Tactical evaluations: Everyday neoliberalism in academia

Australian higher education in the ‘deep’

The late 1980s saw the restructuring of higher education in Australia, through what Barry Hindess (1998: 212) describes as ‘a novel governmental problem of economic security’. In contrast to the orthodox economic view that nation-states could trade with one another to achieve ‘comparative advantage’, as theorised by David Ricardo, economic competition between nations has generally always produced ‘losers’. This is a scenario in which governments would be tasked to find ways ‘to improve the condition of their particular portion of the larger international economy’ (Hindess, 1998: 221). As Hirst and Thompson (in Hindess, 1998: 222) note, the only way to avoid becoming a loser – whether as a nation, firm or individual – is to become as competitive as possible.

In Australia, the voluminous 1979 Williams Report, commissioned by the then Liberal government’s Education Minister, John Carrick, marked a change in the way the government assessed the value of education. Historian Hannah Forsyth (2014: 98) argues that the tightening connection between education and economic models, as emphasised in the Williams Report, launched a new type of public debate about universities. This approach was institutionalised during the formal structural changes of 1987, when the Department of Education was amalgamated into a new Department of Employment, Education and Training, with the neoclassically trained economics graduate John Dawkins at the helm (Pusey, 1991: 147). Politicians increasingly framed the terms of debate in relation to education’s contributions to ‘workforce planning and economic growth’ (Forsyth, 2014: 98) to bolster competitiveness.

The rise of the economic security paradigm has followed with what Brenner et al. (2010: 207) describe as the constitution of new ‘rule regimes, which govern processes of regulatory experimentation and cross-jurisdictional policy transfer’, and a narrowing of politically legitimate public policy options (see Peck, 2001: 446). Brenner et al. argue that processes of neoliberalisation have emerged through experimental, ‘sporadic, yet wave-like’ patterns, producing ‘cumulative impacts’ (2010: 184) that have ‘increasingly induced and incentivized neoliberal strategies’ (2010: 216). These processes have been amplified by ‘successive rounds of distinctly patterned, market-oriented regulatory restructuring’ that have altered the institutional landscape upon which consecutive reforms are proposed and enacted (Brenner et al., 2010: 209).

Both Mirowski (2013) and Dean (2014) claim that these transnational circuits centre around institutions such as the Mont Pèlerin Society, think tanks, universities and national governments, composing a ‘Neoliberal Thought Collective’. Dean (2014: 151) describes this Thought Collective as:

an organized group of individuals exchanging ideas within a common intellectual framework. […] It has spaces for different voices and processes of discovery while at the same time permitting the crystallization of a consensus. […] As a thought collective, neoliberalism gains its coherence less as a doctrine, programme or rationality, and more as a movement.

The Neoliberal Thought Collective, alongside international finance and governance bodies such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, were mobilised to enact a shift, from disarticulated to a more programmatic ‘deep(ening) neoliberalisation’ (Brenner et al., 2010: 215). This new programmatic form is less concerned with encouraging the adoption of specific regulatory regimes than with ‘learning by doing (and failing) within an evolving framework of market-oriented reform parameters and strategic objectives’ (Brenner et al., 2010: 216; also see Peck, 2001). The logic of ‘deep’ neoliberalisation forms not around explicit political programs, but around a certain mode of thinking about the governance of the nation in relation to an international political economy. De Angelis and Harvie (2009: 15) argue that universities became immersed in these modes of thinking, experimenting with how to measure the value of the immaterial labour of scholarship and commodify it.

A key consequence of this deepening of processes of neoliberalisation has been a growing hostility towards the ambiguities of political discourse. Foucault (2008: 30) famously pointed out that, since the 18th century, the market acts as a ‘site and mechanism of the formation of truth’ for governmental activity, limiting the operations of the state through appealing to the ‘truths’ conveyed by the market. The restricted ‘frugal government’ hence possesses an internal ‘self-limiting governmental reason’ for Foucault (2008: 37). This governmental reason designated the market, and in particular the relationship between value and price, as a site of veridiction, while elaborating and evaluating the powers of public authorities by reference to ‘the principle of utility’ (Foucault, 2008: 44):

The fundamental question of liberalism is: what is the utility value of government and all actions of government in a society where exchange determines the true value of things? (Foucault, 2008: 46)

The emergence of New Public Management techniques in the UK, for example, aimed to ‘stimulate the homeostatic disciplinary mechanism of the market’ in public institutions, where complete exposure to market mechanisms was not possible because of ‘strong and diffuse resistance to it’ (De Angelis and Harvie, 2009: 15). Unlike the liberal market, liberal politics has a ‘self-consciously performative dimension’ (Davies, 2014: 4), as political speech acts are presented never only to represent something, but to do something. As a site of contestation, liberal politics threatens the ‘political rationality’ of neoliberalism because it suggests that policy decisions are guided by some means other than the (objective) truths of markets.

As Beeson and Firth (1998: 217) claim, different ways of conceptualising objects like economies and polities have implications for ‘who can legitimately regulate’ them. This view is congruous with Davies’ (2014: 4) claim that ‘neoliberalism is the pursuit of the disenchantment of politics by economics’, in that neoliberal strategies for restructuring government attempt to displace the performativity of politics by appealing to supposedly ‘preinterpretive or noninterpretive’ representations. Australia’s political ideology, one that Pusey (1991: 231) describes as ‘Benthamite’ (utilitarian), has encouraged an acceptance of knowledge that appears objective and pragmatic at the expense of a moral vocabulary more conducive to social democracy. Humphrys and Cahill (2016: 7) note that such utilitarian rhetoric was central to encouraging labour unions to comply with central wage indexation during the Accord years (1983–96). The erasure of the performativity of political acts through appealing to rationales such as economic efficiency circumscribes questions of government within the framing of management expertise.

Everyday neoliberalism: an ethico-political transformation

Rationalisations, such as economic efficiency, are based on claims to objectivity – assumptions about what is known and unavoidable. The persistence of neoliberal doctrines in the presence of falsifying evidence, which John Quiggin (2010) has described as their ‘zombie’-like resurrection, occurs not simply because these doctrines present exploitative and false depictions of reality, but because they ‘have become normative rituals in their own right, through which actors make sense of and criticize the world around them’ (Davies, 2014: 10). Davies (2014: 25) extends this claim to argue that economic techniques, although aiming to undermine forms of sovereignty through rational measurement and calculation, ‘become imbued with a quasi-sovereign form of authority […] ritualized and rhetorically powerful’. Hence, neoliberal political strategies not only alter the policy arena for national governments, but contribute to the production of norms and discourses through which everyday events are interpreted and enacted.

Mirowski (2013) provides a means of exploring this normativity in his concept of ‘everyday neoliberalism’. He shares with Miller and Rose (2008) an interest in seeking out the ‘attitudes, imaginaries, and practices that have come to inform everyday life’ (Mirowski, 2013: 92), contributing to the theorisation of everyday experiences of neoliberalisation. Mirowski endorses Foucault’s assertion that ‘the [neoliberal] model of Homo economicus’ could be extended ‘not only to every economic actor, but to every social actor in general’ (in Mirowski, 2013: 95). Rather than governing through the state, the governance of individuals is enacted through experts and services whose role it is to assist the individual to maximise their own capacity to choose and be free. As each living person may exist between a constellation of social roles and strategies of government, to govern in this way entails the fragmentation of selfhood.

The fragmentation of the neoliberal self begins when the agent is brought face to face with the realization that she is not just an employee or student, but also simultaneously a product to be sold, a walking advertisement, a manager of her résumé, a biographer of her rationales, and an entrepreneur of her possibilities. She has to somehow manage to be simultaneously subject, object, and spectator. She is perforce not learning about who she really is, but rather, provisionally buying the person she must soon become. (Mirowski, 2013: 108)

This fragmenting self implies a corresponding definition of freedom. To be aware of oneself as human capital invokes the rationalisation of the self; a call to direct one’s conduct in the pursuit of some ends, imagining oneself as a kind of material to be worked and reworked. Or, as Mirowski claims, for the fragmented self, ‘you are most yourself when you are putty in your own hands’ (2013: 116). This image of the rational self-manager, extended to non-financial domains of life, conflates freedom with flexibility, self-actuation with self-management, and objectivity with the expertise of self-governance.

Past research exploring the ethico-politics of academia has commented on the transformational influence of neoliberal policies and managerial governance frameworks that have been developing since the early 1980s (Cannizzo, 2015; De Angelis and Harvie, 2009; Henkel, 2000; Ward, 2012). As Ward (2012: 5) notes, neoliberal policy reforms tended to conceptualise education ‘as a private investment in “human capital” made by knowledge consumers in order to better their position and status in the marketplace’. The transformation of universities through performance management initiatives, managerial governance paradigms (or New Public Management) and tighter conditions over the state’s provision of funding to universities raises questions about the values shaping the academic enterprise (see Archer, 2008a; Davies and Bansel, 2010; Joseph, 2015; Morrish and Sauntson, 2016). In light of Mirowski’s theorisation about the experience of self that may result in the context of deep(ening) neoliberalisation, the following section explores three sites at which the effects of everyday neoliberalism register in the discourse of academics. In exploring the enactment of everyday neoliberalism, the experience of neoliberal selves is shown to be fragile and institutionally bound, rather than reducible to generalising about whether one is ‘being a neoliberal subject’ (Archer, 2008b: 281). Within this fragility lie the possibilities for thinking ourselves otherwise.

Three forms of everyday neoliberalism

The data discussed here draws on a study of 29 Australian academics. In-depth interviews ranging from 30 to 70 minutes were conducted between March and October in 2014. Participants were contacted with the assistance of departments’ communication channels (such as e-newsletters and emails from the head of department/school). Academics with a background in social or biological sciences were sought out to explore disciplinary differences across the largely monastic social sciences and team-based biological sciences (see Becher and Trowler, 2001). Although the sample group is not statistically representative of the larger Australian academic workforce, participants were sampled to achieve a diversity of experiences across the following categories: sex (45% female; 55% male), career stage (27% early-career; 59% mid-career; 14% late-career), disciplinary grouping (62% social sciences; 38% biological sciences) and employment classification (14% associate lecturer/research fellow; 31% lecturer/senior research fellow; 24% senior lecturer; 17% associate professor; 14% professor).

Open-ended interview questions were used to allow participants to narrate their personal histories and reflect on organisational governance and change. These interviews were ‘focused interactions’ (Denzin, cited in Silverman, 2014: 183) that depended on common norms and conventions understood by both the interviewer and interviewee. Interviewees were invited to lend their personal experience to a scholarly understanding of university management, establishing a sympathetic rapport between participants. Questions were posed to participants on the following topics: personal academic history; field of specialisation and ambitions therein; formal and informal academic roles; the allocation of time and other resources to activities such as ‘innovation’; and career conceptualisations and planning.

These topics of inquiry formed part of a larger doctoral study of academics’ career planning and expectations in the contemporary context, in which discourses such as ‘innovation’ were identified as central paradigms of academic governance (Cannizzo, 2017). Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim, and pseudonyms were assigned to protect participants’ anonymity. A constant comparative method of analysis was used to develop and test hypotheses: initial inductive categories and claims that emerged from analysis of any interview transcript were tested and modified through comparison to the remainder of transcripts, which were treated as potential ‘deviant cases’ (see Silverman, 2014: 97–9). The three forms of everyday neoliberalism presented below are each the result of one such hypothesis or concept that has been tested against all relevant data collected across the interviews in this study. They cover three areas of academic practice that have become nearly synonymous with a scholarly life: teaching innovation, research publication and career building.

Enthusing enterprising teachers through ‘teaching innovation’

Interviewees expressed a range of views about what constituted teaching innovation and how such activities should be assessed. Those hired on contingent contracts and in junior roles were more likely to express suspicion at the idea of investing their time in teaching innovation, as the following early-career academic states:

I’m conscious of not investing too much time…. One of my colleagues here has talked about this tipping point where you invest a certain amount of time and energy and after that sort of saturation point, the returns are minimal. Not only in terms of student evaluations, but: did the students perceive that time and energy that you’ve put in? You can be too innovative sometimes. (Lecturer, social sciences)

Although viewed as valuable, teaching innovation is situated in a nexus of time constraints and cost–benefit analysis for many younger academics. Despite idiosyncrasies in participants’ definitions of what should be recognised as innovative teaching activities and the potential benefits of such activities, commonalities emerged as to how teaching innovation was understood as an institutional phenomenon, viewed within the university.

First, discussion of teaching quality and innovation was often legitimated through reference to formal student teaching and course evaluations. Although student evaluation metrics did not feature as an explanation of why particular teaching approaches or techniques were adopted by participants, claims of success were often substantiated by reference to such metrics. For one professor, student evaluation metrics were presented as testimony to the success of a recently implemented digital teaching innovation:

We’ve just got the results in at the end of the semester … there was between a 0.3 and 0.5 improvement in student feedback. This is on a scale where last year most of the stuff sat around between 3.7 and 3.9 on a 5-point scale and this year it sits between 4.2 and 4.5. And the strongly agree or agree parts of the student feedback were running 90% positive, which is just amazing! (Professor, social sciences)

Teaching evaluations not only quantify the performance of teaching, but also act as a domain within which the value of teaching may be represented and assessed in comparative evaluations, allowing such measures to shape the form of academic labour (see De Angelis and Harvie, 2009: 18). The use of such metrics as a means of legitimating teaching performance are not limited to teaching innovation, but are also mobilised by those whose career aspirations lay elsewhere, as the following participant suggests:

Because I’m more interested in research, I want to do the bare minimum with teaching; get good student evaluations, but not go overboard…. As long as I’m keeping my head above water with teaching, that’s fine with me. (Associate professor, social sciences)

Although past research has cast doubt on the reliability of student evaluations as a measure of the value of educational experiences (see Bedggood and Donovan, 2012), these doubts have not deterred the use of such evaluations to demonstrate the value of teaching practice and innovation. This ongoing use may partially be understood as part of a disciplinary system (De Angelis and Harvie, 2009: 16). To understand the use of student teaching evaluations as a demonstration of value of teaching activities, these evaluations need to be viewed not as a demonstration of the quality of teaching, but a demonstration of the ability of an academic teacher to demonstrate their value as agents in the present higher education system. These metrics possess, as Stephen Ball (2003: 224) argues, a performative dimension:

Truthfulness is not the point – the point is their effectiveness, both in the market or for Inspection [sic] or appraisal, and in the ‘work’ they do ‘on’ and ‘in’ the organization – their transformational and disciplinary impact.

Through being evaluated, the ‘worth, quality or value’ of a teacher may be encapsulated and represented within a field of judgement (Ball, 2003: 216). Resonating in Mirowski’s image of the fragmented, neoliberal self, Ball (2003: 221) argues that the psychological ‘costs’ of performative teaching metrics include ‘a kind of values schizophrenia … where commitment, judgement and authenticity within practice are sacrificed for impression and performance’ (original emphasis). While Ball identifies this ‘values schizophrenia’, he focuses on cases that exemplify the ‘terrors of performativity’ (that is, experiences of inauthenticity) and therefore overlooks the potential for performance metrics to also validate teachers’ identities. As suggested by the associate professor, above, and contrary to Ball (2003: 224), an academic teacher does not have to care about the authenticity of performances to find value in this evaluation. Rather, what programs for teaching innovation may offer is an opportunity for teachers to experiment with the manipulation of teaching performance outcomes. For the successful teacher, rather than an inauthenticating ‘terror’, performative teaching evaluations and innovation discourse may produce an encouraging experience of self-fragmentation; that is, the experience of being a competent manager of self-expressions.

Self-fragmentation in research publishing culture

The academic participants in my study discussed a variety of conceptualisations of why they published and of what ends they felt academic publication served, such as communication with intellectual communities, the establishment of their credibility as researchers, improving their job security or employment opportunities, or the attainment of satisfaction. Despite the diversity of claims, academics’ conceptions of the publishing process are inalienable from their conceptions of their selves. For those who perceive themselves to be, or who aspire to become, valued researchers in their scholarly specialities, academic publishing is a means to communicate one’s self worth and contribute to a collegial community of researchers, despite also being a ‘convenient proxy’ for ‘achievement’ in university performance planning (Morrish and Sauntson, 2016: 51). One interviewee, Odelia, for example, describes publishing as both governed by university imperatives and yet personally meaningful:

The university has standards, but they’re very low. I think one or two publications a year…. That’s a way of paying back the university for my salary…. But it also has intrinsic value to me. It’s meaningful to me to write. I’m writing for my academic peers. (Associate professor, social sciences)

Other participants also emphasised this duality of types of work, which may be described in Weberian terms as value rational and instrumental rational modes of action (see Osbaldiston et al., 2016). Both forms of action are understood as vital to academic work, competing for time and energy.

The status of the academic as employee has become a dominant rationale, justifying the imposition of the university’s performance objectives within the academic research process. Fairen’s defence of the norm of aiming towards Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) implies the subordination of values-driven conduct to instrumental actions:

If you can achieve your KPIs with publications then it will obviously have implications in terms of you getting research funding. It means you are an expert in an area, that you have established your own research in that area…. With that, that will help you to get your funding. Without publications, you can’t get funding. Without funding, you can’t do your research. It’s the research cycle. (Lecturer, biological sciences)

Instrumental academic publishing is placed at the centre of at least two different rationalities of government relating to the academic self. Academics must be both competent employees, conceptualised through the achievement of performance standards, and also knowledgeable experts. The tension between the two rationalities of academic work implies an experience of self-fragmentation (Mirowski, 2013: 108). This tension may encourage many to expand their work time and habits to accommodate for conflicting demands, as Jacinta describes:

My feeling is that research is increasingly being seen as something that you should be doing in your own time, rather than on their time. So unless you can find the money to be a full-time researcher, it’s highly likely that it’s going to bite into your own time…. I don’t know how to deal with that (Lecturer, social sciences)

The emergence of pressures towards what Currie and Eveline (2011) describe as a ‘long hours culture’ in academia and other professional occupations is potentially exacerbated by the experience of self-fragmentation in the research process. The hierarchical management of academics’ research performance, combined with the desire to produce meaningful work, may encourage the expansion of this long hours culture.

The academic career as an entrepreneurial project

Neither of the examples above, of academic teaching innovation discourse and research publishing culture, can be understood beyond institutional strategies that connect the conduct of academics to notions of ‘risk’. Risk, for the fragmenting, enterprising self, is a narrative tool that frames a confrontation with uncertainty as a test of virtue. As Mirowski (2013: 120) claims: ‘The modern denizen of neoliberal society has not demonstrated real flexibility of personal identity until they have prostrated themselves before the capricious god of risk.’

The willingness to confront uncertainty is valorised as an expression of individual freedom. It is not uncommon to hear academics attribute a degree of ‘luck’ to their successful appointment or promotion. For example, an early-career participant commented upon his good fortune to have secured an academic post focusing on their research field: ‘I feel really lucky. I feel like I’ve won the lottery of jobs.’ Other academics more explicitly framed their willingness to confront uncertainty as virtuous. Whitney commented:

Personally, I have a high level of resilience and I often see change as a new opportunity. It doesn’t mean I don’t often grumble about it sometimes, you know? [laughs] … I bounce back a lot, when I need to. Or even when there’s uncertainty in the future, then it’s just, so what? Every day is another day. (Senior lecturer, biological sciences)

As a kind of response to uncertainty, discourses of ‘luck’ and ‘resilience’ invoke a sense of the incalculability of the uncertainties being described. Alongside engaging with strategies to mitigate known ‘risks’ of academic career planning, participants often described developing qualities of resilience to confront unpredictable catastrophes. A senior staff member employed on his own grant (or ‘soft money’) describes how an entrepreneurial mentality can also be felt to compromise a commitment to other scholarly values.

I have to go-get to survive. The question is to what extent I can manufacture that whilst keeping my values in place…. I feel a little bit tested at the moment by the sort of corporatist mentality and what they’re expecting of me. (Associate professor, social sciences)

The differences in attitudes towards entrepreneurialism between the biological and social scientists above may in part reflect a difference in disciplinary history and expectations, between more grant-dependent biological sciences and teaching-dependent social sciences (Becher and Trowler, 2001). Regardless of the attitude towards entrepreneurialism, the expectation that one must be entrepreneurial and develop resilience is widespread.

Dean (2014: 159) argues that the fostering of resilience in individuals has become part of a neoliberal governmental strategy to confront ‘unknowable, unpredictable and unmanageable catastrophe’. This dispositif of catastrophe enables:

a regime of government that no longer promises an omniscient market order enhancing human welfare but simply accepts the evolution of complex systems and the inevitability of catastrophe…. The only possible policy direction is to prepare against their inevitability. (Dean, 2014: 160)

The engineering of a mentality that encourages individuals to take it upon themselves to confront uncertainties has become part of a governmental strategy through perpetuating a ‘mobilizing uncertainty’ (Lazzarato, 2009: 119). The experience of insecurity, described by academics in the form of ‘resilience’ and ‘luck’, is not evidence of the failure to manage uncertainty, but rather an outcome of a governmental strategy to devolve the management of uncertainty to the individual.

The responsibilisation of the individual as the ultimate self-manager of uncertainty has political implications for one group in particular: those employed on contingent or part-time contracts. For this group, feelings of being undervalued and ‘outside’ of formal academic networks were attributed to their work contract status, as Hailey notes:

The idea is that it has to be who you are and it has to be your whole life. Therefore, if you’re 0.6 [fraction of full-time employment], you’re just a waste of space. You’re just wasting a position that a whole academic could be taking. (Associate lecturer, social sciences)

For Hailey, the experience of being excluded from staff meetings and consultation, having her authority over her teaching staff undermined by senior staff members, and not having a permanent desk to work at on a day-to-day basis prompted her to consider negotiating a full-time contract. Isabel’s view of career management shared with Hailey’s comment a sense of illegitimacy in prioritising non-work life over academic achievements.

Much of academic work takes place outside working hours. What takes place most outside of working hours is the stuff that you’re most crucially judged on, which is number and quality of publications. So even at part-time, but possibly full-time, with someone else doing everything for you and having the maid to sort out the home and whatever – that’s what gets you a career, in my view. (Senior lecturer, social sciences)

The widespread variability of workload management practices across the sample of academics interviewed in this study suggests that institutional norms facilitate academic self-management of working hours and tasks, including their extension into non-work spaces and times. This is especially concerning, given the present variability in organisation workload management practices in academia (Barrett and Barrett, 2007; Vardi, 2009). Importantly, the invocation of feelings of inauthenticity surrounding part-time or casual academic work contracts may be viewed as an extension of the responsibilisation of the individual academic for the uncertainties associated with an academic career. The academic career is simultaneously politically compromised, in that its activities are directed towards organisational objectives, and depoliticised, as the appearance of ‘luck’, individual choice and ‘resilience’ characterise academics’ accounts.

Privatised values, public evaluations and performative pragmatics

The above three forms of everyday neoliberalism suggest an intimate relationship between the transformation of modes of self-valuation, governance and organisational norms. In discourses of innovation, research publication cultures, and academic career planning, norms of evaluation have come to inform the assumptions upon which individuals – and not just governments – judge when they should intervene in their own lives and how this might be achieved. One means of conceptualising the intersection of truth–self-governance is through the concepts of identity and values (see Becher and Trowler, 2001; Henkel, 2000; Winter, 2009). While such an approach is useful for investigating the social constitution of values and dispositions, it risks reifying subjectivity as a mirror of communities or institutions. For example, for Becher and Trowler (2001), academic identities mirror disciplinary communities or other territorial groups; for Henkel (2000), identity formation follows from categories developed during academic socialisation practices, centring on research, teaching and possibly management identities; and for Winter (2009), a mismatch between academic professional and corporate values enact identity schisms between those who find ways of merging these values (becoming ‘academic managers’) and those whose values remain incongruent (identifying as ‘managed academics’). While investigating identity as a part of a group belonging is a useful way to explore the development of values in relation to a community or institution, it is less useful to investigate how a political rationality might influence values, as rationalities are not limited to particular groups or organisations. The investigation of forms of everyday neoliberalism suggests that values may be explored beyond their connection to particular groups: that is, by reference to the forms of knowledge, expertise and political strategies that presuppose their functioning.

By focusing on the epistemological assumptions that frame how individuals describe and reason about their selves and academic lives, this study has revealed the centrality of modes of justification that value academics’ technical compliance with procedural norms. Student evaluations, publication metrics and the development of ‘resilience’ to the potentially catastrophic fortunes of an academic career valorise a certain image of a competitive, competent and compliant technician of self-management. The choice presented to an individual is whether or not to pursue academic practice, but once that choice has been made, there are widely accepted better or worse means and attitudes towards conducting that career. Agents can wilfully make ostensibly ‘bad’ choices! These choices are examined through rituals of judgement: the public evaluations through which academics are regularly measured and compared. Because many of these rituals are rhetorically defended as non-interpretive or pragmatically accepted as practices for comparing and evaluating aspects of academic persons, inequalities in power become rationalised as performative ‘facts’ (see Davies, 2014: 30). The pragmatic acceptance of evaluative mechanisms leads to a metaphysical emptying of the criteria of value for academic practice. In other words, the possibility of valuing academic conduct for its contribution to some private value, be that an idea of justice, truth, freedom and so on, becomes a secondary concern to the pragmatic functioning of the mechanism of evaluation. As respondents in this study have demonstrated, the subsumption of academic labour to performance evaluation is contested through discourses of meaningful labour, such as effective teaching, valued research and fulfilling careers.

The processes though which performative facts about academics are constructed influence how they are compared and judged. This is not to argue that there are never other criteria by which managerial decisions are made, but rather that the visibility and normativity of institutionalised mechanisms for performance management incentivise academics to demonstrate their value through these mechanisms. The successful uptake of gamified social media platforms such as ResearchGate and Academia.Edu can partially be explained by their imitation of institutionalised performance management mechanisms – self-metricisation succeeds in part because it is a game that academics already understand. As Hammarfelt et al. (2016: n.p.) argue, such platforms ‘tend to be premised on existing practices for academic reputation management and visibility’. Though such platforms may provide novel devices to encourage academics to supply information and maintain their ‘profiles’, they do so by drawing upon established practices for producing ‘truths’ about academics: that is, publication counts, journal rankings, and other measures commonly associated with academic curricula vitae. The moments of everyday neoliberalism described above operate through a double nature: enticing individuals to engage through offering a structure to compare self-directed actions, but also threatening exclusion to those who forgo the opportunity to realise their potential through becoming putty in their own hands.

Everyday neoliberalism is experienced in academia primarily as what Winter (2009) describes as a values tension – a mismatch between the values of academic communities and capitalistic imperatives. Furthermore, this tension is felt through the teleologies of different academic practices: on the one hand, hosting scholarly seminars, gratis, or attending social functions may be directed towards developing a scholarly community; on the other, auditing and disseminating research to journals with fast review processes appeal to the criteria of efficiency and utility.

Between these two types of activities, it is those associated with the public evaluation of academics that are premised on a performative pragmatics. It is within the operation of these practices that the actions of academics are, retrospectively and anticipatorily, evaluated in terms of their utility to organisational objectives (Cannizzo, 2015). The production of an auditable subject can be viewed as an outcome of a governmental strategy; of mobilising uncertainty through directing self-awareness, responsibilising academic workers and departments for the outcomes of unknown contingencies. The ‘schism’ between academic and managerial values results in the subjective experience of depoliticised evaluations of academic conduct, as academic work comes to be defined by managerial expertise and its utility to organisational objectives through performance management. The performance management practices described in interviews centre on the utility of academic practice to the demonstration of self-value, encouraging an individualised approach to managing academic labour. Academic workers confront everyday neoliberalism and processes of neoliberalisation similarly to the public service (Pusey, 1991): through the transformation of both institutions and possibilities for professional ethics.