The spread of the principles and techniques of financial accounting into new systems for measuring, ranking, and auditing performance represents one of the most important and defining features of contemporary governance. Audit procedures are redefining accountability, transparency, and good governance and reshaping the way organizations and individuals have to operate. They also undermine professional autonomy and have unanticipated and dysfunctional consequences. Taking up the concept of audit culture as an analytical framework, we examine the origins, spread, and rationality driving these new financialized techniques of governance, not least through the work of the Big Four accountancy firms, and trace their impact across a number of fields, from administration and the military to business corporations and universities. We ask, what new kinds of ethics of accountability does audit produce? Building on Mitchell (1999), Strathern (2000a), Trouillot (2001), and Merry (2011), we identify how the techniques ...

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Audit Culture Revisited: Rankings, Ratings and the Reassembling of Society

Authored by the Series Editor, this is the first volume in the Palgrave Critical University Studies Series, the explicit aim of which is to provide a 'forum for the intensive and extensive discussi...

The toxic university: zombie leadership, academic rock stars, and neoliberal ideology

This article argues that gender equality programmes in universities and colleges may operate as a form of ‘moderate feminism’, producing contradictions through simultaneously providing a site of resistance and complicity for feminists. Our argument draws on a critical and empirical analysis of the Athena SWAN (Scientific Women's Academic Network) charter mark, which originated in the UK. We argue that Athena SWAN is a product of neoliberalization within the UK's academic environments, reflecting the tendency towards accountability, metrics and the performative ‘doing’ of equality work within this context. We problematize the operationalization and implementation of Athena SWAN processes in departments and universities, describing contradictions and caveats. Athena SWAN can lead to benefits and (limited) achievements in terms of culture change and institutional initiatives. However, the burden of undertaking this work predominantly falls upon women and other marginalized groups, such as people of colour and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people. Equality programmes such as Athena SWAN are often poorly designed to address complex issues, such as intersectional identities and discrimination experienced by self‐assessment team members. Nevertheless, we identify potential in utilizing Athena SWAN as a site of resistance and means to foster collective solidarity to work against neoliberal practices.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/gwao.12336

Moderate feminism within or against the neoliberal university? The example of Athena SWAN

Reflecting on the shifting landscape of higher education, this discussion highlights how inequality is entrenched within the university, largely as a result of Western-inspired, commodified...

Rehumanising the university for an alternative future: decolonisation, alternative epistemologies and cognitive justice

https://link-springer-com-443.webvpn.jmu.edu.cn/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-94-017-9553-1_308-1.pdf

New Managerialism in Higher Education

As an early pioneer of market-led institutional reforms and New Public Management policies, New Zealand arguably has one of the most 'neoliberalised' tertiary education sectors in the world. This article reports on a recent academic dispute concerning the attempt by management to introduce a new category of casualised academic employee within one of the country's largest research universities. It is based on a fieldwork study, including document analysis, interviews and the participation of both authors in union and activist activities arising from the dispute. Whilst some academics may collude in the new regimes of governance that these reforms have created, we suggest that 'collusion' and 'resistance' are inadequate terms for explaining how academic behaviour and subjectivities are being reshaped in the modern neoliberal university. We argue for a more theoretically nuanced and situational account that acknowledges the wider legal and systemic constraints that these reforms have created. To do this, we problematise the concept of collusion and reframe it according to three different categories: 'conscious complicity', 'unwitting complicity' and 'coercive complicity'. We ask, what happens when one must 'collude' in order to resist, or when certain forms of opposition are rendered impossible by the terms of one's employment contract? We conclude by reflecting on ways in which academics understand and engage with the policies of university managers in contexts where changes to the framework governing employment relations have rendered conventional forms of resistance increasingly problematic, if not illegal.

Miri Davidson

Papers

Beyond collusion and resistance: Academic–management relations within the neoliberal university