Showing papers on "Performativity published in 2013"
Book•
01 Apr 2013
TL;DR: The political promise of the performative can be found in the sociality of self-poietics: Talking back to the violence of recognition 64 7 Recognition and survival, or surviving recognition 75 8 Relationality as self-dispossession 92 9 Uncounted bodies, incalculable performativity 97 10 Responsiveness as responsibility 104 11 Ex-propriating the performive 126 12 Dispossessed languages, or singularities named and renamed 131 13 The political promise and its resistances 149 15 Enacting another vulnerability: On owing and owning 158 16 Trans-
Abstract: Preface vii 1 Aporetic dispossession, or the trouble with dispossession 1 2 The logic of dispossession and the matter of the human (after the critique of metaphysics of substance) 10 3 A caveat about the "primacy of economy" 38 4 Sexual dispossessions 44 5 (Trans)possessions, or bodies beyond themselves 55 6 The sociality of self-poietics: Talking back to the violence of recognition 64 7 Recognition and survival, or surviving recognition 75 8 Relationality as self-dispossession 92 9 Uncounted bodies, incalculable performativity 97 10 Responsiveness as responsibility 104 11 Ex-propriating the performative 126 12 Dispossessed languages, or singularities named and renamed 131 13 The political promise of the performative 140 14 The governmentality of "crisis" and its resistances 149 15 Enacting another vulnerability: On owing and owning 158 16 Trans-border affective foreclosures and state racism 164 17 Public grievability and the politics of memorialization 173 18 The political affects of plural performativity 176 19 Conundrums of solidarity 184 20 The university, the humanities, and the book bloc 188 21 Spaces of appearance, politics of exposure 193 Notes 198 Index 205
518 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, Ball and Olmedo approach the question of resistance in a different way, through Foucault's notion of "the care of the self" to make clear that social reality is not as inevitable as it may seem.
Abstract: Resistance is normally thought of as a collective exercise of public political activity. In this article, Ball and Olmedo approach the question of resistance in a different way, through Foucault's notion of ‘the care of the self’. Neoliberal reforms in education are producing new kinds of teaching subjects, new forms of subjectivity. It makes sense then that subjectivity should be the terrain of struggle, the terrain of resistance. A set of e-mail exchanges with teachers, based around Ball's work on performativity, enable the authors to access the work of power relations through the uncertainties, discomforts and refusals that these teachers bring to their everyday practice. By acting ‘irresponsibly’, these teachers take ‘responsibility’ for the care of their selves and in doing so make clear that social reality is not as inevitable as it may seem. This is not strategic action in the normal political sense. Rather it is a process of struggle against mundane, quotidian neoliberalisations, that creates the ...
440 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored responses to current research policy trends and found that although the majority of academics expressed opposition to current policy developments, most were nevertheless complying with research imperatives, and discussed compliance, contestation and complicity in relation both to the data and to their own location as academics in this field.
Abstract: Research, a major purpose of higher education, has become increasingly important in a context of global economic competitiveness. In this paper, we draw on data from email interviews with academics in Britain to explore responses to current research policy trends. Although the majority of academics expressed opposition to current policy developments, most were nevertheless complying with research imperatives. Informed by a Foucauldian conceptualisation of audit, feminist research on gendered performativity, and sociological and psycho-social theoretical resources on the affective, we discuss compliance, contestation and complicity in relation both to the data and to our own location as academics in this field.
130 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the potential for cosmopolitan solidarity inherent in convergent journalism lies with the insertion of ordinary voice in a broader structure of Western journalism is organized around processes of remediation, inter-mediation and transmediation.
Abstract: This article draws on performativity theory in order to analyse convergent journalism as a form of journalism that privileges the civil disposition of “I have a voice”, or citizen-driven acts of deliberating and witnessing, over the professional act of informing. Whilst this shift in the epistemology of the news from the truth of institutional expertise to the truth of ordinary voice has been welcome as a democratisation of journalism, catalysing processes of recognition that may cosmopolitanise the West, I advocate a more cautious, empirically-grounded approach that attends to variations in convergence reporting. The potential for cosmopolitan solidarity inherent in convergent journalism, I argue, lies with the insertion of ordinary voice in a broader structure of Western journalism is organised around processes of re-mediation, inter-mediation and trans-mediation. This structure that challenges existing hierarchies of place and human life and thus enables the disposition of “I have a voice” to go beyond...
100 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the relationship between reality and representation is explored, by drawing from performativity theory, and it is argued that the ownership model is not so much constative (descriptive) as performative.
Abstract: Scholars under the ‘Progressive Property’ banner distinguish between dominant conceptions of property, and its underlying realities. The former, exemplified by Singer’s ‘ownership model’, is said to misdescribe extant forms of ownership and misrepresent our actual moral commitments in worrisome ways. Put simply, it is argued that our representations of property’s reality are incorrect, and that these incorrect representations lead us to make bad choices. Better understandings of the reality of property should lead to better representations, and thus improved outcomes.However, the relationship between ‘reality’ and ‘representation’ is not made fully explicit. This essay seeks to supplement progressive property through a more careful exploration of the relationship between the two, by drawing from performativity theory. From this perspective, accounts of property are in an important sense not descriptions of an external reality, but help bring reality into being. The ownership model is not so much constative (descriptive) as performative. Such an account, I suggest, directs us to several important insights. Rather than asking what property is or is not, the task becomes that of trying to describe how property is performed (or not) into being. But concepts do not stand alone: rather, other ideas, people, things and other resources have to be enrolled in complicated (and often fragile) combinations. Rather than criticizing the ownership model for its mismatch with reality, we might consider that models do not have to be ‘true’, just successful. As such, it may be more useful for progressive scholars of property to redirect their energy into enquiring how it is that certain conceptions of property are successful, and others not. To do so also requires that we think about the role of scholars in performing property, for good or bad, into being.
96 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a broader notion of performativity is proposed, one that not only concerns theory but is also extended to the entire economy, which observes itself in all of its operations.
Abstract: The paper reflects on the presuppositions and consequences of the concept of performativity (understood as the involvement of the observer in the objects and projects he/she describes). The paper proposes a broader notion of performativity, one that not only concerns theory but is also extended to the entire economy, which observes itself in all of its operations. This conception has the advantage of being connected with critical approaches inside economics, which highlight the central role of uncertainty and surprise. It can explain how and why performativity turns into counter-performativity and how financial operators exploit uncertainty when orienting their behaviour, expecting and using the unpredictability of the future.
93 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors reveal how the pressures of financialization were passed from top management to employees and achieved performative hegemony in a subsidiary of a knowledge intensive, high technology, multinational corporation.
Abstract: This paper uncovers how the pressures of financialization were passed from top management to employees and achieved performative hegemony in a subsidiary of a knowledge intensive, high technology, multinational corporation. Qualitative insights from subsidiary directors, management and knowledge workers are presented. The paper demonstrates that financialization is a performative phenomenon which elevates the role of accounting in organizations. It highlights how budgets can serve as a performative mechanism through which top management can narrate a desired reality and pass down a myriad of performative interventions to achieve this reality. The paper uncovers how financialization can cause insecurity, work intensification, suppression of voice and the enactment of falsely optimistic behaviours; all of which prompt distress and anger amongst knowledge workers. The paper also uncovers sources of counter performativity and resistance but demonstrates that employees ultimately participate in their subordination. Employees pursue financialized performative interventions as they interpret them as the primary method of securing their role in a pervasively insecure work environment.
89 citations
TL;DR: The authors investigated the relationship between the body and leadership through a case study of a transgender leader and found that the leader's body, presumed gender, and gendered appearance are salient markers that employees use to make sense of leaders and leadership and that this gendered nature of leadership shows the deep roots of gender dichotomies and the heterosexual matrix that permeate our understanding of leadership.
Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between the body and leadership through a case study of a transgender leader. The study shows that the leader's body, presumed gender, and gendered appearance are salient markers that employees use to make sense of leaders and leadership, and that this gendered nature of leadership shows the deep roots of gender dichotomies and the heterosexual matrix that permeate our understanding of leadership. These two findings lead us to emphasize the need to queer leadership. All leaders experience gendered restrictions, to some extent, via the social norms and expectations of the way leadership should be performed. The construction of leadership through a transgender body reminds us to stay open to the exploration of performativity, particularly the relationships between bodies, gender, sexuality, and leadership and how any body can benefit from queering leadership. (Less)
65 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the semiotic underpinnings of the Fregean sense, Austinian performativity, and Derridean deconstruction of the concept of citationality.
Abstract: This essay explores the semiotics of citation. The citation is an act that re-presents some other event of discourse and marks that re-presentation as not(-quite) what it presences. The citation is a play of sameness and difference, identity and alterity, an interdiscursive calibration of an event of citing and a cited event, and is reflexive about that very fact. As such, citational acts can open up new social horizons of possibility, signification, and performative power. This essay investigates the citational underpinnings of the Fregean sense, Austinian performativity, and Derridean deconstruction. I give particular attention to Derrida's reading of Austin, and his development of the concept of citationality. As I argue, Derrida's insistence on the necessary possibility of citationality elides the fact that citations are always already achievements in context, and thus empirical facts about particular (types of) acts in the world. Not all acts are reflexive about their citationality, and this ...
63 citations
TL;DR: This article revisited the making of International Relations as a discrete theoretical endeavour from Waltz (1979) to Wendt (1999), around, respectively, the efforts to unearth the structures of international politics that carved out the international as a distinct site of political analysis, and the appraisal of these structures as social structures.
Abstract: In this contribution I engage with the question of the end of theory from a poststructuralist perspective. I begin by revisiting the making of International Relations as a discrete theoretical endeavour from Waltz (1979) to Wendt (1999), around, respectively, the efforts to unearth the structures of international politics that carved out the international as a distinct site of political analysis, and the appraisal of these structures as social structures (Wendt, 1999). I then revisit the origins of poststructuralism via the works of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, in order to bring its founding moves to bear directly on International Relations constructivism. Engaging with constructivism's founding fathers, Nicholas Onuf, Alexander Wendt and Friedrich Kratochwil, I show that the search for unconstructed universals, grounded in an innate 'human nature', persistently haunts International Relations constructivism, even when it foregrounds language as the medium of social construction, and notably when it engages the question of gender. Just as language provided the original site for orchestrating the 'moving beyond' (the 'post' of poststructuralism) fixed, naturalized structures, I argue that a return to language holds the promise of renewal, and of constructivism's being able to fulfil its founding promise to theorize constitutivity and the constructed-ness of International Relations' world.
62 citations
TL;DR: The theory of performativity provides gender theorists with a rich theoretical language for thinking about gender as discussed by the authors, but it is difficult to apply, as Butler does not apply it in practice.
Abstract: Judith Butler’s theory of performativity provides gender theorists with a rich theoretical language for thinking about gender. Despite this, Butlerian theory is difficult to apply, as Butler does n...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue for a more robust analysis and application of Karl Polanyi's conception of disembedded markets coupled with the performativity thesis authored mainly by Michel Callon.
Abstract: In light of the spread of markets across the globe and deeper into daily life, this paper argues for a more robust analysis and application of Karl Polanyi's conception of (dis)embedded markets coupled with the performativity thesis authored mainly by Michel Callon. It suggests that while disembeddedness as a concept is necessary for an analysis of contemporary financial markets that are increasingly self-referential, it is not sufficient. Despite the suggestion of a gulf between Polanyian and Callonian economics, there are important similarities in the two frameworks. The similarities are considered along with the considerable difference, all in an attempt to develop a more robust methodological framework for analyzing financial markets. Performativity, it is argued, can help fill the gaps in Polanyi's embeddedness framework, albeit only when that concept's tendency to produce aspatial and apolitical arguments are taken seriously. The paper uses an abbreviated case study of the development of US financia...
TL;DR: This article argued that although the act of mommy blogging may be empowering, the term itself reinforces women's hegemonic normative roles as nurturers, thrusting women who blog about their children into a form of digital domesticity in the blogosphere.
Abstract: This article argues that although the act of mommy blogging may be empowering, the term itself reinforces women's hegemonic normative roles as nurturers, thrusting women who blog about their children into a form of digital domesticity in the blogosphere. Drawing on 29 blogs posts women wrote debating the term mommy blogger and 649 comments posted on these blogs, the author uses Judith Butler's concept of performativity to rhetorically analyze the term, using a techno-feminist lens and cyber-ethnographic approach. The author asserts that the use of the term mommy blogger continues the culturally ingrained performance of motherhood women learned since childhood, and, in so doing, holds women captive in this subjective norm that may not fit them. The use of mommy, versus mother, highlights the nurturing aspect of motherhood and conjures a prototype of the ideal mother, further marginalizing women by focusing on one attribute that does not apply to all women or even all mothers.
TL;DR: The Nottingham Critical Pedagogy Project as discussed by the authors proposes to de-essentialise Freire's conceptualisation of the human subject and her desire for transcendence with the introduction of Deleuze and Guattari's politics of desire.
Abstract: In this article I reflect on introducing critical pedagogy into social justice teaching in an elite UK university as part of the Nottingham Critical Pedagogy Project. I de-essentialise Freire's conceptualisation of the human subject and her desire for transcendence with the introduction of Deleuze and Guattari's politics of desire. This enables an adaption of critical pedagogy from its original context of popular politics to the individualised elite setting of our project. Our pedagogical objectives become the opening of spaces of possibility which decentre the dominant regime of truth of the neoliberal university and enable imagining and becoming “other”. This involves disrupting normal patterns of classroom performativity in terms of student as consumer and lecturer as producer of commodities, transgressing dualisms between mind/body, intellectual/emotional and teacher/student. Our pedagogical praxis is therefore inherently political as by radically disturbing commodified subjectivities we foster processes that lead to unanticipated, maybe even unspeakable, transgressions.
TL;DR: The authors explored the performativity of real ale tourism and debates about belonging in northern English real-ale communities, and argued that real ale fans demonstrate agency in their performativity, despite their perceived smaller size and older age.
Abstract: Leisure choices are expressive of individual agency around the maintenance of taste, boundaries, identity and community. This research paper is part of a wider project designed to assess the social and cultural value of real ale to tourism in the north of England. This paper explores the performativity of real-ale tourism and debates about belonging in northern English real-ale communities. The research combines an ethnographic case study of a real-ale festival with semi-structured interviews with organisers and volunteers, northern English real-ale brewers and real-ale tourists visiting the festival. It is argued that real-ale tourism, despite its origins in the logic of capitalism, becomes a space where people can perform Habermasian, communicative leisure, and despite the contradictions of preferring some capitalist industries over others on the basis of their perceived smaller size and older age, real-ale fans demonstrate agency in their performativity.
Posted Content•
TL;DR: In this article, a special section analyses the practices and the performativity of intermediaries in science, policy and the economy, focusing on how they mobilise, reframe and structure expertise and policy imperatives.
Abstract: This special section analyses the practices and the performativity of intermediaries. Rather than conceiving intermediaries as agents that passively transfer knowledge and objects between the worlds of science, policy and the economy, the focus is on how they mobilise, reframe and structure expertise and policy imperatives. The papers demonstrate that intermediaries come to: collectively explore new worlds and ventures; perform, define and constitute new scientific fields; and actively constitute logics such as scientification or forecasting in the development of techno-logical regulation. In this way, the papers that comprise this special section contribute to a performative understanding of the practices engaged in intermediation that extend and challenge documentary and ideographic modes of analysis that dominate current scholarhip.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors offer critical commentary on the culture of "performativity" that has dominated educational discourse over the last 20 years, affecting the way in which researchers, teachers, pupils and parents think and act toward Physical Education and sport (PESP) in schools.
Abstract: Background: This paper offers critical commentary on the culture of ‘performativity’ that has dominated educational discourse over the last 20 years, affecting the way in which researchers, teachers, pupils and parents think and act toward Physical Education and sport (PESP) in schools. It is a culture that, in the UK, is likely to intensify in the years ahead given Liberal-Conservative (Lib-Con) Government commitments to privatisation of public services, privileging the consumer, fostering greater diversity of provision, and freeing formal education of State and producer regulation. Purpose: To foster debate and reflection within the profession as to what Physical Education is for, what should be its guiding principles, and who should decide these things. Design: The paper offers informed polemic grounded in analyses of policy documents and personal research on Physical Education and Health over the last 20 or so years. Analyses: The paper re-stakes a claim for the importance of sociology in educational ...
TL;DR: This paper argued that the concept of indexicality, as theorized across diverse fields in sociocultural linguistics, has the potential to offer a much richer account of subjectivity than found in dominant strands of queer theory.
Abstract: In a review of contributions to a special issue of Discourse & Society on queer linguistics, this article argues that the concept of indexicality, as theorized across diverse fields in sociocultural linguistics, has the potential to offer a much richer account of subjectivity than found in dominant strands of queer theory. While queer theory valorizes practice over identity, viewing the latter as fixed and necessarily allied with normativity, research on language and social interaction suggests that an analytic distinction between practice and identity is untenable. The indexical processes that work to produce social meaning are multi-layered and always shifting across time and space, even within systems of heteronormativity. It is this semiotic evolution that should become the cornerstone of a (new) queer linguistics.
TL;DR: In this paper, a collaborative project between a university and a secondary school in England, in which the university staff supported an action research project within the school, was described, where teachers were given an introduction to action research and were assigned a university researcher to support them.
Abstract: In a culture of performativity, action research offers teachers an opportunity to step back and reflect on their practice. This paper reports on a collaborative project carried out between a university and a secondary school in England, in which the university staff supported an action research project within the school. Five school teachers volunteered to engage in this project. They were given an introduction to action research and were assigned a university researcher to support them. Despite the common input and a common school culture, the teachers engaged in very different models of action research. This article reports on two teachers whose approaches were dissimilar. It examines these differences and suggests that they can be explained by considering the teachers’ different responses to a performativity culture.
TL;DR: In this paper, a special section analyses the practices and the performativity of intermediaries in science, policy and the economy, focusing on how they mobilise, reframe and structure expertise and policy imperatives.
Abstract: This special section analyses the practices and the performativity of intermediaries. Rather than conceiving intermediaries as agents that passively transfer knowledge and objects between the worlds of science, policy and the economy, the focus is on how they mobilise, reframe and structure expertise and policy imperatives. The papers demonstrate that intermediaries come to: collectively explore new worlds and ventures; perform, define and constitute new scientific fields; and actively constitute logics such as scientification or forecasting in the development of techno-logical regulation. In this way, the papers that comprise this special section contribute to a performative understanding of the practices engaged in intermediation that extend and challenge documentary and ideographic modes of analysis that dominate current scholarhip.
01 Jan 2013
TL;DR: The notion of performativity has been used in the context of economic sociology as discussed by the authors, where the authors argue that the expansive use of "performativity" obscures the Austinian idea and thereby impoverishes the conceptual resources available for analyzing the nuances in complex theory/world connections.
Abstract: The new economic sociology claims to have adopted the notion of performativity from J.L Austin, has put it in new uses, and has given it new meanings. This is now spreading and has created another vogue term in the social and human sciences. The term is taken to cover all sorts of aspects in the ways in which the use of social scientific theories have consequences for the social world. The paper argues that the expansive use of ‘performativity’ obscures the Austinian idea and thereby impoverishes the conceptual resources available for analyzing the nuances in the complex theory/world connections. Importantly, it blurs the difference between constitutive and causal relationships, both of which actually are involved. Instead of economics performs the economy as the sociologists say, it would make more sense to say, the economy performs economics – but even this would be undermotivated.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that a performative understanding of emotions not only facilitates linking emotions to certain places, histories and (collective) bodies, but also helps to think of emotions as expressed both through body and speech acts.
TL;DR: This article explored significant points of intersection between foundational tenets of the social studies and the lessons learned by students in the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) at one Midwestern high school and found that students' attention to gender scripts combined with the knowledge they gained from selected lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT), and queer-focused topics have strong implications for changing the landscape of social education.
Abstract: The author explores significant points of intersection between foundational tenets of the social studies and the lessons learned by students in the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) at one Midwestern high school. He suggests new ways social studies researchers and teachers might conceptualize the ideas and themes promoted in GSAs and apply them directly to social studies content and/or standards. The research is informed by Judith Butler's articulation of “performativity” of gender and Queer Theory and draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over the course of 1 school year as well as in-depth interviews with GSA members. Findings suggest students' attention to gender scripts combined with the knowledge they gained from selected lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT), and queer-focused topics have strong implications for changing the landscape of social education. The author concludes that social studies education has an opportunity to broaden students' understanding of social education, to undo ...
TL;DR: In this article, the role of models in Danish economic policy is explored and the concept of performativity is explored as a means of thinking about the constitution of agency directed at policy change.
Abstract: Can the emergence of a new policy model be a catalyst for a paradigm shift in the overall interpretative framework of how economic policy is conducted within a society? This paper claims that models are understudied as devices used by actors to induce policy change. This paper explores the role of models in Danish economic policy, where, from the 1970s onwards, executive public servants in this area have exclusively been specialists in model design. To understand changes in economic policy, this paper starts with a discussion of whether the notion of paradigm shift is adequate. It then examines the extent to which the performativity approach can help identify macroscopic changes in policy from seemingly microscopic changes in policy models. The concept of performativity is explored as a means of thinking about the constitution of agency directed at policy change. The paper brings this concept into play by arguing that the “performative” embedding of models in institutions is an important aspect of how paradigm shifts unfold that the current literature has neglected.
TL;DR: The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity were explored in this article, where the authors used the four "axes" of Foucault's ethics to explain how performativity has brought about changes in relation to the domain, the authority sources/mode of subjectivization, the practices of teaching, and the telos of being a teacher.
Abstract: This paper focuses on Stephen Ball's article, The teacher's soul and the terrors of performativity , since it is here that he analyses the issue of how neoliberal education policies shape teacher identities that I also wish to explore. I begin by providing a summary of the 2003
piece, noting how it locates teachers and their work in the midst of policy, politics, and passion in contrast to dominant techno-rational discourses of teaching – embodied, for example, in discourses of professional teacher 'standards' or 'competencies' that reduce teaching to matters
of technical efficiency. As part of this summary, and complementing Ball's own use of Foucault, I use the four 'axes' of Foucault's ethics to explain how performativity has brought about changes in relation to (1) the domain, (2) the authority sources/mode of subjectivization, (3) the practices
and (4) the telos of being a teacher. The paper goes on to argue that Ball's emphasis on 'terror' can usefully be supplemented by a Lacanian-inspired recognition of 'enjoyment' as an explanatory factor that help us understand the grip of neoliberalism's ideology of performativity. The paper
concludes by examining the economies of fantasy and enjoyment as they relate to the work of teachers, how these economies work to sustain the terrors of performativity, and how an ethics of the Real that emphasizes the critical and creative potential of sublimation, might form part of a repertoire
of resistance.
TL;DR: In this paper, a small experiential study of Hong Kong air from a posthuman performative perspective is presented to encourage new thinking about post-colonial Hong Kong and its air.
Abstract: This article engages with air from a posthuman performative perspective to prompt new thinking about postcolonial Hong Kong. Drawing from a small experiential study of Hong Kong air, this article s...
TL;DR: In this article, the anthropologists who participated in the scientific controversy of female genital cutting were asked to explain how the WHO research that was intended to counter alarmist discourses about genital cutting ended up legitimizing them.
Abstract: This article asks what anthropology can contribute to public and scholarly debates about politics of knowledge in global governance and argues that bringing together insights from aesthetics of governance, science and technology studies, and theories of performativity offers a productive reorientation to existing approaches. My specific question is: how did WHO research that was intended to counter alarmist discourses about female genital cutting end up legitimizing them? For anthropologists who participated in the scientific controversy, the answer was clear: the study was driven by ideology. To expand the range of analytical responses, I suggest, we need to understand the rearrangements of knowledge and power in neoliberal governance, as well as a conception of authorship that uncouples scientific statements from sovereign subjects. Deadly harms were not made certain by ideology, I argue, but by aesthetics of expertise, WHO bundling of governance by emergency and governance by evidence, and performative iterations at the cultural boundaries of science. To make this argument, I analyze the historical conditions of possibility for the WHO study, offer an ethnography of knowledge production, and trace the social and governmental lives of fact and meaning-making. [WHO, female genital cutting, science controversy, governance by evidence, anthropology in the public sphere, aesthetics, performativity]
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors draw together the ANT-derived notions of ontological performativity and politics, alongside empirical research on projects, and specifically project failure, to propose that performativities are ontological, multiple, and political, and are thus capable of being realized otherwise.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors report the findings of an investigation into academic staff perceptions of a rapidly changing research work environment in UK university education departments, highlighting concerns about the emotional impact of work intensification and barriers to collective research identities.
Abstract: The paper reports the findings of an investigation into academic staff perceptions of a rapidly changing research work environment in UK university education departments. The study sheds light on the emotional landscape of an environment shaped by performance-driven change. Based on an integrated triplex framework of analysis, the study addresses the complex interrelationship between performativity, work-related emotions and collective research identities. The findings highlight concerns about the emotional impact of work intensification and barriers to collective research identities. However, there is also evidence of strong motivation and a performativity that is internally and intrinsically driven. The implications for research leaders are considered, both in terms of leadership strategy and the leadership of staff in building vibrant research cultures at a time of major change in the sector in response to global challenges and opportunities.