Abstract
From a Foucauldian perspective, we regard “excellence” and “gender” as discourses that become relevant in academia. We analyze the organizational dispositives of “excellence” and “gender” as organizing patterns and rationalities within academic organizations. Beginning with the modern conceptualization of the independent university as a heterotopic space of and for society, the programmatics of the “entrepreneurial university” shift this heterotopic space into a heteronomic one. How do academic professionals bring about discursive organizing of excellence and gender when reflecting on institutional programmatics and organizational strategies for the promotion of early-career academics? What are these early-career academics’ subject positions that are systematically brought about within these organizational strategies? This article discusses two empirical cases involving academic institutions and strategies of discursive organizing. While in the first case of the global player organization, the claim for excellence is made from a position of “already being there,” the second, aspiring organization is still working toward excellence. This article demonstrates that gender discourses in the global player organization are in a marginalized position, while gender discourses in the aspiring organization gain strategic relevance within the organization’s entrepreneurial strategies. This article therefore shows how heterotopic strategies intermingle and intersect with strategies of heteronomic organization of excellence.
Introduction
In ancient Greek mythology, Akademia was a sacred grove of olive trees dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, skill, and handicraft. Akademia was portrayed as a peaceful place outside the cities. In Foucault’s terms, Akademia can be understood as a heterotopic place, meaning a place that differs from societies’ normalities. In contrast with an absent utopia to reach for, heterotopic spaces are counter-places to normality that already exist in the present. Today, academic study of the state of the academic sphere is revealing major shifts, and academia appears to be losing its seemingly stable and possibly even peaceful foundation. With the rise and hegemony of neoliberal rationalities, academia has been infused by different knowledge sets. It has become a place of competition, performance, and performativity, a place of targets and even terror. These neoliberal rationalities are strongly linked to the rise of excellence in academia, which from a Foucauldian perspective can be seen as a “monument” (Foucault, 1973: 7) of neoliberal rationality. Similar to the visibility-producing practice of grading in schools (Foucault, 1977: 184ff.), the practice of ranking produces global visibility (and non-visibility), positioning every academic organization, scientist, and text in a vertically structured representational and performative space and thus bringing about a scientific panopticon (Angermuller, 2010). Although neoliberal discourses claim to increase autonomy, they produce normalizing and heteronomic spaces. Numerous critiques have problematized the global dimensions of this neoliberal agenda, which seems to infiltrate not only the academic sphere but every social space in the world (Brown, 2017).
However, we do not wish to discuss neoliberalism as a monolith or a uniform ideology. As various authors argue, there are “fault lines,” ambiguities, contradictions, and contestations within neoliberalism (Rottenberg, 2014: 433; Thorkelson, 2019). From a Foucauldian perspective, we do not address the complex inter-weavings and transformations of power-knowledge sets as ambiguities or contradictions but rather as intersections and intermingling of interfering, intervening, and possibly competing knowledge sets and rationalities in scientific organizations.
The shifting rationalities toward and within neoliberalism need to be analyzed at specific discursive intersections. The German case offers an excellent opportunity to more closely examine the intervening and intersecting rationalities between excellence and gender.
The recent changes in the German academic system reveal how the verticalizing knowledge sets of neoliberalism relate to the traditional Humboldtian ideal of the university and the political claim for gender equality. How do neoliberal rationalities connect with the traditional claim to university autonomy that gave professors in Germany great autonomy in research, teaching, and doctoral training? In addition, how does gender intersect here given the fact that the German academic system stems from strongly patriarchal traditions of a male-focused academic system? Through political gender equality demands, gender mainstreaming at a legal level has been institutionalized in Germany’s academia. The German Excellence Initiative (Exzellenzinitiative) initiated in 2005 can be considered a discursive event bringing forth and connecting these debates. At the intersection of excellence and gender, a person of public interest emerges, namely the early-career academic. In fact, the discursive subject of the early-career academic becomes an interesting study for analyzing organizational discourses within neoliberalized academia.
The leading research questions are therefore as follows: (1) How do discourses on excellence and gender intersect in (German) academic organizations, which were not traditionally imagined as inclusive spaces for female academics? (2) Will the traditionally political claim of gender mainstreaming be absorbed, or can it still challenge the hegemony of neoliberal discourses and therefore offer heterotopic potential?
In this article, we analyze discursive dynamics in two German academic organizations. In their institutional programs and organizational strategies, these organizations refer to political agendas, legal frameworks, and the discursive pressure to relate to the field of excellence. Institutional programmatics and organizational strategies can be found on the institutions’ different “surfaces of emergence” (Foucault, 1973: 49), meaning on their webpages, in established programs for early-career academics, and in institutionalized positions like third-space professionals for early-career academics and gender equality officers.
Our research is guided by Foucault’s (1973) discourse methodology, which offers a power-knowledge-based methodology for the analysis of the variations of and in discourses. From this perspective, we are interested in discursive dynamics in organizing and emergent relational patterns as well as in the question of critique and heterotopia: “How not to be governed like that, by that?” (Foucault, 2007: 28).
The article proceeds as follows: first, in a genealogical return to the Humboldtian ideal of the German University, the neoliberal shifts toward heteronomia in academia are revealed. The second section discusses the legal and institutionalized status of gender mainstreaming, the dimension of gender within the German Excellence Initiative, and the academic debates regarding the dynamics of gender mainstreaming for institutional change. The third section introduces the methodology and methods of our analysis followed by the research results. In a final section, the findings are again discussed and highlighted regarding the dynamics analyzed at the intersections and entanglements of heteronomic and heterotopic organizing in academia.
Heterotopia or heteronomia? Shifting from the “ivory tower” to the “entrepreneurial university”
Science and the systematic acquisition of knowledge have been practiced in many cultures for thousands of years. However, the epistemologies of academia and science differ (Barnett, 2011; Foucault, 1971). In this section, we introduce the shifting discourse in the German academic system.
The Humboldtian ideal of the university—a heterotopic space?
The roots of the “modern” university lie in the European Enlightenment. In Germany, philosophers of the Enlightenment like Kant and Humboldt contributed intensively to the debates about the university. The German university of the 19th century is particularly closely linked to Humboldt’s concepts regarding the systematical development of academic knowledge and to educational reforms in general. In Humboldt’s view, scientific process should follow four principles: freedom of science; unity of the sciences; education through science; the unity of teaching, research, and Bildung (i.e. the autonomous development of the self). This idea of Bildung is also reflected in the internal organization of universities in that German universities still pursue their two interwoven missions of research and teaching (Schwarz and Teichmann, 2016).
Traditionally, the German system was characterized by a broad coverage of universities spread all across the country. Since there was no functional differentiation between universities in the German academic landscape, they were regarded as being of equal rank. Furthermore, universities were founded on the idea of academic freedom that shaped several academic practices: the German university was built on academic self-organization, which allowed professors great autonomy in choosing their research topics. Furthermore, academic freedom was also apparent in the master-apprentice model of doctoral education. As the name “ivory tower” indicates, the university was idealized as an unconditional space of autonomous knowledge creation and the discovery of truth (Ricken, 2007). According to the ideas of the Enlightenment, the university can be regarded as a heterotopic (but male) space.
“Excellence” and the neoliberalization of academia
With the massification of higher education in the 1960s and 1970s, the German academic system grew massively, and the sector of universities of applied sciences (Fachhochschulen) expanded. Furthermore, the importance of extramural research institutions, which were founded at the beginning of the 20th century to promote natural and engineering sciences, grew tremendously in the change from industry to knowledge economy (Lengwiler, 2016: 22). Nevertheless, even with the massification of academia, the egalitarian Humboldtian model was kept alive. More recently, however, the 2005 German Excellence Initiative helped to dynamize the categorization of universities as either “beacons of science” or ground-floor academic institutions. The grounds for this were set in the governance reforms of the 1990s, when new public management was introduced gave universities budgetary autonomy and strengthened the role of university management in setting goals and allocating resources (Jansen, 2016; Peters, 2019). It was against this background that the Excellence Initiative transported neoliberal discourses into the German academic system.
Neoliberalist ideas have been promoted by economists such as Hayek, Friedman, and the Chicago School since the 1940s and have been prominently advanced since the 1960s. In contrast to a Keynesian welfare economy based on a strong state, neoliberalist thought is grounded in an anti-state and unregulated markets-oriented ideology. Since the 1980s, neoliberalism has gradually become the dominant point of reference for economic, social, and societal policy on a global scale. In this article, we analyze neoliberalism as culturally hegemonial knowledge, because it is both a political and economic discourse and a set of practices (Larner, 2000; Peters, 2019). Neoliberal discourses explain all human aspirations and actions in entrepreneurial terms. The “moves to and from the management of the state to the inner workings of the subject, normatively constructing and interpellating individuals as entrepreneurial actors” (Rottenberg, 2014: 420). The entrepreneurial self can thus be regarded as ideal neoliberal subject.
Neoliberal discourses entered educational policies and academic organizations in the 1980s and produced a “regime of performativity [in which] the performance serves . . . as a display of quality” (Ball, 2003: 216). In Germany, this change has been accelerated through the introduction of the Excellence Initiative in 2005. The Excellence Initiative is a state-funded, competitive program that has established a vertical and hierarchical differentiation and led to a functional stratification among German universities (Münch, 2007). The “dispositive of excellence” (Bröckling and Peter, 2017) contributes to the alteration of academic organizations and challenges scientists, both are now cast in entrepreneurial terms.
In light of the neoliberalization of academia, organizational researchers highlight the organizational turn of universities (Schwarz and Teichmann, 2016). The neoliberal strategies of a new public management have led universities to refer to bureaucratic as well as managerial and competition-oriented organizational models (Peters, 2019). As the administration complex is enlarged, new professions emerge. Third-space professionals work in the “emergent territory between academic and professional domains” (Whitchurch, 2008: 377). In Germany, these third-space professionals include gender equality officers and heads of departments for early-career academics who will become relevant as organizational change actors. In our empirical study, we analyze these institutionalized positions as they relate to gender equality and early-career academics.
Gender equality—a counter-discourse to the academic regime of performativity?
In the German case, it is also apparent that neoliberal reforms have prompted new visibilities, 1 namely the (female) early-career academic. Although the German university has long been idealized as a heterotopic space, one could also argue that it was (and still is) an exclusive and marginalizing place. The academic career has long been a “wild hazard” because doctoral research in particular was rarely institutionalized in academic programs until the 1990s, and the dropout rate was high (Enders, 2005). This has prompted debates and research about social inequalities in gaining a doctorate. As research by Elven et al. (2018) shows, doctoral supervision is one key issue related to inequality. The dependency of doctoral students on their supervisors has increasingly been criticized and questioned. As one political consequence, doctoral programs were discussed and implemented as one part of the Excellence Initiative. The massive increase of funding for doctoral programs in general led to a much stronger institutionalization of doctoral education in Germany (Bloch, 2018). However, it is not only the supervision relationships but also the organization that (re)produces inequality (Schwarz et al., 2018). 2 Thus, gender equality has been formulated as one dimension of excellence and implemented in the Excellence Initiative. In these changing discourses, it is above all the female early-career academic who became visible and was expected to correct the skewed gender relations in the German academy.
In a Foucauldian sense, the demand for gender equality can be regarded as critique, because it systematically questions male-dominated knowledge and knowledge production. Can gender equality bear heterotopic potential for the academy? The following section explores the recent literature on gender equality and feminist demands in the academy.
Gender equality in academia has been a highly contested project since the first women’s movement. Since the emerging scientific field excluded women (Noble, 1992), gender equality also aimed to change the gendered structures of the academic field. Based on Bourdieu’s analysis of the academic field, studies by Krais (2000), Beaufaÿs (2003), and Engler (2001) challenge the idea of the disinterested and independent researcher and disclose its gendered structure. In her analysis of male and female professors, Engler (2001) shows that women are not excluded from science but from the scientific game. Beaufaÿs (2003: 233ff.) also makes this point by demonstrating how positions in the academic field pivot around belief—or as Bourdieu calls it, illusio—in the academic field. Since women cannot easily display the gendered illusio of the independent researcher, they orient themselves less on the illusio of the field, which distributes them into marginalized positions. As these research results indicate, gender inequalities in academia are not the result of individual preferences but rise out of structural inequalities that are deeply embedded in the symbolic order of the academic field. When the Excellence Initiative was introduced in Germany in 2005, gender equality was formulated as one feature of excellence and was encouraged through other programs such as the state-funded Female Professorship Program 3 and the German Research Foundation’s (DFG) gender equality standards (Gleichstellungsstandards). Feminist research on gender equality shows how gender equality has been usurped and instrumentalized by neoliberal discourses and rationalities. This can be seen in (1) the individualization of structural inequality and (2) the instrumentalization of gender equality to position universities in the academic field.
Individualizing structural inequalities
Critics of gender equality programs argue that gender equality has been co-opted and transformed by neoliberal rationalities. As Fraser (2009) contends, this has transformed feminism from a political demand for structural change into an individualizing project. Gill (2018) describes this form of feminism as “post-feminism.” She sees post-feminism not as a theoretical concept or a new wave of feminism but as a hegemonic sensibility that connects elements of feminisms as well as anti-feminisms. The new gender regime, Gill argues, fits into a neoliberal discourse and is closely linked to the entrepreneurial self: the ideal-typical female subject is autonomous, freely decisive, and entrepreneurial; its femininities are “white” and predominantly heteronormative. This has created new visibilities, or as McRobbie (2008) puts it, young women have gained luminosity. “Top Girls” are simultaneously highly visible and circumscribed, because they have to fit given gender norms. Young women now have to exhibit a high degree of commitment, motivation, and talent in educational settings and the labor market, meaning that female activity is now moving toward a new form of social mobility. The successful young woman has become the embodiment of the improvement and transformation of the entire (higher) educational system. Following the argument of McRobbie, the female early-career academic appears as a new visibility on the surface of discourses. Female early-career academics are regarded as “subjects par excellence, and also subjects of excellence” (McRobbie, 2004: 257).
This discursive shift in gender equality means that though gender equality aims at increasing the number of female scientists, these programs often incline in a notion that acknowledges gender imbalance yet primarily promotes individualizing strategies of female success in academia. Regarding Germany, Riegraf and Weber (2017) show that the entrepreneurial universities’ reform agendas integrate gender equality strategies. Nevertheless, these gender equality strategies mainly focus on measures for “excellent” and high-performing women, while other women still remain in a structurally disadvantaged position. In a Dutch study on the recruitment and selection of full professors in the Netherlands, Van Den Brink and Benschop (2014) demonstrate how the allegedly neutral standard of excellence, which is based on norms of meritocracy, conceal practices of inequalities that have nothing to do with merit. They reveal that gender equality programs do not focus on structural inequalities such as those highlighted in the studies mentioned by Beaufaÿs (2003). Instead, they appear to be subject to individual transformation and the will to succeed and become “unspeakable inequalities” (Gill, 2014: 509). A study by Engels et al. (2012: 208) shows this contradictory and conflicting relationship between gender equality and excellence discourses for female academics. To be recognized as excellent, they must deny that their success may be a result of gender equality measures.
Organizational effects of gender equality in the “entrepreneurial university”
Another strand of literature discusses the effects of gender equality programs and feminist research from an organizational perspective and in different national contexts. For example, Aulenbacher et al. (2015) compare the organizational and institutional logics of the implementation of equality programs in four different European academic systems. All of these systems have experienced an economization process and have simultaneously focused on gender equality. Nevertheless, the extent to which the integration of gender equality and neoliberalization of academia happens varies considerably within the welfare state regimes and science systems despite all the similarities in the orientation toward competitive and private-sector instruments and despite all European standardization efforts. According to the authors, this has consequences for how universities take gender equality concerns into account and assign relevance to them.
In contrast to the British case, the state is of great importance for the implementation of gender equality in Germany. Traditionally much less market-driven than Great Britain, Germany did not withdraw its commitment to gender equality but rather regulated gender mainstreaming legally. In Germany, gender equality is not regarded as a task for the market and individual organizations like the Athena Swan Award in Great Britain. The legal framework adopted by the DFG puts a certain pressure on academic organizations to follow gender-mainstreaming strategies. Interestingly, the Excellence Initiative dynamized gender mainstreaming in a specific way, because gender equality became a dimension of the excellence of academic organizations competing to belong to the chosen few academic beacons. One effect of the Excellence Initiative was therefore that it made gender equality a task of academic organizations. By establishing gender equality as an award criterion in the Excellence Initiative, academia and academic administration are participating in a state-controlled competition in order to be distinguished and excellent not only scientifically but also in questions of gender equality. However, institutionalizing gender equality in these new governance approaches does not necessarily diminish inequalities (Teelken and Deem, 2013).
Furthermore, since gender equality is connected to the promise of material resources and reputation in Germany, the attention to gender equality policies has increased even among those university leaders who had formerly avoided the issue. Gender equality and gender studies became instrumentalized, became features of excellent organizations, and actually serve to position organizations (Hark, 2016).
Excellence as contested terrain
While these studies indicate that gender equality policies follow the logic of a scientific regime of performativity and excellence, there are also discursive openings and practices of resistance. As Riegraf and Weber (2014) argue, the promise of material resources, reputation gains, and equality demands have led to innovation in gender equality strategies at some universities and have also brought different underlying knowledge into universities.
Concerning women, gender, and feminist studies (WGFS), studies point to the scientific belief of WGFS in contrast with the hegemonic knowledge production of academia. Against the credo of independent and uninvolved academic knowledge production, feminist scholarship promotes a relational perspective and advocates for the connection of practice and theory. In this sense, WGFS proponents argue that academic practice and activism must inform each other. Obviously, feminist epistemologies challenge the roots of positivist theories and epistemologies of knowledge. As such, they question the existing hegemonic norm—a point that early-career academics and organizational researchers have also recently taken up (Bristow et al., 2017; Weatherall, 2019).
Although the neoliberal regime of performativity has usurped gender equality discourses to some extent, gender equality discourses also bring counter-knowledge with them. By providing alternative discourses and knowledge sets, they still challenge neoliberal myths and point to still-existing or even broadening inequalities in academia.
Although neoliberal academic excellence is a global, hegemonic discourse (Peters, 2019), it is also a contested terrain. For example, a study by Paradeise and Thoenig (2013) on quality standards indicates that various organizations draw on the excellence discourse differently. Paradeise and Thoenig differentiate between four positions: the “top of the pile,” the “wannabes,” the “venerables,” and the “missionaries” (Paradeise and Thoenig, 2013: 199ff.). Their research demonstrates that academic organizations have different modi operandi, meaning specific dynamics of relating excellence and quality standards depending on the position in the field. Whereas the “top of the pile” draws excessively on the excellence discourse, the venerables and missionaries instead distance themselves from the hegemonic excellence discourse and try to focus on counter-narratives such as highlighting the importance of teaching.
Conceptualizing excellence as contested terrain, we look at relational patterns between discourses of gender equality and excellence in different organizations. We are interested in the relations between heteronomic and heterotopic knowledge and the heterotopic potential of gender in organizing. Nevertheless, there are not yet any studies that research the specifics and logics of how gender equality and excellence discourses evolve in different academic organizations and how this shapes the practice of academic professionals as change agents in this field. What are the speakabilities and visibilities that emerge in discursive organizing in academia, and how do heteronomic and heterotopic knowledge sets relate in times of target and terror?
Research methodology
In light of this change in the German academic system and the contested terrain of gender equality and excellence discourses, our research focuses on the following questions: (1) How are gender equality and excellence discourses related, and how do they transform into institutional programmatics and organizational strategies? (2) Which speakabilities and visibilities emerge within academic organizational discourse? The early-career academic is analyzed as an intersectional subject related to both excellence and gender.
The methodological background of this study is rooted in the strong program of organizational discourse analysis and follows Foucault’s concept of discourse (Alvesson and Karreman, 2000; Weber, 2013). According to Foucault, discourses are “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault, 1973: 49). The research results were produced in the context of the research project “At the Intersection of Gender and Excellence,” which was funded by the Hessian Ministry of Science and the Arts from 2017 to 2019. Our sample consists of six different scientific organizations including universities as well as research institutes. Three of these organizations were funded by different funding lines of the German Excellence Initiative. In our research design, we triangulated three different approaches to discourse using website analysis, qualitative interviews, and video statements. We interviewed academic third-space professionals (Whitchurch, 2008), because we expected them to be familiar with and embedded in both academic and policy discourses. We interviewed and video recorded academic professionals concerned with (1) gender equality and (2) human resources/early-career academics in each of the organizations. For gender equality, we interviewed the university’s gender equality officer, which is a legally required position in German public administration. The position for early-career academics, however, is not legally or formally required and thus has different titles, organizational positions, and settings. However, each of the analyzed organizations had a denominated position in charge of early-career academics. The interviews 4 were conducted between July 2017 and January 2018 and then transcribed. They were also interpreted by our research team.
The website analysis was conducted between March and June 2017. We followed Van Leeuwen’s (2011) multimodal website analysis method and combined it with elements of Panofsky’s image analysis (Weber et al., 2019). The webpages were sampled in a topic-related fashion, meaning that we selected those that referred to gender equality and early-career academics. Beginning with the homepage, the two topics were tracked on the website to identify the website’s internal linking structure. In this process, the relevant pages were downloaded and saved. The next analytical step then took place offline in a team of five researchers. First, the homepage was analyzed, followed by the websites on the topic of early-career academics and then the websites on gender equality. The digital interconnections and referentiality of these websites were then examined.
Our analytical perspectives were guided by Foucault’s (1973: 50) questions in the “Archaeology of Knowledge.” Beginning with the question “Who is speaking?,” we first analyzed the organizational discourse as it appears on the organizational website (Weber et al., 2019). Second, we analyzed interviews with two organizational representatives for each organization. For the interview analysis, we took some methodological inspirations from Jergus (2014) regarding the discourse analysis of interviews. In allusion to Butler (1996), Jergus emphasizes that the mode of discourse production between the interviewer and the interviewee is performative, meaning that it is a process of constant openings and closings. In a final analytical step, we took all the empirical data and examined the emerging institutional programmatics and organizational strategies, namely the strategies of discursive wayfinding in organizations.
The following results are based on the website analysis and the interviews including the statements. The video material itself, however, is not part of the results. For the presentation of the results, we contrast two organizations: the global player organization and the aspiring organization. Their names are derived from their modus operandi for how they position themselves in the field. We present our findings based on the following questions: (1) How does discursive organizing happen in the thematic fields of gender equality and excellence? (2) How do they relate to each other at their discursive intersection, namely the discourse on early-career academics in academia? From a Foucauldian perspective, we analyzed organizations as collective knowledge orders in which specific institutional programmatics and organizational strategies evolve and organize knowledge (Adler and Weber, 2018b). With Foucault, we understand institutional programmatics as the knowledge that emerges on organizational surfaces and that claims to offer guiding knowledge. We first analyzed the organizational knowledge regarding the discursive practice of organizing gender equality and excellence discourses and then analyzed the organizational strategies. With Chia and Holt (2009: 159), we see organizational strategies as discursive strategies or “processes of wayfinding.” From this perspective, we consider dispositives as patterns of organizing rationalities in organizations, bringing forth patterns of emergence of both non-intentional and intentional strategies and practices (Raffnsøe et al., 2014; Weber, 2013).
In the following, we first present the data for each organization individually and then describe and compare the organizational strategies. In the subsequent discussion, we analyze the interplay and intersections of heteronomic and heterotopic knowledge sets and their contribution to potential openings to the performative regime of target and terror within academic organizations.
Results
In the following section, we present the two contrasting cases, both of which relate affirmatively to the neoliberal agenda and knowledge set, but from different positions in the academic field. Their claims to excellence are therefore different, as we will show in the following. We begin by presenting the institutional programmatics and then analyze the visibilities and speakabilities of each of the organizations.
The global player organization
The global player organization (OGP) is a large scientific research organization in Germany with a long-standing tradition, especially in the sciences. As this section indicates, the organization claims a special position in the academic field. For reasons of anonymity, we do not refer to direct quotations from the website or show images retrieved from the organization’s website.
Institutional programmatics
On its website, the organization only refers to itself in superlative terms such as “the most successful,” “outstanding,” and “the best international.” By communicating the success of the organization via parameters recognized in the field such as Nobel Prizes and citations, the organization engages in a style of “humble bragging.” By constantly referring to competitions, medals, and the placement of its scientists, the organization presents itself as belonging to the “haves” side of life while constantly portraying its academic “performance.” In this organization, excellence is performed in terms of what can be measured by performance indicators and international (i.e. Western) recognition. The hegemonic programmatics of this organization result in its self-positioning as a global player competing with elite US institutions. Here, the OGP claims leadership in the field of science and legitimizes its need for the full potential of human capital. As we will see, this performative knowledge order also includes references to gender and early-career academics. As the head of human resource management (HRM OGP) explained, his work is concerned with how to “wonderfully maximize the potential [short break] ehm (.) of the best male and female scientist” (HRM OGP: 470ff.).
This organizational self-representation objectifies excellent international scientists, treating them as valuable commodities. The organization’s relationship with its members is clearly illustrated by the visualizations on the website. Here, the ingenuous and outstanding individual is visualized at the center. Around the brilliant individual researcher, a naturally organizing research group can be found. In order to emphasize the excellence of a person through the excellent organizational conditions, the old academic dispositive of heterotopic academic freedom of research and the free and autonomous researcher are symbolized at the center of the images. The organization’s imaginary refers to the progressive ideology of constant renewal, which is described as the unique selling point of the organization. As a dynamic and agile organization, it is a global player in the market and an alternative to “death by bureaucracy.” According to Schumpeter’s innovation model of creative destruction, the organization is symbolized as being in a constant pattern of the growth and decay of knowledge (Schumpeter, 1947). Cutting-edge research is done in a highly efficient and effective functional research organization constantly operating on the frontiers of science. Even if the researcher is being put at the symbolic center, the organization still takes (and offers) pride and status in and through its scientific and organizational branding. The individual academic contributes to the status of the research organization as an asset or human capital.
While an autonomous and heterotopic space is in force, the global player organization seems to be caught in the heteronomic heterotopia of the research market. Being positioned at the center of global science and academic capitalism gives the organization a legitimate speaking position to which the researchers have to subordinate themselves. In this neoliberal setting, conditional excellence is repeatedly performed as an autonomous, nonconformist position.
Visibilities and speakabilities
Who gains organizational visibility when it comes to gender equality and early-career academics? The pictures on the website depicting equal opportunities and early-career academics show five people, two of whom can be identified as male and three of whom appear to be female. They are all wearing lab coats, which unites them as uniformed laboratory researchers. The lab coats suggest the profession of a laboratory scientist and thus illustrate the natural science setting. Every person in the picture is holding a work-related item like a pipette in his or her hand. Only one person in the picture is not holding a working tool: the tall man in the back is holding a cup. Although the lab coats in this visual representation of the organization unite the different people, each individual in the picture represents dimensions of difference and therefore diversity in research: the picture depicts a Black man, a White man, a woman with a hijab, and a woman who looks Middle Eastern. This tokening representational pattern individualizes multiple categories of difference and inequality. Although the researchers are standing together, they do not seem to form an interacting group but rather an intentionally sampled representational group. The researchers are all looking in different directions, and nobody is directly visually connecting with the camera. As a highly intentional space, the website communicates the organization’s corporate design visions and needs. The organization wants to provide evidence of its obvious diversity. Representational difference and arranged diversity do not create a natural situation. Although the group of individuals is depicted with working material, they are situated in front of a concrete wall and not in a laboratory. Even though they are presented as equal in that they are all wearing the same coats, the perspective in the picture runs toward the head of the White man holding the cup, who is positioned a bit in the back. Everybody is supposed to be equally represented in the picture, yet the picture suggests an implicit gender/ethnicity order with the White man at the center. This gendered order is not only visible in the picture but also resonates in an interview statement where the HRM OGP says, “I think the best advocate for [short break] women’s rights is an old man . . . because he is the one everyone listens to” 5 (HRM OGP: 552f.).
How does speaking become possible? As the interviews indicate, the organizational discourse brings forth zones of tensions and excitements. Interestingly, what seems “exciting” (HRM OGP: 42) to the head of HRM OGP seems to be stressful to the gender equality officer (GEO OGP). She seems to be in tension and under stress, which is also indicated by the length of the interviews. While the interview with the HRM OGP lasted 1.5 hours, the interview with the GEO OGP only lasted half as long. Even though both interviewees talked a great deal about the same organization, the speakabilities were revealed to be quite different not only in eloquence and style but also in the way in which speaking is possible at all. The gendered order discussed above is not only visible in the picture but was also communicated in an interview statement.
When discussing the organization, the HRM OGP used the polished style of international management talk. Like a polished surface, the individual seemed to meld with his organization into identitary speech. Speaking about the organization in its (not his) own voice, he used the term “we” throughout the whole interview. The subtle rejection of any personal perspectives and comments is indicated by this use of an organizational pluralis majestatis. The story of the HRM OGP’s entry into the organization required a shift into a legitimate speaking position. His polished, official and legitimate organizational talk follows the discursive strategy of casting shadows where things are not bright.
While the HRM OGP spoke unbrokenly from his hegemonic speaking position, the GEO OGP held a subaltern position from which she repeatedly attempted to connect to the legitimate organizational talk. The GEO OGP finds herself in an ambivalent relationship in which she is repeatedly referred to in terms of her place along organizational boundaries. The HRM OGP, for example, spoke of the fact that equality and equal opportunities can be examined from two sides, on the one hand from the institutionalized employer’s side, . . . and on the other hand, we have a very committed and very competent woman with our central Equal Opportunities Officer. (HRM OGP: 492ff.)
In addition, the GEO OGP places herself along a border by speaking of the fact that there are people “who stand outside the line, um, because otherwise they are unbound, and um, who can advise their time as well as the line, not un/ uh, necessarily announced” (GEO OGP: 312ff.). Her marginalized and delegitimized speaking position and the field of tension of speaking were demonstrated in the interview. Overall, the interview was very faltering and was characterized by stumbling, stuttering, sentence and word aborts, and long breaks. When she started doing equality work in the organization, she pursued a structural approach to organizational change. Although she sees herself as an organizational designer of change, the breaks seem to express her tension and inability to speak even in a physical way: “but that one should of course pursue a uhm structural uhm approach uhm which is about organizational change” (GEO-GP 67f.). She reluctantly tried to enter the legitimate discourse by employing three speaking tactics.
Her handling of the discursive boundaries of the organization can thus be understood as an attempt to receive recognition and as dissident behavior:
De-identification with her own position. Although the GEO OGP repeatedly positioned herself as a feminist and biographically holds strong ties to the second women’s movement, she de-identifies with this position by calling herself a “consultant.” As an organizational outsider, drawing boundaries for herself supports a certain gain in organizational legitimacy.
Mimicry. When talking about her work, the GEO OGP chose words like “to enter,” and “to bring among the people.” By connecting to data processing vocabulary and to an informal style of speaking, she seems to be willing to adapt to contextual rules. She explicitly addressed the need for adaptation within the “official informal rules of the game in the organization.” Her reflexive relationship to the organization is already apparent here.
Sarcasm. As a third speaking strategy, the GEO OGP used sarcasm as a dissident adoption of the organizational discourse. For example, after presenting the official organizational vision, she ended the sentence by saying, “We are an elitist club, right.” During the interview, she constantly withdrew from speaking.
As we have seen, the GEO OGP is in a subaltern speaking position and can only draw on mimicry and assimilation when she wants to be heard in the organization. Those who commit to the hegemonic discourse are hearable; however, deviant positions are delegitimized and sanctioned, which early-career academics have also experienced in this organization.
The aspiring organization (OA)
In comparison to the hegemonically positioned OGP, the contrasting case has the opposite practice when relating the organization and the individual. Instead of putting the organization first, this organization places the subject and his or her embeddings in the foreground. In the following section, institutional programmatics as well as speakabilities and visibilities are displayed. Again, direct quotations from websites are avoided for reasons of anonymity.
Institutional programmatics
The university is presented as a socially interrelated space. Thus, in its visual and written representations, the organization presents itself as a place of social negotiation of current political and societal topics. This practice of a societally embedded university is shown on the homepage and in our triangulation analysis of interviews: as the university’s visible discursive surface, the website displays relevant societal and political news. In general, organizational visibilities, which refer to magazines and displayed material, tightly connect and relate the university’s knowledge production to the lives of its organizational members.
The organizational programmatics observable on these discursive surfaces show the striving and aspiring style of organizational self-representation. In all its concerted strategies, funding applications, and activities, the university strives to be co-opted, to gain membership in the so-called academic elite institutions, and (at a national level) to be ennobled into belonging to the 10 “best” universities. In its self-representations, the university tends to use an entrepreneurial style. This tight connection to the market and the self-concept of being a service provider for enterprises, which are expressed in the organizational equality discourse, create a stronger connection to leadership in society and the political world. Nevertheless, there is a strong embedding in the rationality of being economically, socially, and politically useful. In comparison to the programmatics of the OGP, the contrast reveals the different positions of these organizations in the academic field, namely being an excellent “elite” per se and engaging in the pretentious strategies of those wanting to be(come) excellent.
In contrast to the OGP, the websites on gender equality and early-career academics are not directly linked and interconnected. They follow two different linkage paths and, within the general usefulness claim, include different content, knowledge sets, and collective imaginaries (Castoriadis, 1998). Since the design and images of the websites for early-career academics are in green and blue shades, they convey an image of androgynous science in which the body of the scientist is kept invisible. These images tie into discourses around the (objective) oeuvre rather than the (subjective) person of the scientist. Interestingly, and in contrast with this allusion or reference to the neutral and objective, the webpages on gender equality are designed in warm orange and yellow tones and show bodies or parts of bodies embedded in an environment. In contrast to the visual representations of the OGP, where the pictures on the webpage represent the internal space of organizations, the gender equality webpage of the OA provides a connection to the outside, to society, and to the open. The webpage includes a stylized picture of abstract silhouettes of gendered individuals, children, and bicycles in front of a town silhouette. The perspective of the picture puts a woman at the center. In contrast, in the OGP, the planimetric patterns (Bohnsack, 2008) run upward like a pyramid, placing a male researcher at the top. He stands in the background behind all the other individuals. Every individual in the picture represents dimensions of difference and diversity.
The planimetrical structure of our contrasting case operates in a bottom-upward movement and focuses the eye of the observer on the woman at the center of the foreground. Since children and a man are represented on the left side and in a second layer of the middle ground, this relatively distant and detached positioning of the woman more closely associates the man with children and family duties.
In contrast to the OGP images, this woman is represented in a professional style and pose and is involved in a communication situation on a mobile phone. The image offers the interpretation of the represented woman as an active young professional mother who is managing her work and family life.
In general, the organizational discourse on gender equality largely connects to the image of an aspiring woman, which connects to the entrepreneurial, political, and societal worlds. Nevertheless, the organizational discourse on women addresses barriers, boundaries, and fractures within the lives of women. Here, the organizational discourse refers more to biological inequalities and structural inequalities and, for example, opens up to recent discourses of new fatherhood in its visual representations and policies.
Speakabilities and visibilities
As the aspiring organization is striving toward national recognition, process is a core dimension in contrast to the OGP’s static claim of already being excellent. The entrepreneurial orientation of the OA is apparent in the importance of the dynamic and active. The interviewees do not protect and preserve the unquestionable image of excellence, but bluntly criticize their organization regarding its lacking dynamism. Both interviewees referred to the organization as a limiting factor that hinders their work.
The head of HR management (HRM OA) sees himself as an entrepreneur and speaks in a young startup style; he uses lots of English words and terms when speaking German, for example. He differentiates his own strategies from those of the university and wants to be seen as a proactive change maker. He is the one to tackle problems and move things forward, which is in contrast to the still-prevalent traditional bureaucratic rationalities in this academic organization: “but this is not a university programmatic, this is my approach” (HRM OA: 581). He has established the department for the support of early-career academics and understands himself as an institutional entrepreneur (Garud et al., 2007). Like an activist for social change, he refers to social change in institutions—in this case, regarding early-career academics.
While he describes himself as an entrepreneur with another startup (HRM OA: 28), the gender equality officer (GEO OA) states that she took her job because she was interested in managing (GEO OA: 23). In fact, she identifies with the problem of gender equality mainly on the basis of her gender and less on the basis of experienced inequality. As the analysis of the institutional programmatics shows, gender equality is a speakable issue within the aspiring organization. This stands in contrast to the self-vigilating attention to every single spoken word in the courtly speakabilities in the context of the OGP. The GEO OA uses a reflexive mode of speaking. She seems to constantly process herself and often uses metaphors like “ways” and “paths” (GEO OA: 69ff.). She reconstructs the university as a place of deferment. When proposing gender equality topics or criticism, she returns to positive statements: “things are already going very well and I would continue this . . . successful equality work like this.” Thus, to initiate change she tries to find openings in the discourse and use them for herself by “jumping on the bandwagon” (GEO OA: 63f.). Her performative practice can be identified as micro-political awareness of openings within the organization’s discursive spaces. Being performative herself and highlighting gender topics allows her to manage her opportunities and gain visibility and acceptance for a traditionally less relevant topic.
In contrast to the organizational symbolic space of the OGP, both the HRM OA and the GEO OA narrate the constant process of managing opportunities from their speaking positions. As micro-political institutional entrepreneurial actors, they are highly flexible in using emerging cracks in their opinion- and decision-making processes. Being agile, alert, and entrepreneurial at all times is not only an institutional norm and value set indicated on the webpage but is also accepted by and subjectivated in these professionals.
In what way does this academic organization relate to the spectrum between heteronomia and heterotopia? Can the academic entrepreneurialism of the OA lead into heterotopia, and is the autonomous excellence of the OGP heterotopic or heteronomous? What are the emerging zones and heterotopic practices within these shifts in the academic world, which has been marked as a world of targets and terror within the dispositive of the entrepreneurial university?
Gender and excellence—heterotopic or heteronomic organizing?
Focusing on the question of discursive transformation within organizing, we are interested in the mode of organizing at the intersections between excellence and gender discourses that interconnect and interrelate at the (organizational) subject position of the early-career academic. Can gender equality discourses effuse heterotopic discourses (i.e. discourses that contest the hegemonic norm of neoliberal academia)?
As we already have seen, the two organizations examined here relate to excellence and gender in different ways when addressing early-career academics. Practices of discursive organizing relate to heterotopic and heteronomic rationalities in specific ways, namely (1) with regard to their positioning in the academic field and (2) with regard to the modus operandi (i.e. the dispositive of the organization).
Regarding the former dimension, the organizations’ modi operandi when positioning themselves in the academic field differ. Whereas the OGP is a university belonging to the “top of the pile” (i.e. a worldwide-renowned academic organization), according to Paradeise and Thoenig’s (2013) model, the OA can be characterized as a “wannabe.” Both of our cases follow the neoliberal regime of performativity in specific ways. In what way do our contrasting cases relate to the neoliberal agenda, and where is heteronomia and heterotopia to be found here?
Neoliberalized autonomy and heteronomic assimilation
Our first case, the OGP, claims an autonomous position in the field. It regards itself as one of the top organizations and therefore distinct from the common German academic organization, but is it therefore heterotopic? When claiming autonomy in research as well as gender mainstreaming, the OGP refers to a traditional, doxic pattern. As an autonomous actor, the OGP does not want to be limited by legal and political demands like gender equality. In claiming to be at the top, the hegemonic discourse in the OGP is infused with neoliberal discourses such as competition and the rationality of rankings. The organizational strategy of discourse refers to heteronomic assimilation. The organizational symbolic order of speakabilities and visibilities aligns deviant actors and behavior. It is oriented toward a normalizing strategy and brings forth a highly conditioned listening practice. As became evident in the case of the GEO OGP, the autonomous and highly competitive organization produces a heteronomous discursive environment for deviant/counter discourses. The OGP’s excellence discourse delegitimizes and marginalizes speaking of inequalities and legitimizes the narrative of individual achievements. Since the topic of gender equality is only speakable in an individualizing way, the GEO OGP assimilates the institutional speakabilities where gender equality is a non-term and an unspeakable issue. The legitimate discussion of equal opportunities instead connects to the discussion of the development of potentials and to neoliberal rationalities. Here, gender equality and diversity are taken for granted. From a strategy-of-discourse perspective, performative enacting and (re-)production are necessary. Here, performance refers (1) to achievement at the highest level and (2) to constantly demonstrating performance. The discursive organizing of gender equality and excellence brings forth heteronomic assimilation. Instead of asking “who is speaking” and who is legitimized to do so (Foucault, 1973: 50), the question is, who can be heard? (Spivak, 1994). This vertical discursive practice organizes around to be listened to and how to speak in order to be heard. The static pattern of “already being there” brings forth a hegemonic and individualizing excellence discourse that trumps gender equality. In this organization, gender equality has to assimilate and align with the neoliberal excellence discourse.
Heterotopic potentials in neoliberalized heteronomy?
On the other hand, the OA can be characterized as a “wannabe.” It mainly aims at national recognition and displays an “opportunistic utilitarianism” (Paradeise and Thoenig, 2013: 208), particularly when it comes to early-career academics’ programs. Early-career academics’ programs are regarded as one of the dimensions through which the scientific organization can position itself in the field. In the OA, early-career academics and gender equality discourses thus form a bond and potential alliance in which the excellence discourse serves as the bonding tissue. As already demonstrated, the performative visual symbolic representation of power here is a bottom-up movement oriented toward micro-political coalition building. In contrast with the pattern of hearing, we find a pattern of speaking here. Instead of positions being suppressed, speaking zones are broadened and speakers mobilized. In order to amplify their voice and demands, early-career academics are mobilized micro-politically.
In this case, it is apparent that the excellence discourse produces quite a different dynamic: since the organization is still aspiring and striving to become visible in the academic field, it operates in a reflexive and process-oriented manner that is focused on path creation. Although the discursive strategy of the OA is heteronomous because it implements political programmatics of excellence, and although it follows the neoliberal agenda, there are different dynamics taking place that may also dynamize power relations of gender. The reflexive mode focusing on becoming excellent brings forth openings or windows of opportunities in which imaginative and new approaches can evolve. In this organization, we do not find the suppression of difference but rather emerging transformative alliances between entrepreneurial institutional actors.
In summary, whereas the OGP follows a static and reproductive pattern that produces heteronomic assimilation, the OA applies an entrepreneurial mode of transformation. When an organization is striving to attain excellence, functional legitimate engagements and alliances between gender equality and early-career academics’ debates and strategies can emerge.
Discursive organizing of excellence and gender.
Conclusion
In the contested terrains of neoliberal functionalization, can gender equality still offer heterotopic potential? Our results indicate that the position of the university in the academic field produces different modi operandi for the two organizations. Whereas in the OGP, the discourse produces heteronomic discursive practices, the excellence discourse dynamizes the gender equality discourse in the OA. However, this does not mean that there is no potential for critique in the OGP. In both cases—and even in both the assimilation strategy and the entrepreneurial strategy—we find the potential for critique and organizational learning. According to Gherardi and Nicolini (2001), organizational learning is “learning-in-organizing” and “as such not only a way to acquire knowledge in practice but also a way to change or perpetuate such knowledge and to produce and reproduce society (p. 50).” Learning occurs (1) when individuals participate in practices—in our case, discursive practices—and (2) in relation to reflexivity and imagination. For the latter to occur, there have to be zones of difference, or zones of uncertain and fluid boundaries of knowledge, to allow institutional reflexivity to happen (Gherardi and Nicolini, 2001). The results of our two exemplary organizations demonstrate that gender equality allows exactly this: a fault line where cracks in rather monolithic neoliberal discourses provide insights into potential heterotopic counter-knowledge. As we have seen in the OA, the organizational dynamics have voicing potentials for gender equality issues and early-career academics.
Nevertheless, the question remains: how do the intersections and interweaving of heteronomous and heterotopic knowledge sets allow discursive openings or reorganize closings? In this case, it is the marginal position, as Berthoin-Antal and Kresbach-Gnath (2001: 466) argue, that allows changes in perspectives, influence, and action. Here, further research is necessary to determine how the heterotopic notion of an autonomous research institution interplays with the heteronomic dynamics of the global research market. The underlying hierarchical and exclusive elitist rationality obviously limits the heterotopic potential, because it still refers to the exclusivity and autonomy promised only to the chosen few. In addition, more research is needed to determine where market strategies might even carry heterotopic potentials through entrepreneurial organizing.
As for the universities, more research concerning universities that do not participate in excellence programs or that position themselves explicitly against excellence is necessary. If we want to study counter-knowledge, we should further examine scientific organizations that position themselves counter to the excellence discourse, namely the “venerables” and “missionary” universities (Paradeise and Thoenig, 2013). Further research is necessary to determine which power-knowledge these organizations bring forth. Against the dispositive of excellence, the dispositive of collective creation (Weber, 2013) can offer new potentials and heterotopic spaces (Adler and Weber, 2018a). The dispositive of collective creation might relate to what the philosopher Barnett calls the “ecological university”: an institution where academic knowledge creation is still autonomous but is interconnected with society. A “university-for-others” (Barnett, 2011: 145) would not be overwhelmed by particularities and interests. Especially in the context of the global climate crisis, it might define its role in a new way and contribute to society in an engaging rather than distancing way through critique and a search for alternative futures (Scharmer, 2009). Against a neoliberal heteronomic agenda, this strategy would act in favor of critical, autonomous, and collective engagements. As a heterotopia, it would envision and live the potentials of Athena’s claims of the future.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Hessian Ministry of Higher Education, Research and the Arts through the funding program “Dimensions of the category gender” from December 2016 to August 2018.
