Careering through academia: Securing identities or engaging ethical subjectivities?

Abstract

This article reflects upon careering, securing identities and ethical subjectivities in academia in the context of audit, accountability and control surrounding new managerialism in UK Business Schools. Drawing upon empirical research, we illustrate how rather than resisting an ever-proliferating array of governmental technologies of power, academics chase the illusive sense of a secure self through ‘careering’; a frantic and frenetic individualistic strategy designed to moderate the pressures of excessive managerial competitive demands. Emerging from our data was an increased portrayal of academics as subjected to technologies of power and self, simultaneously being objects of an organizational gaze through normalizing judgements, hierarchical observations and examinations. Still, this was not a monolithic response, as there were those who expressed considerable disquiet as well as a minority who reported ways to seek out a more embodied engagement with their work. In analysing the careerism and preoccupation with securing identities that these technologies of visibility and self-discipline produce, we draw on certain philosophical deliberations and especially the later Foucault on ethics and active engagement to explore how academics might refuse the ways they have been constituted as subjects through new managerial regimes.

Keywords

academia identity business schools careering ethical subjectivities Foucault new managerialism technologies of power technologies of the self

Despite tensions and ambiguities, our research on UK business school academics has found them to be heavily preoccupied with their careers and identities as they respond to new managerialism, where private sector practices of management control (e.g. competition, performance incentives, league tables, targets and surveillance) are adopted in universities. As sites of progressive work intensification (Ogbonna and Harris, 2004), audit and accountability (Thomas and Davies, 2002; Willmott, 1995), like much of the public sector, academic institutions have become dominated by a neo-liberal culture where there is an unadulterated faith in deregulated market competition that is perceived as a solution to all economic if not social ills. While career has always been of some significance in UK academia, this neo-liberal culture has rendered it increasingly central and problematic (Macdonald and Kam, 2007), as it becomes almost a knee-jerk response in seeking to moderate the pressures of intensified competition and managerial surveillance (Sparkes, 2007, 2013). It is not then too surprising to find a majority of the academics in our study visibly and overtly ‘instrumental in their use of discursive resources’ (Kornberger and Brown, 2007: 513) to pursue their careers. Our title – careering through academia – is intended to convey how this has resulted in a frenetic if not frantic pursuit of career, as if academics were hurtling out of control like ‘a careering or runaway horse for example’ (Grey, 2008: 30) – heading for one specific goal that obscures all else. In our empirical study, we found that a majority were visibly and overtly ‘instrumental in their use of discursive resources’ (Kornberger and Brown, 2007: 513) in pursuit of their careers. In our analysis, we suggest that the all-pervasiveness of careerism in academia might relate to a preoccupation with seeking to secure a solid and stable identity.

In order to explore our empirical material, we have deployed an analytical framework relating to governmentality, or technologies of power and of the self, both of which are concerned with control, discipline or self-discipline (Foucault, 1980, 1982). The concept of governmentality can be seen as the link between technologies of power over others (hierarchical observations, normalizing judgements and the examination) and technologies of the self, whereby the ‘dividing practices’ invoke diverse forms of self-discipline (Foucault, 1975, 1980, 1982, 1988). Of course, both of these aspects of governmentality target the self as an object to be managed, through panoptic-like surveillance mechanisms and norms of self-discipline. These render us permanently under the gaze of the ‘other’, for they involve a co-constitution of subjects through power-knowledge relations and self-disciplinary ideals. In exploring the possibilities of refusing this kind of subjectivity or subjectivation, we also engage with Foucault’s later work where he sought to make of the self an ethical and aesthetic project (Foucault, 1986, 1997a).

Through drawing on certain philosophical deliberations on ethics and active engagement (Foucault, 1997b, 2011; Spinoza, 1955), the aims of this article are first to examine the conditions that seemingly drive academics to pursue their careers as projects of self-aggrandizement (Levinas, 1986) rather than reflect more critically on the tension and ambiguities that they often feel. Second, and related, we explore a limited range of discourses on ethics that might encourage academics to transform their subjectivity in ways that push these tensions to their limits rather than manage them simply through cynicism and/or (apparent) instrumental compliance (Shore, 2008). One matter of importance is to see a distinction between identity and subjectivity where the former is a ‘bounded, ego-indexed habit of fixing and capitalizing on one’s own selfhood’ (Braidotti, 2011: Location 129), whereas subjectivity is more an openly negotiated and ever-changing positioning, reflecting a multiplicity of material and non-material relations. This is of significance to us insofar as we see careerism as the preoccupation with establishing an (unattainable) secure identity that tends to deflect or render opaque any sense of a nascent ethical and embodied engagement that could be a response to ambiguity and tension around new managerialism. Our concern here with treating the ambiguities and uncertainties of our respondents as a resource to reflect on possible responses to managerialism other then careerism and the pursuit of identity, distinguishes this article from our other publications. While the data we drew on in each case is different, our first article discussed academic work as a central life interest or love (Clarke et al., 2012), whereas the second focused on the ever-proliferating insecure identities surrounding academic work (Knights and Clarke, 2014). Of course, we see these analytical and practical concerns as intimately interrelated.

The article is organized as follows. We begin by elaborating on the argument that we have outlined by examining the growth of new managerialism in UK universities (Ford et al., 2010; Harley, 2002; Parker and Jary, 1995; Pollitt, 1995) and then consider the implications for academics in terms of career just prior to introducing ideas around ethical engagement. Before presenting our data on business school academics, we provide a summary of our research design, methods of data collection and analysis and, after the empirical section, we discuss careering and the self in relation to our concerns about ethical subjectivity.

Careering as a response to new managerialism in UK universities

An audit and accountability culture has progressively swept a path through western public sector management over the last 25 years owing largely to neo-liberal beliefs in quasi-market procedures of competition and transparency regulating professional employees such as academics (Lorenz, 2012). Consequently, academics have experienced their working lives as increasingly subject to various managerialist pressures to perform, and these disciplinary techniques of evaluating research output, teaching quality and public/social impact assessments have become normalized and naturalized (Clarke et al., 2012; Harley, 2002; Harley and Lee, 1997; Keenoy, 2003; Mingers and Willmott, 2013). Both research (now including social impact) and teaching have been assessed at four or five-year intervals since the late 1980s by external agencies. Although the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) was renamed the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2009, our participants continued to use the former terminology.

Because research was more amenable to quantified measures and ranking than teaching (Lorenz, 2012), it became a basis for marginal increases in state funding linked to publication performance. It has also engendered competition between universities, departments and academics and reinforced individualistic careerist strategies, as opposed to collegial and scholarly values (Shore, 2008). This managerialism ‘invite[s] and reward[s] academics who willingly restrict their work to duties and activities that provide the greatest measurable, visible output for the lowest risk and least effort’ (Willmott, 1995: 1024).

New managerialism in universities cannot easily be resisted, since it is predicated on the mobilization of vernacular meanings surrounding terms like accountability, flexibility, quality and transparency (Lorenz, 2012) that seem intrinsically laudatory. While our study is specific to business schools and the UK, a burgeoning literature is testament to the idea that such audit cultures are becoming increasingly pervasive, across universities and disciplines (for a detailed review and analysis see Sparkes, 2013). Clearly, new managerialism cannot be separated from relations of power/knowledge (Foucault, 1980) and as academics we subject ourselves to the proliferation of performance measures, which in turn contributes to prevailing technologies of the self and self-discipline (Foucault, 1988). Consequently, individuals transform themselves into ‘subjects that secure their sense of meaning, identity and reality’ through engaging precisely in the very practices that power invokes (Knights, 2002: 582), thus deflecting a reflexive ‘critical ontology of ourselves’ or the genealogy of our historical self-formation (Chan, 2000: 1059; Foucault, 1984a). Managerialist practices render subjects visible through observation and normalizing judgements (Foucault, 1980) that often result in an ‘unthinking regulation of our selves’ (Reedy and Learmonth, 2011: 124) in pursuit of career, so both internal and external regulation can be the targets of disruption. Still, managerialist practices and careering as a means to secure identity are not without their contradictions, tensions and self-defeating effects, not least because of the unpredictability of the other in seeking social confirmation for the self (Luckmann and Berger, 1964; Mead, 1934).

As a project of self-management, career is ‘a defining feature of contemporary subjectivity’ (Grey, 1994: 480), albeit one associated largely (but not exclusively) with the middle class so-called professional worker. Subjects experience their lives in terms of ‘linear progressive career stages in a hierarchy of increasing professionalism’ (Gleeson and Knights, 2006: 283) that transcend economics to include the whole self, so that career is a signifier – ‘we are what we make of ourselves’ (McKinlay, 2002: 596, 597). Insofar as this is imposed upon us by repressive regimes, we need to problematize it, but this responsibility requires ‘work by the self on the self’ (Foucault, 1997a: 286) that enables us to ‘practice a certain code of conduct and construct our own morality’ (Bardon and Josserand, 2011: 507).

Neo-liberal managerialist discourses rely on ideal members, rendering employees wholly responsible to meet the ever-inflating demands of the organization and to go the ‘extra mile’ – although of course it is never enough (Davies and Peterson, 2005a: 90). The ethos of modern culture means that everyone has total personal responsibility to realize their own human potential and is obliged to strive unendingly and without limits to extend themselves in pursuit of this unattainable ideal (Costea et al., 2012). Academics, then, must ‘manage their own career ambitions’ (Adcroft and Taylor, 2013: 836), and thus as subjects they/we readily become ‘the principle of [our] own subjection’ (Foucault, 1979: 203) through fashioning potential (Gergen, 1992), or ‘preferred versions of ourselves’ (Kornberger and Brown, 2007: 500).

Foucault’s concept of governmentality involves not only the control and surveillance of subjects, but also the regulation of their souls in ways that sustain self-discipline through the dividing practices of normalizing judgements and techniques of individualization. These techniques turn subjects in on themselves so that they come to depend on their own identities for a sense of social significance (Foucault, 1982, 1991), transforming the individual into an object for purposes of self-improvement (Miller, 1987; Townley, 1995; Winiecki, 2006). This involves ongoing maintenance and refurbishment usually through intense identity work, requiring the continuous presentation of a (competent) self in everyday life (Goffman, 1959).

Identity management often manifests itself in contemporary academia through instrumental game-playing, as a response to the performative demands of managerialism (Gabriel, 2010; Harding et al., 2010). This is evidenced by the preoccupation with specific metrics of ranking such as journal lists and the h-index (Burrows, 2012; Cluley, 2014), because academic careerism is predicated on a pragmatism that ‘reinforce[s] and responds to its own seductive discourse – the promise of success’ (Clarke et al., 2012: 11). However, such performative demands can also result in contradictions and tensions, leading academics to experience double lives:

We liked to think of ourselves as people who want to write and teach in ways that reflect our moral, political and aesthetic concerns. However, we had become increasingly conscious that another, more disturbing self was simultaneously trying to pursue with ‘skill and courage . . . the [career] game’ (Macdonald and Kam, 2007: 641) often played in academia. (Learmonth and Humphreys, 2012: 103)

Recently, this career game has generated a comparative neglect of teaching and students in favour of research and writing, partly because publication output has a measurable status that lends itself to the preoccupation that new managerial regimes have with ranking individuals, organizations and institutions. Lynch (2014: 13) argues that ranking has ‘profoundly transformed what we choose to do, who we try to be, and what we think of ourselves in higher education’.

However, power and discipline, whether over others or the self, can be positive and productive as well as negative and repressive, such that we begin to challenge the norms and conventions and refuse to be what we have become through these exercises of power (Foucault, 1982). This is part of what Foucault (2011) describes as the ethical and aesthetic self-formation process, where there is a transformation of the relationship one has with oneself and a willingness to be truthful despite the risks. Rather than pursue conventional approaches in terms of deontological, utilitarian or virtue ethics, he returned to ancient Greece to examine how to reconstruct ourselves as ethical subjects by transforming and taking care of the self in a parrhesia commitment to tell the truth, despite risks to ourselves (even to our very lives), as opposed to avoiding disrupting relations, or in democratic terms – losing support (Foucault, 1984b, 1986, 1997a, 1997b, 2011). Consequently, if we are to ‘explore the limits that constitute our subjectivity’ (Barratt, 2008: 518), we need to be equally concerned to judge critically the subjugating procedures of audit, accountability and performativity as with interrogating our embodied and emotional attachment to the identities and careers that sustain them. In doing so, we believe it may be possible to develop our work and our relationships with colleagues and students in a more embodied and engaged ethical manner, as advocated by posthumanist feminists who also draw on Derrida (1982), Foucault (1997a), Levinas (1985) and Spinoza (1955) in their deliberations on ethics (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2011, 2013; Gatens and Lloyd, 1996).

In the remainder of this article, we explore and theorize the tensions, contradictions and ethical dilemmas that revolve around careerism and its tendency to leave academics disengaged from practices that do not directly enhance their career profile, such as teaching and spending ‘time with students’ (Lynch, 2014: 13).

Research design

While it is perhaps unusual ‘for academics to expose their doubts, fears and potential weaknesses’ (Humphreys, 2005: 852), it is by no means entirely unique (Sparkes, 2007). Perhaps somewhat ironically, the demands of new managerialist regimes in universities have stimulated a growing critical literature. This too is an in-house study of our own profession attempting to ‘capture the inter-subjectivity of organizational life in a thoughtful and empathetic fashion’ (Alvesson et al., 2008: 7). At one level, it is perhaps easier to conduct in-house research because of a familiarity with the culture that facilitates the construction of meaningful questions as well as a currency for detecting any dissembling on the part of respondents. Also, as in this case study, a network of existing relations ensures access is less problematic, although this always poses a risk of offending colleagues. However, arguably there are twin dangers: being too close to the data to take a considered view because of the ‘agonizingly familiar “us”’ (Bell and King, 2010: 432); or going native by virtue of being a member of the community under investigation. We have sought to reduce these dangers through continuous interrogation of our findings between ourselves and with other close colleagues.

Traditionally, academics have ‘tended to neglect their own labour process’ (Ogbonna and Harris, 2004), but another rationale for choosing academics to study is that they (we) have been subject to the same managerialist rationalizations and demands that as management scholars we study in other organizations. Studying ourselves cannot only help us to understand academic life, but may also aid our understanding of ‘the complexities and contradictions in other workplaces’ that have adopted managerialist strategies (Harding et al., 2010: 103). This is the case because all managerialism and its illusion of a sense of mutual recognition colonizes the subject to perform in accordance with the instrumental objectives of organization, and imposes a subjectivity that undermines ‘the possibility of a genuinely just and therefore ethical community’ (Hancock and Tyler, 2001: 581).

In interpreting our data, we are aware that we have inevitably given priority to certain features and responses in the research (Watson, 1995), but since all ‘fieldwork is a creative endeavour’ (Clarke et al., 2009: 329) we do not pretend to develop constructions of reality that are either politically or morally ‘neutral’.

Data collection

We conducted our research within eight different UK Business Schools during 2009/10, and carried out 52 semi-structured interviews with lecturers, senior lecturers, readers and professors. The vast majority of our participants came from organization studies departments, although there was also some representation from human resource management and marketing. These individual groupings surfaced more similarities than differences in their accounts and, therefore, we have not sought to differentiate their quotes. Academics in management and organization studies should be able to reflect on the imposition of regimes and so our method of sampling was to some extent purposeful; we specifically targeted organizational scholars because they write and teach about management control, power, performativity and resistance. Perhaps then they ought to be even ‘better equipped than most’ (Keenoy, 2003: 138) to articulate a critique. Our sample was also self-selecting, insofar as participants had to respond voluntarily to an invitation to take part in the study.

Interviews lasted between 45 minutes and 70 minutes in duration, and were digitally recorded and fully transcribed. Participants were split 60:40 in terms of males and females respectively, and their ages ranged from 29 through to 68. These were interviews or ‘conversations with a purpose’ (Burman, 1994) – that of elucidating the impact of new public management on academic identities. Despite this focus, we invited participants to talk about themselves and their work through open and general questions such as ‘what drew you into higher education?’ and ‘when you meet strangers, how do you articulate what you do for a living?’.¹

Data analysis

Of course, as ‘language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier’ (Bogan, 1970), yet in analysing our data, we were cognizant that language also ‘filters experienced realities’ (Ybema et al., 2009: 304), and that discursive practices are both a condition and consequence of ‘the power relations that characterize any setting at a particular moment in time’ (Hardy and Phillips, 2004: 305). The discursive themes, which we are about to present, reflect and reproduce these power relations: first, in participants disclosing them to us – a specific audience with shared membership to the academic community; and second, as a product of our own exercise of power in turning them into particular stories composed from the data (Charmaz, 2002).

We employed a multi-stage inductive approach to our data analysis (Kuhn, 2009): all our data were transcribed and entered into NVIVO where we worked iteratively through a process of identifying a number of emergent categories that were then expanded or collapsed depending on how well they were populated. Initially, through the employment of template analysis – ‘a loose and flexible form of analysis’ (King, 2004: 256) – we refined these categories into first-order concepts (such as professionalism, career, promotion, morality) that we then sub-divided into second-order analytical concepts such as ethics, success, tension, a focus on advancement, performativity and material/symbolic rewards. Since we subscribe to the view that ‘social interactions cannot be fully understood without reference to the discourses that give them meaning’ (Phillips and Hardy, 2002: 3), we then critically analysed our data to understand how participants deployed particular (neo-liberal) discourses to reproduce and reshape ‘existing social and power relations’ (Fairclough, 1995: 77). Through discursive positioning, participants authored their own experiences in academia to create particular versions of reality.

Some of the questions in our research provoked responses that demonstrate how business school academics in their current circumstances may increasingly have their eyes on the future – sometimes at the expense of what they are doing in the present. For example, while it can be argued that their work has primarily been rooted in a love and passion for what they do (Clarke et al., 2012), we now witness (in our interviews and everyday contacts), a tendency for academics to be interested more in where they publish rather than what they publish (Macdonald and Kam, 2007). Additionally, the career reward system increasingly seems to lure them away from other traditional primary concerns, such as teaching, into ‘productive work’ that ‘gives all published work a uniform dollar value’ (Davies and Peterson, 2005a: 85).

In common with most research projects, we are aware of the many methodological limitations in our study. First, in asking for ‘volunteers’ to take part in our study it is necessarily self-selecting in ways that unpredictably affect the findings. Second, we feel that our specific sample may benefit in the future from a broader base – both in using the business school in general as a population, and extending this research beyond the business school into other areas of the university to gauge whether these are issue of widespread concern among other faculty members, although research tells us that the problems seem to surface as similar issues elsewhere; for example, in sports and health (Sparkes, 2007, 2013) as well as in faculties of education (Davies and Petersen, 2005a).

We now turn to a presentation of our data: first, on careering subjectivities that are constituted through ‘technologies of power and the self’ and, second, on the tensions and ambiguities that sometimes lead to the ‘problematizing of careering’.

Technologies of power and the self

In this first part of the data section, we present excerpts from participants’ narratives and analyse these in the context of our analytical framework of technologies of power and the self. These individualizing technologies are predicated on ideas of visibility, rendering individuals both observable to the self and to others – to see and be seen. Discipline in this sense operates as an economy of power without force, under a steady and calculating gaze, which rewards or penalizes specific behaviours through observation, norms and the examination (Foucault, 1975).

Our data supported the notion that careering practices were predicated on notions of visibility as a seemingly unambiguous route to promotion:

[T]he formal bureaucracy says I need to publish four good articles by 2012 and, if I do that, de facto, I become a good academic, because I get a promotion . . . if I do it again, in another four years, I’ll be a Professor and it’s as simple as that. That is their definition of a ‘good’ academic. (Lecturer)

Any planned ascent up the bureaucratic hierarchy was discursively linked to a single-minded pursuit of visible and tangible achievements capable of clear measurement under examination; a procedure that combines processes of observation and normalization (Foucault, 1975):

I mean my Head of Group has been very clear to me about what it’s going to take for me to progress through my career so that’s been great, where the goalposts are in terms of moving ahead in my career . . . I know how to tick those boxes. (Lecturer)

This participant interprets the advice as helpful, but care is simultaneously an opportunity to control; the individual is transformed into a case to be analysed and described, while these specific practices act as ‘a mechanism of selection and exclusion’ (Foucault, 2001: 173). We argue that demonstrating ‘competence’ through transparent quantified measures is little more than a fantasy; a form of ‘qualispeak’ (Darbyshire, 2008). However, for many participants it was vital that examination ‘evidence’ was capable of unambiguous assessment, and in this sense participants were keen to assemble their own ‘field of documentation’ (Foucault, 1975):

I’ve just gone for promotion and you’ve got to obviously fill in something about your teaching [where] . . . you can take creative license, but there’s no arguing about whether you got into the journal Organization Studies or not. (Senior Lecturer)

This participant embraces visible quantification in ways that reflect the very power of new managerialist rhetoric, constituting the subject through precise norms of ‘objective’ excellence that foreclose other narratives (Davies and Peterson, 2005b). Consequently, whether or not a so-called 4* journal indicates excellence is not interrogated, for it already constitutes a particular regime of ‘truth’. In this context, academic ‘achievers’ are lionized, commanding high salaries and appearing to ‘thrive on a fantasy of spectacular success . . . and a fantasy of recognition’ (Davies and Peterson, 2005a: 85):

[T]he requirements of the RAE … seem to drive the sector in terms of promotion . . . it’s just changed everything[. Y]ou’ve got your equivalent of Ronaldo, Drogba and Messi in the sector – but not as educators – as Researchers. You don’t ever see the great teachers in there . . . that’s where the divide exists. (Lecturer)

In Foucauldian terms, the self-disciplining individual works on rendering themselves visibly superior in comparison with others, exploiting the self fully as ‘the new strategic possibility’ (Veyne et al., 1993: 7). Processes of observation, normalization and hierarchical ranking are intended to differentiate deviant behaviour from ‘normal’ or desired behaviours, and to encourage correction (Foucault, 1975). As such particular regimes of truth emerge: ‘I wouldn’t advise anyone to write a book – it’s career suicide’ (Professor).

This normalizing judgement oppresses and silences deviance – under the gaze, what does not meet the rule departs from it, requiring correction. Individuals are constituted through these knowledge–power effects so writing a book may be punishable and terminal, by career-death.² This reflects and reproduces one significant element of ‘careering’ practices – a disregard for activities not linked with personal advancement and individual career aspirations. It appears as one condition, and near totalizing effect of neo-liberal discourse:

Some of it comes from the university . . . some of it comes from your own desire to do well and improve yourself . . . to climb the greasy pole. (Senior Lecturer)

Every time I do a piece of field work I’m looking at trying to get another publication out, [thinking] ‘where will it take me when I leave here?’. (Lecturer)

Reinforcing this paucity of ideals, another participant was convinced that being a successful academic now required one to be mechanistic rather than creative: ‘[T]here’s almost a Fordist element to publishing and once one paper’s finished then you are thinking about the next paper . . . increasingly, it’s beginning to feel like a production line’ (Professor).

This preoccupation with output can be at the expense of scholarly content since it focuses on where rather than what to publish, and increasingly leads academics to follow a formulaic style or ‘prescribed template’ (Corbett et al., 2014: 8). Perhaps, as academics are subjected to increasingly intense workloads (Ogbonna and Harris, 2004), they are in effect directing their energies where it will maximize career potential (Clarke et al., 2012: 8) perhaps as compensation for traditional values that are being eroded (Keenoy, 2003). Certainly, some suggested that different values were evident in the past, although there is some danger of nostalgia here. Nonetheless, the game of careering does deflect academics from thinking and doing otherwise, or from seeking an ethical and embodied engagement with work practices and relations:

If I’d perhaps started prior to that [the RAE], I might have had some ideals, particularly around research and teaching. I’ve come into it late enough to state ‘well this is the game’ and there’s a pragmatist aspect of me who just thinks, ‘well, okay’. (Senior Lecturer)

It is clear that far from being unthinking ‘cultural dopes’ (Garfinkel, 1967), participants made conscious decisions about where to channel their time and energies, and most often with individual promotions and career strategies in mind. In this way, academics transform themselves into perfect ‘neo-liberal’ subjects, for ‘techniques of control work best when they make individuals “want” what the system needs in order to perform’ (Thornborrow and Brown, 2009: 370). It might be possible to argue that if student-as-consumer discourses gather momentum (e.g. the National student survey), this may provoke a shift in academic effort into teaching. However, this would merely relocate careerist strategies, rather than challenge or problematize them. Indeed, some of our data support such a view:

If this institution had always valued teaching as being what mattered and being innovative in your teaching and so-on, I can guarantee that I wouldn’t have so many publications, but I would be an all-singing and all-dancing teacher. But it hasn’t been that way and teaching isn’t valued here. (Professor)

Here we see an example of Foucault’s notion that power works not just on people, but through them. Our data also provide ample support for Grey’s idea that pursuing careers may actively ‘displace all other values, goals and relationships’ (1994: 482), and even cherished ideologies: ‘[W]hat I’ve learned from being here is that you sacrifice your integrity for ambition in university life’ (Lecturer).

Arguably then, the pursuit of a successful career encourages and reinforces tunnel vision;³ rendering the academic blind or indifferent to that which is other, or to the truth of ‘otherness’ (Foucault, 2011: Location 7632). As such, myopic strategies disregard the consequences of pursuing individual careers at the expense of activities that might be deemed ethically valuable, but not institutionally valued. Pursuing careers in this way can also be seen as an attempt to render the world orderly and stable so that it does not too readily disrupt any sense of a secure self (Knights, 2006).

Nonetheless, power and knowledge effects are never totalizing. We now turn to some of our more ambivalent narratives that incorporate deliberations on refusing the subjectivity imposed upon them by managerial regimes, and reflections on wider moral and ethical issues.

Problematizing careering

[A]n academic who is happy to contribute is one that is not necessarily completely individualistic and career-orientated. (Senior Lecturer)

So far, it may appear that as authors we are culpable and neglectful on two counts: subscribing to the notion that academics comprise an undifferentiated and homogenous set of docile bodies; and failing to provide ‘a nuanced picture of the diverse discourses’ (Kuhn, 2009: 682) to which academics are exposed. However, the complexities that arise from our data and everyday lives in academia render this convenient (although somewhat compelling) narrative unsustainable, and disingenuous. In this section, we have therefore sought to give more attention to how the ambiguities and tensions can be, and sometimes are, problematized and managed differently by academics. Rarely did this result, however, in a passionate, embodied and ethical engagement with their work; it was usually simply a discursive device for acknowledging some of the contradictory consequences of compliance with managerialist regimes.

Ambiguity and ambivalence often resulted in participants’ struggling with performative demands:

It’s like standing on Tower bridge as it starts to open – you have to choose. For instrumental publishing academics it’s very, very clear. For those happy not to research and who love teaching, again, it’s very clear. Us, the poor sods standing on the opening bridge with one foot each side, are the most troubled. (Senior Lecturer)

Tensions were also expressed in relation to contemporary academia as a site of intensification, where academics are expected, but unlikely, to excel in all areas. Some participants reflected on these uncomfortable conundrums:

I’m conflicted because game-playing is morally dubious . . . on the other hand there is an element of ‘if you can’t beat them join them’, but I feel aggrieved that I’m forced onto the horns of such a dilemma. (Senior Lecturer)

Thus, although conscious of the ethical dilemma in playing the ‘game’ – a set of procedures and ‘rules by which truth is produced’ (Foucault, 1997a: 297) – this person feels compelled to avoid being singled out or divided from what is considered normal. The question for Foucault is not to ‘break free’ of this power, which is not ‘bad in itself’, but to ‘acquire the rules of law, the management techniques and also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self that will allow us to play these games with as little domination as possible’ (Foucault, 1997a: 298). However, we have often heard academics reasoning (as did a 4* journal editor when advising early career academics) that securing your four publications enables you to ‘stick two fingers up to the Dean’ and provides you with free space. While ‘dressed up’ as a form of resistance, this is the opposite of the ethical self that Foucault is encouraging since, as a form of compliance, it merely serves to reinforce rather than challenge the dividing practices of managerialism:

[I]n some ways it changes your relationship with . . . research, because you have to be more instrumental about what you do and I think that’s sometimes to the detriment of what you do. It forces you to get outputs. (Senior Lecturer)

I do see that academics have got quite pragmatic in thinking about research output and impact, a loss of intellectualism . . . having to deal with people whose sole agendas are about their career. (Lecturer)

There was also a tendency to criticize and constitute the Other; those who aspired to the ‘organizational ideal’ of single-minded dedicated research at the expense of collegial relations: ‘Unfortunately, many people have been rewarded who are very bad citizens but have pursued their own career purely through publications, effectively’ (Professor).

This participant is providing an example of how attempts to secure the self marginalize other values, but he is also engaging in the dividing practice of elevating himself over the other. In attempting to secure the self, participants simultaneously constructed themselves (and others) in relatively disembodied ways, thus displacing an ethical engagement with ‘substantive values’ (Kuhn, 2009: 685):

I thought all academics would be passionately concerned with their students coming out with a fantastic education . . . It was a deeply upsetting experience to find out that that wasn’t the case. (Senior Lecturer)

I think what I’m surprised at, if I’m honest, is how career-minded people are. (Lecturer)

Accepting that careerism has a tendency to displace other activities (Grey, 1994), the demands on academics to publish can also be positive. So these ideas are not mutually incompatible because often (although not always) the input of reviewers does lead to improved intellectual quality. However, when the output and type of journal takes precedence over the content, this is arguably more problematic:

There is a sense in which the UK research assessment exercise (RAE) is seen as having changed the ‘rules of the game’, and that to become successful means perhaps an erosion of the more traditional values of being an academic. (Professor)

Lorenz (2012: 613) suggests that managerialism ensures conformity through linking output with economic reward, thus displacing ‘intrinsic satisfaction’. It is the case that participants overwhelmingly talked of teaching as not attracting rewards in terms of promotion, yet some continued to invest time and energy in improving the pedagogic experience: ‘[Y]ou don’t seem to get promoted on the basis of spending all of your time designing innovative, effective courses. I do that as a discretionary thing’ (Senior Lecturer).

There was even talk of others being ‘too good’ at teaching, spending too much time on this activity and thereby attracting negative criticism:

I’ve heard comments about people who spend a lot of time preparing teaching along the lines of ‘they’ve obviously got a lot of time on their hands if they can fiddle about creating pod casts for their lectures’. So the implication is that those people are not as worthwhile [as] they can’t be focusing on their research. (Senior Lecturer)

In Foucauldian terms, these observations and explicit judgements show clearly what is good/desirable and what needs correcting, so power creates the reality and rituals of truth. The subtext is required to promote feelings of self-consciousness in the deviant for purposes of correction. As we have seen, this notion of dividing practices is an important exercise in power and essential to procedures of normalization. However, some participants challenged these judgements, and raised explicit moral concerns around the neglect and even disdain for what (at least in the past) was considered a fundamental part of an academic’s job:

[I]t’s not like a surprise – you know, that you got the job and then suddenly someone asked you to teach and you thought, ‘What! No-one told me about this’. I always find it quite amazing how some academics don’t like teaching and aren’t very good at it . . . I mean I don’t want to spend my whole life teaching, but I consider it a really important aspect of the job and something I actually enjoy. (Professor)

In talking about academic life, participants did not confine their talk only to careerist strategies. Neither did they express themselves in terms of simple dualisms between teaching and research, for they occasionally incorporated other activities such as administration, knowledge exchange and ‘service’ to both the university and to their profession. That said, our interviewees did focus mainly on the competing demands between teaching and research.⁴ Despite the pressures to focus their time on research, some respondents reflected on a more ethical sense of subjectivity where commitments to publishing did not displace their ‘open’ and embodied engagement with students and a concern to facilitate their emotional, moral and intellectual development. These took various forms, such as expressing the utmost belief in teaching, as well as advocating a wider dissemination of information beyond readers of journals:

If you think about what we’re supposed to be here for in the very beginning, then it isn’t just about research, it is hugely about passing it on . . . and that’s not writing for each other in four star journals. (Senior Lecturer)

Of course, any sense of subjectivity is ‘constituted by the other it is not’ (Roberts, 2005: 634) and there were noticeable attempts by some to ‘author themselves as moral beings’ (Clarke et al., 2009: 323). A few of our participants distanced themselves from blatant careering strategies and sought to be more ethically engaged with students: ‘[A]lthough I know that I can be unpopular if I fight for the student experience, I will continue to do so and . . . in a way that rewards me’ (Senior Lecturer).

However, almost all our participants acknowledged how teaching and professional dedication to the students involves sacrifice in terms of research time, and while not always explicitly described as career limiting, it was certainly not seen as a career advancing strategy:

Every hour spent preparing for teaching is an hour when you’re not sitting there with fingers on the keys producing something. The RAE has dominated to the extent that our teaching has suffered. (Reader)

I really believe that I want to be a good Lecturer and that students deserve to have a decent standard of delivery from us . . . [However, it is not] . . . part of the career development here. (Lecturer)

While academics have always valued research and publishing as a part of their professional work, the audit and accountability culture has transformed attitudes to teaching. Rather than being seen as integral to university life, teaching is treated by some academics as a ‘necessary evil’ (Professor) that must be dispensed with by deploying the least amount of time and effort.

However, we have shown in this section of the data that although ambivalence and ambiguity was by no means a universal response, it was nevertheless articulated by a number of our interviewees, with varying degrees of disquiet. There were those who reported ways to seek out a more embodied engagement with their work, where a passionate activism (Spinoza, 1955) rather than instrumental compliance would inform their relationships to ideas, students and colleagues. Still, there remained some participants for whom reward in terms of career or financial incentive was of little consequence, preferring a more aesthetical embodied way of engaging with academic life:

[R]eward comes from some intrinsic thing so you don’t need to think of reward as being in terms of financial or promotion type terms. (Senior Lecturer)

I don’t get measured on the output of a student feeling like they got looked after, but it is absolutely fundamental to a good education, it changed my life, my career . . . we are actually impacting peoples lives. It is tragic that so many of us as academics have lost sight of that possibility. (Reader)

In sum, the majority of our respondents were merely descriptive of the performative demands of new managerialism, while considerably fewer problematized careering as displacing other valuable activities. Fewer still demonstrated a ‘certain transfiguration of themselves as . . . subjects of action and as subjects of true knowledge’ (Foucault, 2005: 416). We now turn to our discussion to examine whether these problematizations might transform subjectivity in ways that produce and sustain active, embodied and ethical relations at work.

Discussion

Throughout this article we have sought to demonstrate how a preoccupation with career is becoming increasingly pervasive within UK business schools.⁵ We turn now to an examination of the implications of careering through academia, especially in relation to what we understand to be the problems associated with conceptions and practices of the self. The discussion is organized in terms of: first, technologies of power and securing the self through career; and second, different ethical subjectivities.

Technologies of power and securing the self

So far we have elaborated how Foucault’s notion of governmentality encompasses technologies of power such as hierarchical observation, normalization and the examination and technologies of the self, such as the dividing practices and self-discipline. In attempting to secure the self through careering, academics are inclined to court these practices of visibility. Of course, where we are not judged to be successful, these same processes may come back to haunt us as reifying mechanisms for dividing and ranking academics. This fuels the humanistic demand to be autonomous and tied to oneself for the purpose of realizing one’s own potential (Costea et al., 2012) and can be seen as an invidious mode of confinement – a potentially oppressive self-disciplinary force concerning which we should certainly remain ambivalent if not vigilant (Foucault, 1982, 1984a). Possibilities for elevation are seductive, constituting new regimes of truth and complex knowledge–power effects. Importantly, since these hierarchical judgements are predicated on excluding the majority, it is only the promise of ‘success’ that inspires the masses to continue participating – regulating both themselves and others.

Clearly, academics are not the first occupational group to be subjected (and attracted) to hierarchical processes of judgement and visible outputs, as we often feel more comfortable and secure when complying with an order that sustains seemingly unitary and stable identities. So, ‘whatever people may profess to think of ranking systems they do in subtle and unsubtle ways condition us to accept them as meaningful’ (Grey, 2010: 688). As Foucault suggests, however, there is inherent danger here for ‘the normalizing society reaches its zenith when the power of normalization itself becomes normalized’ (Covaleski et al., 1998: 297). We argue that careering reflects not only the institutionalization of managerialism, but also a preoccupation with securing the self both materially and symbolically.

Acknowledging that like any other occupational group academics are neither homogeneous nor without agency, we argue that their/our compliance is both a condition and consequence of careering. Instead of presenting ‘resistant’ selves, academics are inclined to comply with or conform to the demands of the performance culture, enticed, seduced and compensated by its potential rewards. Success, however, is highly individualistic, promising ‘the narcissistic pleasure of competence and accomplishment’ (Roberts, 2005: 624), while perfectly fulfilling the formal demands of the organization. While offering material or economic advantages, career is also symbolic in the sense that it provides the appearance of a stable and coherent self, which is perhaps all the more salient in the increasingly competitive context of audit, accountability and control.

Of course, any attempt to secure the self is potentially problematic and self-defeating. First, the self can never be secured because it is dependent on unpredictable Others – and, as we have shown, ranking processes, by definition, exclude the majority of subjects. Second, a preoccupation with self provides an illusion of autonomy, which occludes other truths (Foucault, 2011). Third, so-called acts of resistance, such as securing four publications as a way of creating ‘free space’, is somewhat illusory for it does little to challenge the managerialism that fuels the demands and instead simply sustains the appearance of the ideal organizational subject.

Engaged ethical subjectivities

Technologies of power and the self are to be distinguished from Foucault’s later work on ethics and aesthetics where the self-formation process becomes more reflexive and resistant to existing regimes of governmentality, and the self is transfigured to fulfill personal standards of ethical and aesthetic practice (Foucault, 1997a). On the other hand, we have illustrated how the constitution of academics as particular neo-liberal subjects in contemporary academia ensures that these matters cannot be easily separated out, for, as Foucault suggests, ‘a challenge to prevailing power relations, especially relations of domination and control, entail[ed]s the elaboration of a new ethics, a new relations of self to self’ (Milchman and Rosenberg, 2007: 52).

Academics tend to comply with, rather than resist, the hierarchically produced normalized judgements and systems of audit and accountability. This passive compliance with rules or norms has been seen as incompatible with modern conceptions of ethics as it displaces any moral dilemma or situation of undecidability, thus removing any responsibility for decisive action from the subject (Derrida, 1982) or the commitment to hyper-activism that is necessary despite pessimism about its outcomes (Foucault, 1997b). In terms of a Spinozian sense of virtue, this prevents us making the ‘transition from passive thought’ to an embodied engagement in action as a necessary condition of ethical behaviour (Gatens and Lloyd, 1996). It could be argued that choices made (e.g. between investing in the activities of research or teaching) are both a condition and consequence of superfluous performative frameworks experienced by academics, which dictate that only the former are explicitly rewarded. However, from the ethical position that informs this article, it is not about making choices or seeking rewards, since once that happens we have already separated out humans from materials, self from other and subjectivity from responsibility (ethics). For Levinas, responsibility is a relation of bodily engagement ‘that precedes the intentionality of consciousness’ (1985: 95). We therefore subscribe to a posthumanist ethics (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2011, 2013) that derives from an ontology of life as involving entanglements with the world of others, material objects, and time and space. Ethics or responsibility is about our proximity to the other who is different from us but to whom we cannot be indifferent (Levinas, 1985) and it must therefore involve an ethical and embodied engagement with the other. Insofar as these performance audits are normalized, they are difficult to challenge partly because they reflect and reproduce the scholarly norms of academia to publish, but also have generated powerful career interests and thereby a disinclination ‘to rock the boat publicly’ (Shore, 2008: 292). Consequently, academics have colluded in, and thus sustained, these systems of accountability and control (Clarke et al., 2012). Yet, as we have intimated, the excessive preoccupation with audit, accountability and performativity are not exclusive to academia so that our research could well have implications for practices well beyond these boundaries.

While historically academics have failed to disrupt these ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault, 1980), individuals always have the potential to ‘develop their own art de vivre alongside the dominant ethos’ (Bardon and Josserand, 2011: 511) as a way of treating their lives as an ethical and aesthetic project (Foucault, 1997a, 2004). However, this requires abandoning the ‘narcissistic preoccupation with how the self and its activities will be seen and judged’ (Roberts, 2005: 620) and is thus a departure from feeding and fuelling notions of careering as a means of securing particular identities. One problem is that the rankings and other performative accoutrements are simultaneously ‘seductive as well as coercive’ in promising ‘valued identities for those who conform to and prosper within them’ (Lorenz, 2012: 618). Moreover, there is a paradox in that critiques by those academics that have been less successful in the rankings will tend to be dismissed as merely the result of envy or sour grapes so it is almost necessary to play the career game in order to have any credibility in undermining it. It just so happens that some of the more virulent critiques of the system have been produced by academics particularly well skilled in fulfilling its performative requirements (Thomas and Davies, 2002; Willmott, 1995, 2011). In effect, these have chosen neither absolute compliance nor total escape from the norms, rules and regulations.

Yet, ‘ethics requires a questioning of preconceived ideas and institutionalized norms’ (Pullen and Rhodes, 2014: 4) and perhaps an active bodily engagement with the world to refuse the self that we have become through so many procedures, regulations and exercises of power (Foucault, 1982, 1986, 1997a). Such questioning facilitates the promotion of ‘new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality’ (Covaleski et al., 1998: 324), which reflects Foucault’s (2005, 2011) hyper and pessimistic activism to make of the self an ethical and aesthetic project. Of course, being active does not necessarily mean abandoning scholarly concerns, but perhaps it obliges us to direct our activity toward continually challenging the ways that managerialist demands and regulatory procedures render us passively compliant as we seek to secure our own identities. For such compliance is only about a return to the same (Levinas, 1986) or reducing the Other to a mere ‘mirror for confirming the self’ (Knights, 2006: 265).

However, instead of this preoccupation with the self and its instrumental use of the other to secure oneself, scholarly activity allows for an embodied and political engagement with contesting organizational practices that subjugate us in ways that ‘close down’ or deny ‘difference’ (Pullen and Rhodes, 2014: 2). In seeking to develop such engagement, we can draw on the classical concept of parrhesia, as did Foucault (2001, 2011) in proposing his ethics for the self. Parrhesia is contrasted with other modes of truth telling (prophecy, wisdom and teaching) insofar as it is personal to both practitioners and their audience, and risky because it threatens those who might prefer not to hear the truth so ‘can therefore disrupt relations’ (Foucault, 2011: Location 823). Could such practices encourage a range of ‘organizationally submerged’ discourses and practices to resurface?

The extent to which there was considerable ambivalence and tension among our respondents, we believe, is a question of ethics of the kind we have discussed here. Many academics seek an ethical sense of self that is tied not only to scholarly publications in refereed journals, but also to a responsible engagement with students and colleagues as a way of facilitating a co-constituted formation of the ethical self through ‘bearing witness’ to different forms of life where we reflect upon, and interrogate ourselves about, not what is true or false but ‘our relationship to truth’ (Foucault, 1997b: 327). This is not about emancipating truth from power but ‘detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony social, economic and cultural within which it operates’ (Foucault, 1984b: 75).

Whether the modern secular age can find a ‘principle on which to base the elaboration of a new ethics’ is problematic (Foucault, 1997b: 255) and it has parallels with ancient Greece where parrhesia and the courage to risk being truthful in opposing ‘rules, conventions, customs, and habits’ existed alongside what Foucault felt were disgusting inequalities and exclusions. However, at the boundaries of cynicism he found an ascetic with the potential to purify the soul and put to bodily test a ‘position of otherness’ that seeks another world and another life (Foucault, 2011: Location 7589). While less than sanguine about the possibility of fashioning this ethical self, he retained a ‘hyper and pessimistic activism’ (Foucault, 1997b: 256) insofar as he felt ‘there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself’ (Foucault, 2005: 251–252). However, this relationship or caring for oneself is ‘not in order to escape from the world but in order to act properly in it’ (Gros, 2005: 702).

Processes of ethical subjectivation therefore involve a ‘pessimistic activism’ (Foucault, 2005: 256) that can often be found in the ‘anti-institutional force of heretical social movements’ (Munro, 2014: 1134). It is arguable that at present academics face what Foucault (2005, quoted in Munro, 2014: 1135) describes as ‘points of reversibility’ because there is an increasing concern to be ethical, less in terms of complying with deontological rules than in caring about the self as the embodiment of an ethics of engagement (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Pullen and Rhodes, 2014). At the same time, there is growing dissent about the performative pressures of new managerialism in universities (Sparkes, 2007, 2013; Willmott, 1995, 2011) and not only from ‘below’, but also from ‘above’ when, for example, the Minister for Universities argued that pressure on business school academics to publish in highly ranked journals resulted in their work being less ‘relevant’ than it might otherwise be (Willetts, 2013). Unfortunately, academics cannot rely on a challenge to managerialism from government as it is only likely to result in different forms of performance measures replacing the existing ‘publish or perish’ ones, and it appears that the writing is already on the wall in the form of the ‘impact’, student numbers and research funding mantras. Therefore, as Foucault insisted, we have to turn to ourselves in a search for a truth that risks career and possibly the ridicule of our managerialist masters, in order to open up space for difference and otherness. Although remaining pessimistically active, in our concluding thoughts we hint at some glimmers of optimism in the growing attention directed toward ethics and embodied engagement in organization and management studies.

Summary and conclusion

Against the background of a proliferation and intensification of audit, accountability and performativity in universities, this article has elucidated how academics are increasingly adopting careering strategies, thus largely complying with and reproducing rather than resisting the performative demands of managerialism. The celebration of accomplishment and resulting careerism is legitimized through the aspiration of meritocratic achievement, reward and ‘hyperindividualism’ (Ryan, 2012), which then becomes the end in itself, rather than a simple by-product of traditional scholarly activity. Of course, when aspirations are not realized then this meritocratic system often adds ‘the insult of shame’ to notions of failure (de Botton 2004: 91), which may fuel further attempts to secure material and symbolic success while ensuring academics maintain their ‘complicitous silence’ (Sparkes, 2013: 444).

Still, there were many that were uneasy or troubled by this compliance and a few who were intent on disrupting or at least following a different path, perhaps a path that embraced the sense of an ethical self. This provided us with the context for exploring an ethical position informed by a range of philosophical deliberations that provide mutual support for one another. Our main source of argument was based on Foucault’s discourse about the self-formation process of treating the self as an ethical and aesthetic project, but this was complemented by other work. For example, Derrida’s assertion that ethics occurs only at the point where there is no external guide or set of rules to resolve problems of undecidability is important in the sense that there is no moral decision involved when doing what we are told or simply obeying rules. This possibly accounts for the reported ambivalence that some of our respondents felt in being compelled and seduced into meeting the formal demands of managerialism, for they could see that its implications were often unethical in relation to others. This coincides with Foucault’s demand to construct an ethical self that encompassed a continuous challenge to the norms, rules and conventions of society. Levinas insisted that we take responsibility for the other in a way that is compatible with Foucault’s linking of truth and otherness, perhaps illustrated in our study by those participants who talked about care for their students and the possibilities of transformative classroom experiences. Reflecting Foucault’s demand for hyper activism, Spinoza held a belief that ethics is located in active embodied engagement rather than passive acceptance of things as they are and this found resonance in those respondents who were committed to teaching that transformed their students’ experience despite the penalties for doing so. Finally, the posthumanist feminist ethics of engagement eschews the disembodied and cerebral elevation of mind over body, masculinity over femininity, and the reduction of difference to diversity in ways that embrace Foucault’s (2011: Location 7384) claim that truth demands a position of otherness.

Perhaps we could argue that by expressing unease about academic careering, participants exhibited an ethics of parrhesia in ‘telling the truth without concealment’ (Foucault, 2011: Location 454). In this sense, we might also talk of problematization, where ‘a complex of power/knowledge relations or a set of practices become a “problem” and provoke “a crisis in the previously silent behaviour, habits, practices and institutions”’ (Milchman and Rosenberg, 2007: 52). Writing this piece is an attempt to challenge this silence, with some optimism that the reader may be provoked into undertaking similar reflection and deliberation on these matters. Nevertheless, we cannot escape from the notion that we ourselves do not stand outside of these practices, although we do see that this has potentially both positive and negative implications. Negatively, researching ourselves leaves us exposed in a number of ways. First, as academics researching other academics we may be vulnerable to criticisms of ‘gross self-indulgence’ (Coffey, 1999: 132), narcissism and futility (Delamont, 2009). Second, we may alienate our participants and colleagues in this ‘small world’ (Lodge, 1984) arena of academia. Third, and perhaps most importantly, by publishing our work on academics we are at risk of turning into a parody of ourselves. In challenging the regime while simultaneously mastering the formulaic models it prescribes, we risk emulating precisely the subjectivity that sustains the performative culture that we have critiqued. Positively, and partly in our defence, our research is not simply ivory tower scholasticism, for we are seeking to provoke academics out of their (our) passivity in complying with managerialist demands. In this sense, we are contributing not only to scholarly knowledge as that which some condemn as less than relevant (Hambrick, 1994), but also directing our work toward the practices of academics and their (our) ethical self-formation as part of what it is to resist the domination of managerial regimes (Foucault, 1997b). Feedback from conference presentations and plenaries suggests this is a topic that is of critical interest to many scholars and one that should not be ignored, even if it means we must all confront our own particular form of duplicity or ‘doubleness’ (Learmonth and Humphreys, 2012: 100). Such doubleness perhaps is inevitable, in that academics who wish ‘to critique and to undo some aspects of neoliberalism’ (Davies and Peterson, 2005b: 38) are paradoxically doomed in doing so by sustaining them; in crafting this article, we are embodying and reproducing these very practices ourselves.

So the problem for our academics and perhaps for all of us is one of preventing the performative and instrumental demands of the job displacing our non-performative and absorbed engagement with life whether at work or in everyday life. However, the attention within organization and management studies (Barratt, 2008; Munro, 2014; Pullen et al., 2015; Rhodes and Wray Bliss, 2013) currently being given to an ethics of engagement may provide all ‘pessimistic activists’ with a glimmer of hope and optimism for the future.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our three anonymous reviewers and Associate Editor Nick Turner for the insightful suggestions and comments provided, which helped us in developing this article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Caroline A Clarke works as a senior lecturer in Organization Studies in the Department of People and Organization at The Open University, UK. Dr Clarke’s research interests are primarily around identity, emotions and power and her most recent research relates to academics and business schools, published in Organization Studies and Scandinavian Journal of Management. Caroline is currently carrying out research with veterinary surgeons. [Email: caroline.clarke@open.ac.uk]

David Knights works in the Department of Organization, Work and Technology at Lancaster University and the Department of People and Organization at The Open University, UK. Professor Knights’ current research has been related to academics in business schools, the global financial crisis, the body and embodiment, and most recently, veterinary surgeons. He jointly created and continues to edit Gender, Work & Organization and is on the board of several other journals. [Email: david.knights11@outlook.com]

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