Drafting “foot soldiers”: The social organization of the war for talent

Abstract

The “global war for talent” refers to the increasing competition among organizations and regional governments for top employees. The concept of “war” in this context acts as a powerful metaphor, heightening the intensity with which organizational and regional leaders mobilize their efforts to create, attract, and retain “top talent.” However, this article argues that the “war for talent” is not a distant practice articulated between corporate and state spheres of action but a set of activities directly connected to those in higher education institutions. Framed through the theoretical and methodological approach of Institutional Ethnography, this study tracked students’ activities and experiences with a university’s economic development initiative, Generation Now, showing how the students’ experiences are connected to the global war for talent, how they become its foot soldiers, and with what consequences. More generally, tracing these connections is critical for making sense of contemporary modes of organizing in university classrooms, furthering class hierarchies and neoliberal rationales not necessarily related to students’ educational expectations in the conventional sense. Specifically in this case, experiences derived from classroom activities drafted and differentiated students for a war not of their making while naturalizing their “rightful” places in the global economy.

Keywords

Academic capitalism critical management studies critical university studies talent management Institutional Ethnography university education

The “global war for talent” refers to the increasing competition among organizations and regional governments for top employees in the global economy. The concept of “war” in this context acts as a powerful metaphor, heightening the intensity with which organizational and regional leaders mobilize their efforts to create, attract, and retain “top talent” (Michaels et al., 2001; Ng, 2011). However, the “war for talent” is not a distant practice “out there” conducted primarily on the terrain of corporations and governments, but rather a set of activities coordinated by, and coordinating, the everyday lives of many, including those activities that unfold in contemporary higher education institutions.

These dynamics became apparent to us during a 3-year study of an initiative spearheaded by university leaders in a northeastern state of the United States. The initiative—referred to here by the pseudonym of Generation Now—was intended to encourage more college and university students to remain in or return to the region after graduation, and can be understood as a local instance of the global war for talent.

The study was framed through the theoretical and methodological approach of Institutional Ethnography (IE) (Smith, 1987, 2005). This approach aims to understand how people’s lived experiences—that is, “the local”—are organized by external forces, processes, and ideologies that Smith calls “ruling relations.” These “ruling relations” are translocal forms of social organization and social relations mediated by texts, discourses, and practices which can be traced in order to map how people are linked to others across time and geography in ways that are not readily apparent. The goal of IE research is to provide informants with alternative accounts that legitimize their local experiences and practices, extending their knowledge and offering ways to “talk back” (Rankin and Campbell, 2009).

Methodologically, we tracked students’ experiences in classrooms and other activities, highlighting “moments of disquiet” (Campbell and Gregor, 2004: 92). In our observations, such moments, disjunctures in the IE lexicon, were shaped by expectations of the war for talent. We explored, specifically, how some students become “officers” while others become “foot soldiers,” as they take their “marching orders” from professors in support of a “chain of command” that extends from academic administrators to state governments and local business communities all the way to the diffuse “global” in an elusive “war for talent.” In this case, experiences derived from classroom activities drafted and differentiated students for a war not of their making while naturalizing their “rightful” places in the global economy.

The global war for talent

McKinsey consultants Michaels, Handfield-Jones, and Axelrod first named the global war for talent in a book advising businesses to fight harder to attract and retain their best employees: “the limited supply of very capable managers” (Michaels et al., 2001: 5). Observing the acceleration of global economic integration, these consultants exhorted organizations to wage war against other “hungry” organizations (Michaels et al., 2001: 4). Following this dictate, a growing body of management research has focused on uncovering the best battle strategies for succeeding in talent wars.

Talent management is distinct from human resources management in both discourse and practice (Minbaeva and Collings, 2013; Vaiman and Collings, 2013). While human resource management refers to practices driven by human resource departments, talent management is conceptualized as a set of practices to be carried out across all departments in organizations, rewarding and promoting excellent performance by attracting, retaining, and managing the most desirable workers (McDonnell, 2011) across the global talent pool (Al Ariss, 2013). “Scarcity” is a driving force in these arguments, and identifying and retaining scarce talent requires an overarching strategy.

Extending beyond the corporate world, the talent war has become a global battle for national and regional governmental leaders (Ng, 2011). In a global economy where a skilled knowledge-based labor force is seen as critical for organizations and localities (Mathur, 1999), people are considered to be “the main agents of economic growth” (Houston et al., 2008: 135). Thus, the need to draw the most talented people to a region has produced major endeavors for making cities and regions more appealing, building new infrastructure, and creating marketing initiatives that would attract professionals (Florida, 2002, 2008; Peck, 2005).

Consistent with this logic, the governor of the state discussed here announced in a 2008 press release that he had appointed a task force charged with retaining young people in the state. Referring to their “creativity and talent” he said,

It is our people—and the skills they have—that will ensure that [our state]’s economy continues to lead the nation. Our young people are vital to the future of our state’s economy, and we must do everything we can to keep their creativity and talents in [the state]. (Press release, February 2008)

Although consultants, business leaders, and regional governments have accepted the need for implementing new initiatives to attract and retain talent, analyses of the consequences of such programs show mixed results. Evidence indicates the programs are mostly beneficial to regional elites but they fail in their promises to expand opportunities for multiple segments of the population (Houston et al., 2008; Zimmerman, 2008) and often come at the expense of developing other socially needed infrastructure (MacLeod, 2001).

As well, the notion of “war,” frequently used as a metaphor for mobilizing attention, efforts, and resources on social issues, such as in the “war on drugs” and in “the war on poverty,” has been criticized; while discursively powerful, it tends to simplify and reduce complex problems to dichotomies of “good” and “evil,” and “winners” and “losers” (Best, 1999). Critics of the “war for talent” focus on its potential for fostering inequality within societies, rewarding only the “top” talent (Brown, 2003, 2013; Brown and Hesketh, 2004). Moreover, in the organization and management context, the “war for talent” is seen as relying on a “competitive framing that belies a mindset dominated by scarcity, competition, and fear” (Beechler and Woodward, 2009: 278), whereas improving organizational processes can be more important than finding the “best” people (e.g. Pfeffer, 2001). In fact, emphasizing the “top talent” over organizations and teams as wholes has been shown to have negative effects on performance (Beechler and Woodward, 2009).

Universities, business schools, and the war for talent

As regions join in the war for talent on behalf of local organizations and to attract new businesses, their leaders have drawn universities into this war as staging grounds for battle—that is, for building and maintaining local talent. Strong relationships among universities and organizations in the private corporate sector are often touted as beneficial for all parties involved, but there is also a different story to be told about these programs. University missions once included a broad spectrum of research programs and university scholars were expected to provide unbiased data on the effects of private industry on socio-culture, the economy, and the environment (Washburn, 2005). However, the spread of neoliberal policies and discourse shifted these expectations (Giroux, 2002), and the degree to which higher education institutions are currently focused on corporate imperatives is unprecedented (Kauppinen, 2012; Nedeva and Boden, 2010). Federal funds are now directed toward research that serves private corporate interests (Washburn, 2005), often through what has been labeled “academic capitalism” (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004) or through public–private partnerships aimed toward practicality and profitability (Brown and Tannock, 2009; Mars et al., 2008; Mars and Rios-Aguilar, 2010).

Regarding teaching aims, universities have traditionally served dual purposes—to prepare engaged citizens and to prepare skilled workers for future careers. Now, we see that the former dual purposes of higher education are collapsed into one, as definitions of “engaged citizenry” include a focus on market value. Being a responsible citizen today requires constant contributions to economic growth and ever-increasing consumerism (Suspitsyna, 2012). Higher education faculty is expected to produce highly employable workers who can transition seamlessly into global organizations (Mitchell, 2001, 2003).

Business schools are prime locations for observing these trends. Business schools, in particular, have a focus on preparing students to be immediately employable (Hall, 2008) in careers that are competitive and individualistic (Perriton, 2014). These schools have partnered with the private corporate sector in various ways including shaping their curricula to meet corporate employee standards. As well, regional governments devoted to very fast regional economic growth, such as in Singapore, have used business education—including offshoots of established MBA programs from the United States and/or Europe—specifically to develop citizens with the knowledge and enterprising characteristics to drive organizations and economies toward rapid growth (Ng, 2011; Olds and Thrift, 2005). Business schools are not simply intermediaries, disseminating scholarly knowledge from academics to aspiring practitioners. They also legitimize business knowledge and interests such that corporate interests ultimately have a greater impact on economic policy (Adler et al., 2007; Hall, 2008).

In the classroom, the development of management studies as a discipline, from Tayloristic principles to today has hinged on the possibility of demonstrating that individual identities and subjectivities can be molded into “appropriate individuals” of managerial control, whether overtly through close supervision or more recently under more subtle premises of workers’ self-control (Alvesson and Robertson, 2006; Alvesson and Willmott, 2002; Gagnon, 2008). Business schools thus work to shape “appropriate individuals” long before students graduate and join a work organization. They are explicit in their efforts to create a new citizenry capable of “managing themselves” according to corporate directives (Grey and Mitev, 1995).

Concurrently, with these rapid and clear shifts in higher education, students are increasingly taking the brunt of declines in public financial support, experiencing dramatic increases in their university tuitions, which also burden graduates with skyrocketing levels of debt (Washburn, 2005). While private corporations are benefiting in new ways from university research and teaching, individual students are carrying the costs (not always equally) for university activities that may not directly serve their own personal interests.

A new field of “critical university studies” has been emerging, addressed to the systematic dispossession of higher education as a neutral institution for the public good, and foregrounding how it has become a site of struggle between private commercial interests and more public ones (Williams, 2012). Importantly, as Williams notes, critical university studies analyzes how “higher education is an instrument of its social structure, reinforcing class discrimination rather than alleviating it” (p. 4). In complementary fashion, critical management studies has gained a degree of traction within business schools as a critique of the conservative neoliberal values dominating the Business school culture (Clegg et al., 2011; Reedy and Learmonth, 2009; Rowlinson and Hassard, 2011) and for questioning and rethinking the ends of management education (Adler et al., 2007; Grey, 2004). This study, as discussed below, can be understood as part of such efforts.

Generation now: setting the stage for a theater of war

Top administrators in a university system of a northeastern state of the United States launched Generation Now in 2007, a campaign to address concerns of the state’s largest corporations, particularly those linked to the high-tech sector. According to those who spearheaded the initiative, it was a response by government and university leaders to complaints from corporations about their difficulties finding people qualified to fill their open positions. State demographers confirmed the state’s recent decline in people under the age of 40, a sign that the state was losing its younger population. Generation Now was thus a multi-pronged approach to keep more young professionals in the region after college, driven by the assumption that organizations and regions needed to compete with and fight against other organizations and regions to attract and retain young workers in short supply and high demand, very much in accord with “the war for talent.”

The previously mentioned Governor’s Task Force, convened in 2008 to make recommendations regarding the challenge of attracting and retaining young people in the state, endorsed the Generation Now effort. The governor followed the task force recommendation by verbally supporting the initiative, but claimed lack of financial resources to do more than that. It was at this stage that we became involved, when apparently contradictory forces were impacting the launch of Generation Now.

The social organization of the war for talent: an IE understanding

Our study had a somewhat opportunistic beginning. The first author (E.P.) heard a radio program on which a university leader announced the aims of the Generation Now initiative. Moved by her interest in educational organizations and intrigued by the prospect of studying a change effort, she followed up with the administrator and was able to negotiate access to the project while it was still at this early phase.

From the start, a major component of Generation Now, and the focus of this study, included university administrators enlisting senior (undergraduate) marketing students to help develop a Generation Now marketing campaign. To achieve this, administrators from the university system began soliciting the cooperation of marketing professors from various colleges and universities in the system, asking them to use Generation Now as a “real-world” project in their courses. From the administrators’ perspective, these students could provide insights into the kind of marketing approaches likely to attract young people to live and work in the state. Professors from four marketing classes, one each at four different institutions—the state university’s highly regarded business school and three smaller state colleges—agreed to use Generation Now as a course project.

Guided by the orientation of IE, rather than thinking about the war for talent as something fought by organizational leaders that might distantly impact professors and students, we focused on the ways in which professors and students ultimately both recreated and resisted the war for talent in their everyday local experiences and actions. Sociologist Dorothy Smith (1987, 1999, 2005), developed IE to explore how everyday lives are influenced by strategies and plans formulated at higher levels of institutional hierarchies. As already indicated, this theoretical and methodological approach sheds light on people’s everyday experiences as they participate in the coordination of larger patterns of activities, revealing ways people become accountable to ideologies in which they participate without their explicit knowledge or attention; for example, “the war for talent” in our case.

In IE, “ruling relations” are those forms of social organization and relations that connect multiple and various sites of experience and “occur when the interests of those who rule dominate the actions of those in local settings” (Campbell and Gregor, 2004: 36). They are the courses of action originating, for instance, in the planning processes of those in positions of power, and spread across many local settings through concrete discursive and textual practices such as in the various modalities of texts articulating “talent wars.”

As developed by Smith, with influences from Bakhtin among others, discourses and texts are important in IE for they document which knowledge is considered legitimate. Through texts, the knowledge of ruling relations is codified and can be passed from site to site, while ground-level experienced knowledge not captured in text is lost (Campbell and Gregor, 2004; Smith, 1999). In Smith’s formulation, Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of dialogic in the emergence of meaning through coordinated local action among people (e.g. Gergen, 2015) is complemented by his later consideration of “secondary speech genres” (Bakhtin, 1986). These include complex and comparatively highly developed and organized cultural communication, often textual, such as novels, or scientific research. As such, socially organized activity among people results from “an active dialogue between what people are trying to get said and get done at any given moment of speech or writing, and what has been given prior discursive shape” such as scientific texts (Smith, 1996: 189). The aim of the institutional ethnographer is thus “to produce for people what might be called ‘maps’ of the ruling relations and especially the institutional complexes in which they participate” (Smith, 2005: 51), so they can recognize their own local knowledge, practices, and concerns as reasonable and possible, even if these were to contradict the dominant knowledge diffused through ruling relations.

For example, ruling relations become evident when government planners, concerned with economic growth, engage with regional leaders to ensure there are accessible populations of skilled workers by launching or supporting educational and marketing initiatives to shape and/or attract the desired workforce (Houston et al., 2008; Ng, 2011). Concurrently, through media messages and policies, government planning initiatives activate the “cultural circuit of capital” in everyday lives (Olds and Thrift, 2005). Management knowledge therefore implies engaging in a process of “instrumentalized commodification” with a set of highly politicized values underlying the spread of neoliberalism (Olds and Thrift, 2005: 274).

It was under these tenets of IE that we posed the following general research question: What are the implications of bringing Generation Now into business school classrooms? While this question is specific to the particulars of this project, the changing imperatives of public higher education more generally, from educating the citizens of the state to producing and retaining “talent” for global competitiveness have immediate consequences for students and extend more broadly from there. Thus, the study explored the ways in which professors and students were drawn into ruling relations through engagement with Generation Now. In particular, the experiences of students working with the Generation Now marketing campaign were examined through the following orienting questions: What ruling relations are shaping these students’ classroom experiences as they grappled with Generation Now? How do they participate and reproduce those same ruling relations?

Method

Methodologically, institutional ethnographers begin their research by tracing the experiences of people in local settings, and then move their inquiries outward to complexes of social relations. To address their orienting questions, they embed themselves in the field, and work from the standpoint of their subjects (e.g. Campbell and Gregor, 2004; Smith, 2005), focusing on the social organization of experience (Weigt, 2006). Analytically, they look for disjunctures, or moments of tension created when that which is coordinated by ruling relations contradicts the personal needs and understandings of individuals participating in them.

With IE as research approach, E.P. “followed” the initiative as it extended over several years (Porschitz, 2011). Taking the standpoint of those who were the targets of the initiative—university students—she became embedded in several activities of the marketing campaign. The ethnographer acted primarily as an observer of the students’ classroom work, but there were occasions when she was asked to participate in an activity, for instance, taking notes at meetings.

It is important to clarify that rather than striving for detached objectivity, institutional ethnographers continually work to unravel the ruling relations in which they themselves are entangled, and to reveal those relations to the extent possible in their writing (Smith, 2005). Thus, we attempt to expose some of the ruling relations that organized the actions of students and university administrators, but also our own actions as management scholars who do their work within management programs in public university systems.

Data collection and context

Early on, the university system administrators working on Generation Now were successful in enlisting marketing professors and their classes from the state university’s large business school and three smaller state colleges into the work of the initiative. E.P. negotiated access to the state university business school’s course, spending the spring semester of 2008 conducting field research as the students’ projects were evolving. She attended class as well as students’ group meetings, and engaged in informal conversations with the students and the professor. More limited access was negotiated with one of the smaller state colleges, with attendance at fewer class sessions and less informal time with students when the professor was not present. E.P. also participated as observer at the final activity of the initiative: public presentations made by the various marketing classes.

The two educational institutions where the researcher conducted fieldwork looked different in terms of student demographics and physical space. The large university has a beautiful campus setting, with a new business school building. It is also relatively expensive to attend, pays its professors much more, and has a much larger endowment. While the small college also has a picturesque campus, business classes take place in a building that clearly has not been renovated in decades. Attending the small college is less expensive than the large university, and it has a greater number of students who are the first generation in their family to attend college.

During data collection, notes were taken in the field, and more detailed fieldnotes were written immediately after each session using techniques from Emerson et al. (1995). The ethnographer also gathered documents produced by the Generation Now initiative as well as those produced by the students, including websites, reports, PowerPoint presentations, along with press releases and articles about the initiative and the students’ work. These all would function as codified knowledge; “texts,” in the IE lexicon.

Data analysis informed by the framework of IE was an ongoing iterative process in which each author participated. Analysis started in the field, during the production of fieldnotes, but also incorporated reading of the literature, and subsequent re-readings of fieldnotes continued into the writing process. In the next section, “Students or soldiers? A story of disjuncture,” we discuss how Generation Now coordinated students as appropriate individuals for the war for talent.

Students or soldiers? A story of disjuncture

In their first meetings with the marketing classes, the university administrators requested the students to develop marketing plans for Generation Now. They were asked to read through data collected in an earlier survey of students from several universities and colleges in the state, to gather more data from their own peers, and then create a marketing plan focused on enticing young college graduates to stay and work in the state. The students were to present their marketing plans at the end of the semester to state business and government leaders in a culminating event at a new theater in the state’s capital city.

As he introduced the project to the marketing class at the large state university, an administrator sought to present the task in concrete terms:

[If we encourage 323 more people to stay it] would have an economic impact of $375,000,000 over five years. These are people that you are eating with, sleeping in the dorms with, hanging out with. You are already with these people, so you can do something creative. (Fieldnotes, January 2008)

By presenting Generation Now as a class project, the university administrator was bringing the war for talent into the classroom in a very direct way for the students. Yet, as Generation Now was introduced to the university students, and on several other occasions, the ethnographer noticed that students struggled to make sense of the underlying reason for the project. For example, just after the university administrator delivered the above message, a student named Loren expressed her confusion regarding the purpose of Generation Now. “All I can think about is that I don’t quite understand why they wouldn’t want students to go away for a while and have experiences in other places. They should encourage people to leave and do interesting things,” she said (Fieldnotes, January 2008). The ethnographer learned later that after graduation Loren was interested in moving to a metropolitan city in another state. For her, it was difficult to make sense of why now, in her final semester at the university, administrators were asking her to sell her classmates on the idea of staying close to home.

Loren’s confusion—“disjuncture” in IE—derived from the fact that the goals of the project were aligned with ruling relations, specifically, the economic development goals of the state, not with Loren’s personal plans. The disjuncture arose from the fact that the university she paid for and attended was, with this project, attempting to serve the needs of the local business community first and foremost. She was not aware of how Generation Now was generated by the university administration’s effort to respond to the perceived needs of regional businesses, rather than to the needs of its students. Loren was not privy to, and probably would not agree with, the logic of the initiative. In Generation Now’s parlance, students were not “students,” but rather future revenue generators for the state. They were future workers and consumers, and their ultimate function was to add economic value to the state.

Fitting into the uniform: images of employable students/soldiers

“This is how it works in private industry”: the university students

The marketing class at the large public university followed a specific format for developing their marketing campaign, which they were given during the first week of the term. This format primarily matched the basic marketing conventions outlined in their textbook, and the professor provided explanations of the model including examples from his several decades of work in marketing as a practitioner. In a discussion with the ethnographer, the professor explained that he had “a proven model,” that he “had used for years” (Fieldnotes, February 2008).

The strict plan for the class was continually reinforced by the professor. At the beginning of each meeting he showed a timeline of the semester, indicating exactly how much work the students should have completed to date. At one session, the students were preparing their midterm report for their “clients” (the university administrators spearheading Generation Now). One student asked what specifically they would need for the upcoming midterm report. The professor responded, writing a list of four things on the board as he talked:

There are only four things you need to do. [He began writing on the white board.] Number one, you need your statement of work. What is this project about? Number two, your research. [The professor began to talk as if he were the students giving the presentations to their clients.] “Here is what we did, here are the results, you can show it in chart form, or some quotations, or whatever. This is what we learned from the research: X students think this; X people have this false impression, etc. etc.” Number three, your marketing strategy. “Here is what we plan to do. We want to … bullet point … bullet point … slide … slide … [The professor mimicked the motions of going through a PowerPoint presentation]. You don’t have … bullet … bullet … so, click, we want to run an event like X” … whatever it is, you’re going to lay out various strategies.

You’re going to show how you’re going to move people from this perception to that perception. This is basic marketing. By the way, this is really how it works in private industry. (Fieldnotes, February 2008)

The students were learning not only how to “do” the marketing, but also how to document each step so they could explain it to their clients. Being able to follow the structure and articulate clearly what they did for each stage was part of their assignment.

In accordance with his instructions, the university students grew used to writing details of everything they did for their weekly reports to their professor. The ethnographer’s fieldnotes describe one of the students pausing for this purpose during a conversation where they were developing focus group questions:

“Wait—let me go back and put this in the report,” said Serena, “developed focus group questions,” she spoke as she wrote in her laptop. As they did any task, she was adding it to the list of things that had been accomplished that week, which would be reported back to the professor the next day. (Fieldnotes, February 2008)

The university students engaged in their project through the specific format given to them by their professor and their textbook, following a step-by-step formula throughout the semester. Thus, the documentation of their work was guided by marketing standards created within the marketing industry and codified in textbooks and the syllabus. Aspects of the semester’s work, such as Loren’s confusion with the goals of Generation Now, that did not fit into the formula were not captured and documented by the students. The ruling relations underlying Generation Now were bolstered by the clear, “professional” standards demanded by the university professor.

Specifically, the syllabus for his class stated,

The primary intent of this course is to provide students with a hands-on experience in the application of marketing concepts to a real-world marketing problem. (University marketing class syllabus)

The university course clearly intended to be a training exercise for working in the field of marketing, and the professor had the goal of recreating, as closely as possible, the experience of working in a professional capacity.

The students were required to dress professionally when they had contact with their “clients,” and the ethnographer witnessed the students exploring what that meant, not just for the context of the class, but also for the larger context of transitioning into the professional world. The following short vignettes illustrate this:

Garth said he had just been at an interview in Philadelphia, and had stayed at a “fancy hotel where he got all kinds of fancy stuff.” “Look,” he said, pulling out a blue mitten. “Is that a swim cap?” asked Serena. “No, no, it’s for shining your shoes,” Garth said, pulling the mitten over his hand and buffing his already shiny brown leather shoes. (Fieldnotes, May 2008)

Mel and Albert [both males] asked Loren [a female] about her clothes, and she told them how much her jewelry cost. “$250 for the necklace, $150 for the watch.” Mel and Albert told Loren she spent too much on clothes and jewelry, but she said she “needs it for work.” (Fieldnotes, April 2008)

Serena asked the group if they liked her suit, “since I’ve worn it to every event we’ve done.” Serena had on a shiny green tank top. “I like that top,” said Loren, “but if you don’t have a button-down top to go with your suit, I’m going to buy you one.” Serena said “I have one, but it gaps and shows my bra.” “You have to use this double-sided tape,” said Loren. (Fieldnotes, May 2008)

These students, still in college, already owned some formal business attire, and were beginning to understand the complexities of “dressing for success,” and projecting the right professional images. Their professors, parents, and experiences in internships and interviews were helping them learn the rules of dressing to win the battle to become top talent. The marketing class involving the Generation Now project occurred during their final semester of university, and they were beginning to undergo the transition from university student into young professional employee—that is, “talent.”

“It’s total chaos”: the college students

The marketing students at the small college were given the same introduction to the project from the university administrator as the students in the university business school. However, the process they were given by their professor for completing a marketing plan and presenting it to the community was notably different. This professor had been teaching at the small college for over a decade, but because of the Generation Now project she was now developing a completely new course syllabus. It was obvious she did not have a clearly tested structure in place for the class. During one class period, the ethnographer observed, the entire class was having a discussion about how to distribute the surveys and analyze the data. The students seemed confused, and the professor changed her mind several times about how the survey should be distributed.

For example, on one occasion the professor explained to the ethnographer some of the work they were planning to do in her class:

“We’ve also assigned each student to take a state and look at what they’re doing to try to retain graduates or advertise jobs in the state,” she said. She turned to her students. “Where are our sheets,” she asked, “the class ones and the state ones?” “Everyone is taking a state and a class, we’ll work a discussion of a couple of states into each class,” she told me. “Tuesday,” can Utah, Arizona, and Ohio go?” she asked. The students nodded. “What do we do for this again?” Several students kept expressing confusion. (Fieldnotes, February 2008)

Two of the five times the ethnographer observed the class, the professor was unable to attend, and the students were left to work on their marketing plans themselves.

A few weeks later, the university administrator who had introduced Generation Now to all of the marketing classes commented to the ethnographer that one could really tell the difference between the university class and that college class—“when you walk into [university professor]’s class, he has complete control, and when you walk into [college professor]’s class, it’s total chaos. She has no control over the class” (Fieldnotes, 2008).

While one classroom experience in a student’s total college or university experience does not define his or her education, the differences between the two experiences and—even more importantly— the university administrator’s perception of the difference between the two experiences points to some critical concerns regarding the fallout from the war for talent. Within the context of Generation Now, state, university, and business leaders put their focus on the need to attract and retain certain workers with education and skills, those with the best “fit.” Within the two college classrooms, distinctions in the training to become the right “fit” are revealed, and, at least according to the university administrator’s perception, one professor is much more successful at the training process than the other.

Public presentation or the selective service? The making of officers and foot soldiers

From the inception of Generation Now, university administrators were particularly interested in promoting images of students and young professionals who were successfully living in the state. One of the university administrators in charge of Generation Now told the ethnographer several times that he was looking at the students as potential “faces of the initiative,” who could “project the right image of the state” (Fieldnotes, 2008).

The opportunity for the students to act as the faces of the initiative came toward the end of the semester, when presentations from the four higher education institutions were to be given at a new theater in the state’s capital city. CEOs, business leaders, state government representatives, and other university staff members, as well as media representatives, were invited. During these presentations, the students and their final “products” would be on display not only through the content of their presentations but also through their personas as potential professionals contributing to the state’s economic growth.

The first group of students to present was from one of the state colleges that the ethnographer did not have access to during the semester. Fieldnotes from the day describe the scene:

Two men and two women stood on the stage. They said that they were missing one member of their group who hadn’t been able to make it. They were all casually dressed; one of the men had long hair and was unshaven, with a wrinkled blue shirt, khakis, and a tie. The other young man was clean-shaven with spiky hair, and was similarly dressed. The women had on sweaters and khakis.

The unshaven man opened with a joke—“how many of you college kids are hungover this morning?” The audience laughed. (Fieldnotes, May 2008)

These students projected a very plain PowerPoint on the huge screen behind them. The slides had a basic background, no images and several spelling mistakes. There was a tone of cynicism directed to the college’s career center throughout the presentation. At one point, the unshaven male student took the microphone back and said that they also found that the job fairs were very inconsistent, and the companies who went to them did not find good candidates at those job fairs. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” he said (Fieldnotes, May 2008).

Later, the ethnographer spoke with the marketing manager for a local Chamber of Commerce. Referring to the comment about being hungover, the marketing manager said,

someone needs to tell them that it’s not appropriate to make comments like that. I knew [a journalist from a local newspaper] was there, and all I could think was, oh no, they just got the nugget they need to debunk this whole thing [the efforts of Generation Now].

The work of this first small college group was clearly not well received by those working with Generation Now. One of the university administrators later lamented privately to the ethnographer that “I realized later that the first groups didn’t even put together a marketing plan. That was the task, but they just talked about problems with the career centers” (Fieldnotes, 2008).

The second presentation was given by a professor, who explained that his students were unable to come that day. The university administrator later told the ethnographer he found this strange (Fieldnotes, 2008). The third presentation was by the group from the small state college the ethnographer had observed several times. They presented a video in which they interviewed young professionals from around the state describing their careers and lives. An administrator later mentioned privately that he thought the video was a great idea, but the quality was too poor to be useful. “I really thought [this group] was going to knock it out of the park,” he said, and it was “just crap.” “Why was it so bad? Why couldn’t they have put the camera closer?” (Fieldnotes, May 2008).

Finally, the ethnographer’s fieldnotes describe the presentation given by students from the large university:

The [university] group looked very polished next to the previous groups’. Four of the nine students were up on stage doing the presentation. All wore dark suits, the two women in skirt suits and heels. The PowerPoint presentation projected behind them was colorful, with pictures and very polished looking compared to the previous presentations. They didn’t have notes or look back to the screen, they had clearly practiced often and had their points memorized. The microphone pass-offs were smooth without any fumbling or looking questioningly at each other as the previous groups had done. (Fieldnotes, May 2008)

After this presentation, a woman in the audience, who had recently been awarded state CEO of the year, raised her hand and told the students publicly that they were very professional, and that they should be very proud of themselves. No such compliments were given to any of the other groups. The university administrator later told the ethnographer that he had planned the order of the presentations that way—saving the university presentation for last, as he knew it would be the strongest.

In contrast, the ideas of the college students who spoke more extemporaneously of their frustrations with the incompetence of career centers in their colleges (the assumed employment services they should have) were dismissed. And, similarly, the video presentations by the student in the college class observed by the ethnographer—an innovative approach that could only have emerged through the organically evolved course—were not praised but criticized as not good enough. Rather, as it became clear to the ethnographer, and perhaps to the college students themselves, the administration was not interested in the specific opinions from these students about their own personal struggles, or interested in recognizing the differing access to resources; the administration was solely interested in showcasing a particular group of students to the point of having already “stacked the deck” in their favor by planning the order of presentations. In the administration’s view—probably from the start—the university students were the ones who could represent the state positively by having a “professional image” and presenting ideas that pertained directly to ways to market the existing state structures and features to the young people the state wanted to retain—that is, the “talent.”

More generally, by having the students present their plans to a broader audience, the university was able to display some of their “best and brightest,” but in the process, a hierarchy of potential employees from the polished and the professional, to those who were less “employable,” was also displayed. This visible hierarchy corresponded with the statuses of higher educational institutions in the state—from the highly ranked university business school to the lower-ranked small colleges. The hierarchy visible during the presentations was established before the presentations.

In fact, the metaphor of the “war for talent” is an apt one in this context. Social class is built into the higher education system analogous to the way it is built into the supposedly meritocratic armed forces. In the military, rank-and-file foot soldiers tend to be drawn from underprivileged and lower socioeconomic class populations, while successful officers often attend military academy and come from higher socioeconomic class backgrounds (Wang et al., 2012).

The price of war (for talent): Loren’s disjuncture

Following the student presentations, the university administrators led a discussion among audience members regarding the work of the students and to generate more ideas about how to encourage young people to stay in the state. One audience member, a prominent demographer, suggested that the university administrators ask the state legislature to think about a loan forgiveness program for students who stay and work in-state. The audience member noted that graduates [in this state] have the highest student loan debt in the country. Activating the discourse of scarcity, the demographer noted that “We’re giving tens of millions in incentives to people at the other end of life, why can’t some of that be directed to the young people?” A representative of the state legislature in attendance replied that it “was not going to happen” because of lack of state funds.

Another woman in the audience spoke up, asking if businesses could also participate in helping students pay off their debt, citing a model program for doing so in a hospital in a neighboring state. This woman talked about how much stress it must cause young people to come out of school “with $20,000 in debt.” At this suggestion, the students sitting near the ethnographer began snickering. “$20,000? Try $70,000,” Loren whispered. Loren raised her hand to speak, and told the audience that most of the people she knows

would be very happy with $20,000 in debt, they actually have more like $50,000–$70,000 and when you have that much debt, you really have to consider the jobs [in other states] that might pay $5,000 more, because monthly [student loan] payments are so high.

This verbal exchange clearly reveals the disjuncture the students experienced working on Generation Now. Loren had been a dedicated marketing student all semester, working hard to sell the state to her peers, and here she also activates a capitalist logic to argue against the central premise of Generation Now. While Generation Now encouraged them to stay, it did not directly offer the students well-paying jobs or loan forgiveness. In fact, the stated goal of Generation Now—to retain young professionals in the region—conflicted with the personal needs of many of the students working on the project because of their debts.

The high level of student debt in the United States is due to a gradual shift in society to the adoption of neoliberal values, which promote the dismantling of public social structures such as higher public education, and place increasing pressure on individuals. As Martin (2002) explained, a major tenet of the new economy is the passing on of debt and risk from states and large organizations to individuals. This impacts particularly young workers as they are asked to accrue more debt than previous generations to pay for their education. Education is now seen as a personal investment, rather than a public good, and this has a much larger impact on those students with less access to family resources to pay for school. The decline in government support for higher education has made it harder than ever for lower-income students to attend college (The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, 2015), but the voices of those most impacted are hardly ever heard. For instance, although Loren resisted the ruling relations to some extent during the question and answer period, her resistance was not recorded textually, except in the ethnographer’s fieldnotes, and the logic of her complaints reiterated the economic principles she was apparently resisting.

As costs for students climb, changes in university imperatives have led to corporations benefiting from university resources in ways that are unprecedented (Washburn, 2005). For instance, in the case of Generation Now, students were paying tuition to attend the colleges and universities while actually working for their institutions to maintain the neoliberal values through their classroom projects and presentations. While the final products of the university and college students differed, both groups were entangled in the same ruling relations that masked their own personal interests.

The university students basically followed a pre-packaged structure in their presentations, leaving little space for their own imagination and creativity to show up, but in appearance they earned the respect of the audience. Meanwhile, the college students were resisting being absorbed by the Generation Now logic and displayed their cynicism as a means to intervene in obstacles to their employability, namely the poorly functioning career centers in their institutions. Yet, in this case their complaints were explicitly erased from “the record,” including by the administration manipulating the press to silence their voices. Altogether, the dominant relations of ruling were reproduced; those who departed from the norm were judged as deviant, and the rewarded were those who stayed in line.

Still, for the administrators—and the neoliberal logic scaffolding of Generation Now with its connection to the ideology of “the global war for talent”—it was the presence of all these teams—in their difference—that constituted the important event in the theater. The teams explicitly performed the “inequality” necessary for choosing “winners”/“officers” (those who would submit to the relations of ruling) and “losers”/“footsoldiers” (those who would not submit, or not so easily). The former would be passed to the rank of talent, and would keep the system going. The latter would be available to perform the lowly tasks or to be dishonorably discharged from the system (i.e. becoming unemployed as “their choice” and/or for “their own faults”).

Discussion and conclusion

This article was oriented toward answering the question: What are the implications of bringing Generation Now into business school classrooms? Using institutional ethnographic methods, we uncovered the ways in which university students were drafted into the war for talent through Generation Now. Students worked for Generation Now, a project not of their own design or necessarily in their own interests. The students were evaluated, not as students completing an assignment, but as future workers and citizens of the region under question. These evaluations reinforced a hierarchy of talent among the students which place those attending the more elite university business school at the top.

As a research approach, IE connects what are often understood as the “macro” and the “micro” levels of organizational life. It unravels how local actions are coordinated to mesh with standards set extra-locally by those in power in large corporate and governmental institutions. The concerting of action between the local and the extra-local makes up the social relations that are of concern to institutional ethnographers, and those relations are considered ruling relations when those in power are dominating local settings to accomplish extra-local interests. Through the tracing of ruling relations, institutional ethnographers can reveal how the categorization of individuals according to extra-local standards becomes naturalized. For example, the distinctions between the ways the university and college students were instructed to approach the same Generation Now project were ultimately judgments upon the students that reflected back on them as individuals, as their failures rather than as properties of the system in which they are embedded. One group of students “should be proud of themselves” while another was “so bad.”

As we found, university administrators, professors, and most importantly, students, are held accountable to ruling relations of regional economic growth, and the ideology of the talent wars. The students’ reactions to the experiences of working on Generation Now projects were often confused or ambivalent, as throughout the semester they struggled to reconcile their own positions as soon-to-be graduates with uncertain futures with the messages of Generation Now. The relations of ruling expressed in the discourse of university administrators, business leaders, and government told the students that there were jobs and great opportunities in the region—for those who were talented enough to be able to take advantage of them. The students were judged on their abilities to recreate this discourse, rather than their abilities to effectively voice their own personal stories and concerns.

While the Generation Now story is a local story, we can also ask more generally, what is the evidence that “the global war for talent” is working well for anyone? Our findings have implications that go beyond the region and university system under consideration in this research. As university professors, we (the authors and, we suspect, many of the readers of this article) are ostensibly preparing students to compete for jobs after graduation. As we have shown here, however, the battles for professional success are rigged before students even graduate. “The global war for talent” is a major discourse fueling expectations that everyone’s life chances will improve the more education they have, including their social mobility by becoming one of the best and the brightest, but there is also ample literature showing that possibilities for social mobility and successful careers for everyone who goes to college and works hard enough are not endless. In fact, higher education may be simply amplifying existing class differences (Goyette, 2008), reinforcing rather than challenging the status quo (Aries and Seider, 2005; Brown and Hesketh, 2004). The social organization that allows for these inequities is replicated through students who are drawn in continually as new recruits in the war for talent.

Critiques of the war for talent are beginning to proliferate, yet there is little movement toward alternative models of regional growth. The neoliberal model that drives the need for competition and continual economic expansion has also altered the goals and outcomes of university education dramatically. The relationships among universities and corporations have strengthened and universities have adopted more managerial models, cutting labor costs while simultaneously raising student tuition (Williams, 2012). Students are viewed as the customers in this new model (Cuthbert, 2010; Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004).

These are complicated relationships, which as we have shown in this article, can be quite subtle but can have a powerful impact on the students involved. As the price of higher education and enrollment numbers rise, the “rewards” of university education have only become more unevenly distributed (Allen et al., 2013). Professors might claim to recognize the varying backgrounds of the students and understand that the students have different needs and face different challenges, but research has also found that in practice professors would tend to attribute classroom success or failure to individual motivation rather than socioeconomic structures (Allen et al., 2013). Similarly, the students working on Generation Now were judged based solely on their final presentations, while their diverse backgrounds and very distinct classroom experiences throughout the semester were not recognized.

So, what is to be done? It is certainly possible to imagine a different kind of university initiative, a different way of organizing the efforts of a “Generation Now.” The war for talent, as enacted in the region, could have been an effort to actively and authentically support students in this state who were suffering under great amounts of debt and the threat of rising unemployment. Alternative reactions to the presentations from the smaller colleges could have included listening to the students’ concerns regarding the career centers at their institutions, and brainstorming about how to address those concerns. Furthermore, distinctions among the presentations could have generated interesting discussions regarding differing resources and values among the distinct, yet connected colleges and universities.

Instead, university resources were used in a less overtly risky manner. By focusing on marketing the state, and marketing the students to the local business community, rather than supporting its current students and citizens, the war for talent was allowed to wage on the ground level in the university classroom. Of course, pursuing the alternatives would have meant questioning the very logic on which the war for talent stands, disrupting the ruling relations.

Finally, while in this article we offer some critique of universities and their efforts to engage in regional economic competition, we also acknowledge that university administrators themselves are embedded in ruling relations and confront the reality of the scarcity of resources offered to most public higher education facilities worldwide. And of course, we too are working within these ruling relations and contribute to them.

Thus in our quest to educate and prepare our students for the “real world,” who, exactly, are we ultimately assisting most? Our work asks for continued reexamination of the roles that we and our peers, university professors, and writers, play in co-creating the textual practices of being an “appropriate individual” in the war for talent, or as important conduits in the “stretch” of strategic management discourse (Greckhamer, 2010), and as perpetrators of many other follies of “business school education.” Paraphrasing Weigt (2006: 348), should we not provide our students with a roadmap for understanding how they may be participating in their own oppression and for resisting and re-visioning how their knowledge and experiences are (de)valued in our society?

In short, this article illustrates a continuing need to reexamine the work we do with the intention of serving our students while being embedded in the same ruling relations as they are. At the most fundamental, we hope to be able to map with them those ruling relations as part of our own classroom activities, and in so doing expand opportunities for students and faculty to “talk back” (Rankin and Campbell, 2009).

Footnotes

Funding

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

References

Adler

Forbes

Willmott

(2007) Critical management studies. Academy of Management Annals 1(1): 119–179.

Al Ariss

(2013) Call for Book Chapters: “Global Talent Management— Challenges, Strategies, and Opportunities” to be Published 2014. New York: Springer.

Allen

Quinn

Hollingworth

. (2013) Becoming employable students and “ideal” creative workers: Exclusion and inequality in higher education work placements. British Journal of Sociology of Education 34(3): 431–452.

Alvesson

Robertson

(2006) The best and the brightest: The construction, significance and effects of elite identities in consulting firms. Organization 13(2): 195–224.

Alvesson

Willmott

(2002) Identity regulation as organizational control: Producing the appropriate individual. Journal of Management Studies 39(5): 619–644.

Aries

Seider

(2005) The interactive relationship between class identity and the college experience: The case of lower income students. Qualitative Sociology 28(4): 419–443.

Bakhtin

(1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin

(1986) Speech Genres and Other Lute Essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Beechler

Woodward

(2009) The global “war for talent.” Journal of International Management 15(3): 273–285.

10.

Best

(1999) Random Violence: How We Talk about New Crimes and New Victims. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

11.

Brown

(2003) The Opportunity Trap: Education and employment in a global economy. European Educational Research Journal 2(1): 141–179.

12.

Brown

(2013) Education, opportunity and the prospects for social mobility. British Journal of Sociology of Education 34(5–6): 678–700.

13.

Brown

Hesketh

(2004) The Mismanagement of Talent: Employability and Job in the Knowledge of Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

14.

Brown

Tannock

(2009) Education, meritocracy and the global war for talent. Journal of Education Policy 24(4): 377–392.

15.

Campbell

Gregor

(2004) Mapping Social Relations: A Primer in Doing Institutional Ethnography. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.

16.

Clegg

Dany

Grey

(2011) Critical management studies and managerial education: New contexts? New agenda? Management 14(5): 271–279.

17.

Cuthbert

(2010) Students as customers? Higher Education Review 42(3): 3–25.

18.

Emerson

Fretz

Shaw

(1995) Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

19.

Florida

(2002) The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books.

20.

Florida

(2008) Who’s Your City: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life. New York: Basic Books.

21.

Gagnon

(2008) Compelling identity: Selves and insecurity in global, corporate management development. Management Learning 39(4): 375–391.

22.

Gergen

(2015) Culturally inclusive psychology from a constructionist standpoint. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 45(1): 95–107.

23.

Giroux

(2002) Neoliberalism, corporate culture, and the promise of higher education: The University as a democratic public sphere. Harvard Educational Review 72(4): 425–463.

24.

Goyette

(2008) College for some to college for all: Social background, occupational expectations, and educational expectations over time. Social Science Research 37(2): 461–484.

25.

Greckhamer

(2010) The stretch of strategic management discourse: A critical analysis. Organization Studies 31(7): 841–871.

26.

Grey

(2004) Reinventing business schools: The contribution of critical management education. Academy of Management Learning and Education 3(2): 178–186.

27.

Grey

Mitev

(1995) Management education—A polemic. Management Learning 26(1): 73–90.

28.

Hall

(2008) Geographies of business education: MBA programmes, reflexive business schools and the cultural circuit of capital. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33(1): 27–41.

29.

Houston

Findlay

Harrison

. (2008) Will attracting the “creative class” boost economic growth in old industrial regions? A case study of Scotland. Geografiska Annaler, Series B: Human 90(2): 133–149.

30.

Kauppinen

(2012) Towards transnational academic capitalism. Higher Education 64(4): 543–556.

31.

McDonnell

(2011) Still fighting the “war for talent”? Bridging the science versus practice gap. Journal of Business and Psychology 26(2): 169–173.

32.

MacLeod

(2001) New regionalism reconsidered: Globalization and the remaking of political economic space. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25(4): 804–829.

33.

Mars

Rios-Aguilar

(2010) Academic entrepreneurship (re)defined: Significance and implications for the scholarship of higher education. Higher Education 59(4): 441–460.

34.

Mars

Slaughter

Rhoades

(2008) The state-sponsored student entrepreneur. The Journal of Higher Education 79(6): 638–670.

35.

Martin

(2002) The Financialization of Daily Life. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

36.

Mathur

(1999) Human capital-based strategy for regional economic development. Economic Development Quarterly 13(3): 203–216.

37.

Michaels

Handfield-Jones

Axelrod

(2001) The War for Talent. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

38.

Minbaeva

Collings

(2013) Seven myths of global talent management. International Journal of Human Resource Management 24(9): 1762–1776.

39.

Mitchell

(2001) Education for democratic citizenship: Transnationalism, multiculturalism, and the limits of liberalism. Harvard Educational Review 71(1): 51–78.

40.

Mitchell

(2003) Educating the national citizen in neoliberal times: From the multicultural self to the strategic cosmopolitan. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28(4): 387–403.

41.

Nedeva

Boden

(2010) Employing discourse: Universities and graduate “employability.” Journal of Education Policy 25(1): 37–54.

42.

(2011) Singapore’s response to the global war for talent: Politics and education. International Journal of Educational Development 31(3): 262–268.

43.

Olds

Thrift

(2005) Cultures on the brink: Reengineering the soul of capitalism—On a global scale. In: Ong

Collier

(eds) Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, And Ethics as Anthropological Problems. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 270–290.

44.

Peck

(2005) Struggling with the creative class. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29(4): 740–770.

45.

Perriton

(2014) The (re)negotiation of the critical warrant in critical management education: A research agenda. Human Resource Development International 17(4): 384–399.

46.

Pfeffer

(2001) Fighting the war for talent is hazardous to your organization’s health. Organizational Dynamics 29(4): 248–259.

47.

Porschitz

(2011) Becoming a professional: The social organization of career. Unpublished Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA (data from the 2013 edition of Journal Citation Reports®).

48.

Rankin

Campbell

(2009) Institutional ethnography (IE), nursing work and hospital reform: IE’s cautionary analysis (41 paragraphs). Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung (Forum: Qualitative Social Research) 10(2): 8. Available at: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs090287 (accessed 18 February 2015).

49.

Reedy

Learmonth

(2009) Other possibilities? The contribution to management education of alternative organizations. Management Learning 40(3): 241–258.

50.

Rowlinson

Hassard

(2011) How come the critters came to be teaching in business schools? Contradictions in the institutionalization of critical management studies. Organization 18(5): 673–689.

51.

Slaughter

Rhoades

(2004) Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

52.

Smith

(1987) The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Society. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press.

53.

Smith

(1996) Telling the truth after postmodernism. Symbolic Interaction 19(3): 171–202.

54.

Smith

(1999) Writing the Social: Critique, Theory, and Investigations. Toronto, ON, Canada: University of Toronto Press.

55.

Smith

(2005) Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

56.

Suspitsyna

(2012) Higher education for economic advancement and engaged citizenship: An analysis of the US Department of Education discourse. The Journal of Higher Education 83(1): 49–72.

57.

The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education (2015) Indicators of higher education equity in the United States: 45 year trend report. Available at: http://www.pellinstitute.org/publications-Indicators_of_Higher_Education_Equity_in_the_United_States_45_Year_Report.shtml (accessed 20 February 2015).

58.

Vaiman

Collings

(2013) Talent management: Advancing the field. International Journal of Human Resource Management 24(9): 1737–1743.

59.

Wang

Elder

Spence

(2012) Status configurations, military service and higher education. Social Forces 91(2): 397–421.

60.

Washburn

(2005) University, Inc: The Corporate Corruption of American Higher Education. New York: Basic Books.

61.

Weigt

(2006) Compromises to carework: The social organization of mothers’ experiences in the low-wage labor market after welfare reform. Social Problems 53(3): 332–351.

62.

Williams

(2012) Deconstructing academe: The birth of critical university studies. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Available at: http://chronicle.com/article/An-Emerging-Field-Deconstructs/130791/ (accessed 24 February 2014).

63.

Zimmerman

(2008) From brew town to cool town: Neoliberalism and the creative city development strategy in Milwaukee. Cities 25(4): 230–242.