevant and inappropriate. We did not understand the genre of strategic plans. Furthermore, she made very clear that I was not to speak, as she was in charge. She got us to throw balls to each other to build up trust and produced a set of clichés that would form the basis of the very expensive plan we were paying for – probably identical to all the other plans she was the highly paid consultant for. We were in effect being normalized and regulated to produce a neoliberal scheme of things that was not of our own making. It was my first exercise in having creative and critical thought strategically switched off and responsibility handed over to this new player on our scene – the expert consultant whose grasp of neoliberal discourse and her expensive bag of tricks would apparently shape our futures.

In fact, the plan disappeared into a filing cabinet and wasn’t seen again after its launch. No one had thought about its implementation.

There were many such initiatives in the ensuing months and years. We never knew which ones were going to come to matter and which would disappear. Each of these initiatives was apparently unconnected to the others and we were slow to realize they were part of a comprehensive program of globalization and neoliberalization that would transform the human species from homo socius to homo eoconomicus (to use Foucault’s term).

This strategic transformation began with the Trilateral Commission, an alliance between a handful of political leaders and multinational big businesses (Sklar, 1980). They had decided that democracy was no longer unaffordable, and that people had to be made, without them realizing it, more manageable and more productive. Further, and without realizing it, workers must become complicit in increasing the flow of $$ toward the rich (Sklar, 1980). Rather than announce itself as a program for social change, it presented itself as the inevitable changes we must all engage in if we are to survive in a globalizing world. Vulnerability and fear were to be mobilized. The strategy of piecemeal implementation was adopted so none of us would realize what the tide of change was, and where it was coming from – or what it was we needed to resist.

To further disguise itself it appropriated terms that were vital to the world it was dismantling and gave them new managerialist meanings; ‘ethics’ and ‘quality,’ for example, would now be produced through regulation and surveillance. Collectivity was strategically undermined, and with it the capacity for resistance. A new hyper-individualism was installed. The erosion of collectivity was effected through a strategic assemblage of initiatives including:

Intensification of vulnerability through ever-increasing workloads and increased competition for reduced resources;

Transfer of responsibility from the social to the individual;

The creation of an the illusion of freedom through emphasis on choice;

The undermining of institutional/historical knowledges and allegiances through constant restructuring;

The de-valuing of critique and the demise of departments whose main purpose was to engage in critique, such as history, philosophy and gender studies;

The redirection of resources to administration, and to the production of regulations, of uniformity, and of surveillance, making accountability the new mantra for what would count as virtue;

The establishment of master’s degrees in management that would teach new managerialism;

And, of course, the strategic weakening of unions and the demise of tenure as a job for life.

My horror at what was happening to universities led, finally, in 2009, to my ‘Virginia Woolf moment’; I had an income, since I’d reached so-called retirement age, and I had a room of my own. I could create my own space, in which my work might continue without the requirement of dancing to the tune of the latest neoliberal madness. I am still a work in progress of de-institutionalization.

Margaret: I struggle with the neoliberal university as a daily reality but I also recognize that this university pays my salary and enables me to do the work I do. It helped when thinking about how it is possible to talk about the neoliberal university, in consideration of the ethics of this position, to scan a website hosted by Michigan State University. Its stated aim is to encourage public debate about the type of society we want, the direction neoliberal policies have taken society and its institutions, and to identify alternative paths that lead to a social order in which there is less poverty and greater opportunities for all. It invites public comment. (see http://futureu.education)

Analyzing the posts on this website makes certain universally common patterns visible. These include

• the rise and rise of college sports,
• diff iculties for African American and other minority studies,
• the plight of contingent faculty staff,
• removal of staff who do not conform to neoliberal ideologies,
• increasing tuition fees – ‘a public good has become a private matter,’
• lack of credentials of chief executives,
• the demise of social science and humanities,
• corporate sponsorship of universities, and
• and university branding and re-branding.

In reference to this last, the story of the re-branding of the University of Western Sydney, an occasion when I hit a wall of existential despair, has no ethical barrier that requires my silence, since it is specifically intended for a vast public audience. At enormous expense the University of Western Sydney has been re-branded as Western Sydney University. The re-branding required all signage, stationary, promotional materials, websites, business cards, name badges, even the Vice Chancellor’s executive cars, to be replaced. Members of the university are required to use marketing templates and stock images of individuals produced by the marketing department in all documents and presentations. Not only does the new website feature individuals who represent particular marketized narratives, such as ‘the successful refugee,’ or ‘the determined young woman from a low SES background,’ but the overall catchphrase is ‘Unlimited’ with headings such as ‘Discover stories of unlimited,’ and ‘Find your unlimited.’

This marketing catch-cry of ‘unlimited’ symbolizes the problem for me, articulated in Rosi Braidotti’s Deleuzian analysis of advanced capitalism as a process ontology that codes and recodes the existing rules that construct our socioeconomic relations. All possible emancipatory positions have been co-opted to the market economy, disconnected from the emancipatory potential of making a difference in the world.

“Animals, seeds, plants, and the earth as a whole” are subsumed into the market, she writes; “Seeds, cells and genetic codes” (Braidotti, 2014, np), all of our basic earth others, everything that lives, has become controlled, commercialized, and commodified. For Braidotti, the emancipatory gesture is seldom spectacular, involving a reconceptualization of the feminist politics of location, and of desire as lack, to desire as plenitude.

Lise: The examples above illustrate the ways that neoliberal discourses are ubiquitous in universities. These discourses create material demands on our bodies that sprout up, hydra-like, at every turn, since we are ‘24/7’ workers constantly on call.

Recently, Monbiot (2016a; see also 2016b) suggested that neoliberalism is an ideology that needs to be named and shamed so that it can be routed. But there’s the difficulty. If we are going to take theoretical insights from the whole poststructural project into account, a simple dualism – neoliberals versus those more enlightened ‘not-neolibs’ – will not work, since every dualism has within it the entanglement of presence and absence. The works of Bergson and Deleuze are helpful in pointing out the indestructible links between so-called opposites; their connection contradictorily affirms the dominant position under critique. Drawing on these theorists along with Colebrook, Dolphijn (2012, np) urges us to go beyond structure to “the establishment of a non-dualist logic of univocity,” beyond the dualism and its two-dimensional expression towards splitting in time and space to create multiple differences. Here Barad’s feminist poststructural project can assist by suggesting diffractive analysis that takes into account the complexity of discourses and material conditions that constantly propel our subjectivities towards expression within neoliberal norms.

Since being invited to participate in this conversation, I’ve been propelled down strange lines of ascent and descent as I have grappled with various subjectivities I have inhabited over my career as a senior university administrator. Initially this led me to feelings of hopelessness as the task of working on this paper became one of the many tasks I am constantly juggling, tasks that leave me depleted, exhausted, dissatisfied and always convinced I could have done more. Once I started to connect back to the feminist theoretical work I enjoy reading, though, my flow of energy started moving again, away from the stultifying confines of my “To Do” lists. Some troubling experiences provided a place for further analysis.

Last year I experienced, at a meeting of all staff in my faculty, a ‘failure of indignation.’ Someone from the floor commented that neoliberal ideas were a hegemonic force affecting the lives of all staff in the midst of the latest and most severe restructuring to date. Some time at the meeting was spent on the wording of a “strong yet fair” memo to be sent to senior managers at the university expressing a collective disbelief and subsequent sadness (given the presumed educational values we all share) at the unfairness of the announcement of the latest budget cuts. I was surprised by my own difficulty in generating energy for this task, something I could easily have mobilized a few years before. The whole project of writing the memo seemed a rhetorical act, part of a theatre of the absurd, with its touching faith in the power of logical argument and provision of information as a way to create a change in the operation of an institution that was already on a line of descent focusing on the altered flow of money and status. As I left the meeting I heard the comment, “we can’t become cynical.” Even the possibility of cynicism, with its glimpse of the individual body that is tired, overly experienced, and ultimately traitorous in its lethargy, seemed a fanciful figuration from another discursive era.

When searching for a new way to respond, I find Patricia Clough’s (2012) analysis of possibility useful to consider. She also draws on Bergson and Deleuze to suggest that any supposed difference between what is possible and what is real is inevitably stuck within a commemoration of what was: “The possible anticipates the real or the real projects backwards to its possibility as if always having been” (p. 3). Such commemoration seems to underpin a complaint I have often heard at staff meetings, that “good education and care for students don’t have a monetary value.” Within the neoliberal discourses that dominate the university, this complaint is no longer intelligible (Butler, 2011), since value is defined by the financial. Taking a position in opposition to the neoliberal reaffirms the centrality of its importance. This leaves us without possibilities beyond a return to the familiar (resistance), stuck in a citational chain that holds the status quo in place.

Some senior administrators I know have refused to follow strongly worded suggestions about implementation of cutbacks. These managers can then themselves become sidelined, not asked to crucial meetings or having their main goals given little time in management discussions. This valiant resistance then becomes sucked into the vortex of the dualism, where to be ‘non-neoliberal’ is still a position defined in neoliberal terms as an aspect of the one reality, the same-old. Perhaps that is why administrators are now more likely to be sidelined from access to accurate financial information and hence to crucial decision-making. In my workplace, it is increasingly harder to get specific information about the institution’s oft-mentioned straitened economic circumstances. There are general pronouncements about how important it is to save money and how drastic the actions have to be for the institution’s survival. But the facts on which this argument is based are no longer transparent even to senior administrators.

Instead of staying within the possible-real plane, then, we could consider Clough’s focus on the contrast between the virtual and the actual, where “[t]he virtual is ‘never realized’ ; the difference creates a swerve, a divergence to the new or ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Qualitative inquiry in neoliberal times
• Section I: Theory, ‘data,’ and entanglements
• Section II: Ethics, politics, and resistance
• Coda: All I really need to know about qualitative research I learned in high school:  The 2016 Qualitative High graduation commencement address
• List of contributors
• Index