Showing papers on "Performativity published in 2016"

What do we mean by performativity in organizational and management theory? The uses and abuses of performativity.

Abstract: John Austin introduced the formulation ‘performative utterance’ in his 1962 book How to Do Things with Words. This term and the related concept of performativity have subsequently been interpreted in numerous ways by social scientists and philosophers such as Lyotard, Butler, Callon and Barad, leading to the coexistence of several foundational perspectives on performativity. This paper reviews and evaluates critically how organization and management theory (OMT) scholars have used these perspectives, and how the power of performativity has, or has not, stimulated new theory-building. In performing a historical and critical review of performativity in OMT, the authors’ analysis reveals the uses, abuses and under-uses of the concept by OMT scholars. It also reveals the lack of both organizational conceptualizations of performativity and analysis of how performativity is organized. Ultimately, the authors’ aim is to provoke a ‘performative turn’ in OMT by unleashing the power of the performativity concept to generate new and stronger organizational theories.

Subjectivity as a site of struggle: refusing neoliberalism?

Abstract: This paper extends the author’s previous enquiries and discussions of governmentality and neoliberal policy technologies in a number of ways. The paper explores the specificity and generality of performativity as a particular contemporary mode of power relations. It addresses our own imbrication in the politics of performative truths, through our ordinary everyday life and work. The paper is about the here and now, us, you and me, and who we are in neoliberal education. It draws upon and considers a set of ongoing email exchanges with a small group of teachers who are struggling with performativity. It enters the ‘theoretical silence’ of governmentality studies around the issues of resistance and contestation. Above all, the paper attempts to articulate the risks of refusal through Foucault’s notion of fearless speech or truth-telling (parrhesia).

Critical Essay: Reconsidering critical performativity

Abstract: In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of ‘critical performativity’, a concept designed to debate relationships between theory and practice and encourage practical interventions in organizational life. Notwithstanding its laudable ambition to stimulate discussion about engagement between critical management studies researchers and practitioners, we are concerned that critical performativity theory is flawed as it misreads foundational performativity authors, such as Austin and Butler, in ways that nullify their political potential, and ignores a range of other influential theories of performativity. It also overlooks the materiality of performativity. We review these limitations and then use three illustrations to sketch out a possible alternative conceptualization of performativity. This alternative approach, which builds on Butler’s and Callon’s work on performativity, recognizes that performativity is about the constitution of subjects, is an inherently material and discursive construct, and happens through the political engineering of sociomaterial agencements. We argue that such an approach – a political theory of organizational performativity – is more likely to deliver on both theoretical and practical fronts than the concept of critical performativity.

When performativity fails: Implications for Critical Management Studies

Abstract: This article argues that recent calls in this journal and elsewhere for Critical Management Studies scholars to embrace rather than reject performativity presents an overly optimistic view of (a) the power of language to achieve emancipatory organizational change and (b) the capability of lone Critical Management Studies researchers to resignify management discourses. We introduce the notion of failed performatives to extend this argument and discuss its implications for critical inquiry. If Critical Management Studies seeks to make a practical difference in business and society, and realize its ideals of emancipation, we suggest alternative methods of impact must be explored.

Extending critical performativity

Abstract: In this article we extend the debate about critical performativity. We begin by outlining the basic tenets of critical performativity and how this has been applied in the study of management and organization. We then address recent critiques of critical performance. We note these arguments suffer from an undue focus on intra-academic debates; engage in author-itarian theoretical policing; feign relevance through symbolic radicalism; and repackage common sense. We take these critiques as an opportunity to offer an extended model of critical performativity that involves focusing on issues of public importance; engaging with non-academic groups using dialectical reasoning; scaling up insights through movement building; and propagating deliberation.

From Performativity to Political Economy: Index Investing, ETFs and Asset Manager Capitalism

Abstract: As a discipline, political economy has often been reluctant to engage with the details of market devices and practices. This weakens the microfoundations of its analysis of capitalist macro-dynamics and cedes unnecessarily large stretches of intellectual territory to economics. The performativity approach developed by Michel Callon offers a theoretical way out of this dual dilemma. It allows political economists to study ‘the economy’ directly by investigating the links between the diversity of market devices and the diversity of capitalism. The argument is illustrated by an analysis of the gradual, performative evolution of the investment intermediation market, where the traditional high-cost model of active asset management has been challenged by the emergence of a low-cost alternative in the form of index-tracking investment funds. Highlighting the distributive implications of this development, the current article shows that the financial innovation of exchange-traded funds played a crucial par...

Struggling within and beyond the Performative University: Articulating activism and work in an “academia without walls”

Abstract: Synopsis In many regions, the past decade has been characterised by significant transformations of models of organisation and evaluation of academic work. These include processes of extensification, elasticisation and casualisation of academic labour, and the institutionalisation of regimes of “performativity” (Ball, 2003), enacted by apparatuses of measurement and auditing (Burrows, 2012). These interacting trends are having significant impacts not only on academic working conditions, but also on opportunities for sociopolitical intervention outside the academy. This article draws on an ethnography of Portuguese academia, and on debates about the “toxic” (Gill, 2010) and “careless” (Lynch, 2010) nature of contemporary academic cultures, to analyse the current (im)possibilities of articulating activism and academic work. I argue that in the present day “academia without walls” (Gill, 2010) this articulation is extremely difficult, but we must reject conceptualising that difficulty as an individual challenge, and reframe it as a structural problem requiring – urgently – collective responses.

Children of the market: performativity, neoliberal responsibilisation and the construction of student identities

Abstract: This paper draws on interview data gathered from a broader study concerned with examining issues of social justice, cultural diversity and schooling. The focus is on five students in Years 5 and 6 who attend a primary school located on the edge of a class-privileged area in outer London. The children are all high achievers who are very invested in doing well in school and in life within the parameters of neoliberalism. The paper examines the ways in which neoliberal discourses of performativity and individual responsibilisation permeate the children’s talk in relation to their understandings of education and their future, and their worth and value as students. Such examination enriches the findings of important research in this area that draws attention to the ways in which neoliberal discourses have become naturalised and taken-for-granted in what counts as being a good student and a good citizen. The paper problematises the individualism, competitiveness and anxiety produced by these discourses ...

Diverse economies and alternative spaces: An overview of approaches and practices

Abstract: Although the origins of the theoretical debate regarding political–economic alternatives are as old as Proudhon, Marx and Engels, discussion concerning alternative economic and political spaces has...

Theory Evaluation, Entrepreneurial Processes, and Performativity

Abstract: Is it reasonable to evaluate process explanations such as effectuation using criteria that assume a world of efficient causation and linear variance? To address this question, our comment covers the following points. First, we review efforts by scholars within the management discipline to clarify what theory is and how to evaluate it. Second, we introduce process explanations and consider whether the 3E framework is capable of evaluating such contributions. Third, we consider recent explanations of entrepreneurial processes premised on performativity. Our overall assessment is that the 3E framework is ill-suited for evaluating process explanations in general and contributions based on performativity in particular. But, in that case, what options do we have? We address this question in the last section of this dialogue.

Towards a Butlerian methodology: Undoing organizational performativity through anti-narrative research:

Abstract: This article explores the methodological possibilities that Butler’s theory of performativity opens up, attempting to ‘translate’ her theoretical ideas into research practice. Specifically, it considers how research on organizational subjectivity premised upon a performative ontology might be undertaken. It asks: What form might a Butler-inspired methodology take? What methodological opportunities might it afford for developing self-reflexive research? What political and ethical problems might it pose for organizational researchers, particularly in relation to the challenges associated with power asymmetries, and the risks attached to ‘fixing’ subjects within the research process? The article outlines and evaluates a method described as anti-narrative interviewing, arguing that it constitutes a potentially valuable methodological resource for researchers interested in understanding how and why idealized organizational subjectivities are formed and sustained. It further advances the in-roads that Butler’s writing has made into organization studies, thinking through the methodological and ethical implications of her work for understanding the performative constitution of organizational subjectivities. The aim of the article is to advocate a research practice premised upon a reflexive undoing of organizational subjectivities and the normative conditions upon which they depend. It concludes by emphasizing the potential benefits and wider implications of a methodologically reflexive undoing of organizational performativity.

Beyond data as representation: The performativity of Big Data in surveillance

Abstract: The article discusses problems of representative views of data and elaborates a concept of the performativity of data. It shows how data used for surveillance contributes in creating suspect subjectivities. In particular, the article focuses on the inductive or explorative processing of data and on the decoupling of data generation and analysis that characterize current use of data for surveillance. It lines out several challenges this poses to established accounts of surveillance: David Lyon’s concept of surveillance as social sorting and Haggerty and Ericson’s “surveillant assemblage”. These problems are attributed to a representationalist view, which focuses on the veracity of data. This can lead to ignoring problematic consequences of surveillance procedures and the full scope of affected persons. Building on an idea by Rita Raley, an alternative account of data as performative is proposed. Using Judith Butler’s concept of “citationality,” this account shows how surveillance is entangled with the production of subjects through data in general. Surveillance is reformulated as a particular way in which subjects are produced that is parasitical to other forms of subjectivation.

How the World Stage Makes Its Subjects: An Embodied Critique of Constructivist IR Theory

Abstract: This article provides a critique of constructivism and post-structuralism within IR theory from an embodied, realist perspective. Meaning is not made as much as experienced, we will argue, and subjectivity is not constructed as much as enacted. The theater illustrates the difference between constructivist, post-structuralist and embodied perspectives. By analyzing international politics in terms of a performance instead of performativity a more credible version of the sovereign subject can be identified. The world is a stage and it is only by appearing on this world stage that the state becomes real. To back up this argument the article draws from recent research in cognitive theory and neuroscience.

From the Process of Innovation to Innovation as Process

Abstract: We begin this paper by examining the process of innovation using Usher’s model of cumulative synthesis which comprises four steps: perception of an incomplete pattern, setting of the stage, the act of insight, and critical revision and full mastery. Going beyond a synoptic view on the process of innovation implied by this sequence, Usher’s model also anticipates a performative view of innovation as process. In this latter view, innovation is an on-going accomplishment with actors contextualizing their projects in light of their aspirations and memories. We explicate such a performative view by discussing the complexities of innovation. Considerations of performativity suggest several implications that are different from those offered by a synoptic view.

A conversational approach to consumer vulnerability: performativity, representations, and storytelling

Abstract: This conceptual article provides a conversational analysis of consumer vulnerability, which unveils how vulnerability is made through conversations and interactions among actors holding different market power positions. Three types of conversations prove fruitful to pursue a transformative research agenda improving vulnerable consumers’ well-being: (1) performativity, which unpacks agency and finalism in conversations; (2) social representations, which reveal uneven power positions and normativity expressed by participants in a conversation; and (3) storytelling, which reveals alternative and more powerful persuasive mechanisms of conversations framed as stories. Illustration for these types of conversations comes from extensive review of the literature on consumer vulnerability and from a critical consideration of my life-as-researcher with consumers as varied as gays, homeless people, migrants, second-generation immigrants, and subcultures of consumption.

Freedom to Learn: The threat to student academic freedom and why it needs to be reclaimed

Abstract: The freedom of students to learn at university is being eroded by a performative culture that fails to respect their rights to engage and develop as autonomous adults. Instead, students are being restricted in how they learn, when they learn and what they learn by the so-called student engagement movement. Compulsory attendance registers, class contribution grading, group project work and reflective learning exercises based on expectations of self-disclosure and confession take little account of the rights of students or individual differences between them. This new hidden university curriculum is intolerant of students who may prefer to learn informally, are reticent, shy, or simply value their privacy. Three forms of student performativity have arisen – bodily, participative and emotional – which threaten the freedom to learn. Key themes include: A re-imagining of student academic freedom The democratic student experience Challenging assumptions of the student engagement movement An examination of university policies and practices Freedom to Learn offers a radically new perspective on academic freedom from a student rights standpoint. It analyzes the effects of performative expectations on students, drawing on the distinction between negative and positive rights to re-frame student academic freedom. It argues that students need to be thought of as scholars with rights and that the phrase ‘student-centered’ learning needs to be reclaimed to reflect its original intention to allow students to develop as persons. Student rights – to non-indoctrination, reticence, in choosing how to learn, and in being treated like an adult – ought to be central to this process in fostering a democratic rather than authoritarian culture of learning and teaching at university. Written for an international readership, this book will be of great interest to anyone involved in higher education, policy and practice, drawing on a wide range of historical and contemporary literature related to sociology, philosophy and higher education studies.

Economics is not always performative: some limits for performativity

Abstract: The phenomenon of performativity has recently produced debates about the status of the economic discourse. This paper aims to discuss the subjectivist idea that if economics “performs” (shapes) the social reality, rather than merely reflecting it, then every theory can be “true”. My main goal is to point out the limits of performativity in three ways. First, no theory can be performative because some do not produce empirical landmarks for the agents. Second, the social institutions restrict the performativity. Third, I emphasize the necessity for a theory to be self-fulfilling. This article is a prelude to a new kind of performative studies based on an original definition: a theory performs the world if it implies a behavioral regularity which leads to the general coordination between agents. That is to say, if it becomes a convention a la David Lewis.

The Perpetual Performance and Emergence of Heritage

Abstract: This chapter develops a discourse on heritage that seeks to achieve two things. First, it seeks to dislodge ‘heritage’ from the conventional concept of its being somehow pre-gured or ready-made. Second, it positions heritage beyond the visual and, whilst holding on to the visual as a component in the dynamic constitution of heritage, acknowledges it to be one among many commingling energies. These energies are discussed through a consideration of performance and performativity, the spaces of heritage, and the ows of inuence inherent in its continual making and emergence. The relationality, rather than polarity of representations and what is not representational, is examined through recent debates on performativity. Heritage is related to cultural identity, feelings of belonging and the play of memory and duration. The character and meaning of heritage may be inuenced by representations, including those that are visual; heritage is continually emergent in living.

Gender, the Body and Organization Studies: Que(e)rying Empirical Research

Abstract: Even in organization studies scholarship that treats gender as performative and fluid, a certain ‘crystallization’ of gender identities as somehow unproblematic and stable may occur because of our methodological decision-making, and especially our categorization of participants. Mobilizing queer theory — and Judith Butler's work on the heterosexual matrix and performativity in particular — as a conceptual lens, we examine this crystallization, suggesting it is based on two implicit assumptions: that gender is a cultural mark over a passive biological body, or is a base identity ‘layered over’ by other identities (class, race, age etc.). Following Butler, we argue that in order to foreground the fluidity and uncertainty of gender categories in our scholarship, it is necessary to understand gender identity as a process of doing and undoing gender that is located very precisely in time and space. Given this perspective on gender identities as complex processes of identification, non-identification and performativity, we offer some pointers on how the methodological decision-making underpinning empirical research on gender, work and organization could and should begin from this premise.

Moving critical performativity forward

Abstract: In this rejoinder, we draw attention to some of the possible performative effects of Spicer et al.’s (2016) commentary and reaffirm the importance, in our eyes, of the fundamentally political and material dimensions of performativity.

A More Relevant Approach to Relevance in Management Studies: An Essay on Performativity

Abstract: A literary criticism of the book "Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics," edited by Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu, is presented. The article considers the relevance of business school fields in financial economics (FE) and management and talks about how the authors develop their performativity thesis. It examines cases on management technical devices and financial economic technical devices, and consider the competitive advantages of management over FE.

On the potential of progressive performativity: Definitional purity, re-engagement and empirical points of departure

Abstract: In this article, we respond to Cabantous, Gond, Harding and Learmonth’s (2016) critique of recent conceptual contributions that employ the concept of performativity for prompting progressive changes in organizations. All in all, we seem to share the general unease concerning the marginal impact of Critical Management Studies on re-defining organizational realities. At the same time, we largely disagree on how critical scholars could support effective, progressive changes. In this rejoinder, we respond to but also absorb Cabantous et al.’s critique of progressive performativity and sketch three ways of how to advance discussions of Critical Management Studies’ role in organizational scholarship.

"Is Race a Trope?": Anna Deavere Smith and the Question of Racial Performativity

Abstract: "Is race a trope?" Anna Deavere Smith's performances not only ask but embody this question. They also ask another, equally important question: "Who is asking?" Anna Deavere Smith is an African American performance artist known for her technique of interviewing subjects, particularly on matters of race, and then recreating her subjects' responses with a difference on-stage. She has recently gained tremendous popularity for her work Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, part of her larger project "On the Road: A Search for American Character." The question in my title, "Is Race a Trope?", comes, however, not from me or from Anna Deavere Smith per se but from a performance of Smith's in which she recreates an interview she conducted with academic and critical theorist Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. (1) Early in the development of her technique of interviewing and then performing people of diverse races, ethnicities, genders, classes, professions, dialects, cadences, personalities, and opinions, Anna Deavere Smith performed an edited interview she'd conducted with Smith-Rosenberg, who asks and explores the question "Is race a trope?" The answer to this question for Smith-Rosenberg is complex, and Anna Deavere Smith's performance of Smith-Rosenberg's answer is even more complex. Not only do both social theorists say that identity, in this case racial identity, is experienced as both a fact and as a trope, but Anna Deavere Smith incorporates this post-structuralist model of racial identity into her acting approach. The question "Is race a trope?" is all the more interesting when it is asked in the context of a black woman (Smith), playing a white woman (Smith-Rosenberg), asking the question of the black woman who is now playing her. First, however, to get to the question of race as a trope, and how Anna Deavere Smith has developed an acting technique that can embrace the complexity of this question. I want to move back to the context of current acting practices, and then forward again into Anna Deavere Smith's interventions into approaches to racial identity and character in theater. What I am calling Anna Deavere Smith's post-structuralist acting practices arose not out of her engagement with post-structuralist race theory but out of her frustration with acting based in "psychological realism" (Fires xxvi). While poststructuralist models of identity--notions of identity as "performative"--have become almost dogma in current literary theory, acting practice in the U.S. has been slow to reflect this shift in models of identity, and is still very much based in liberal humanism. Although anti-Naturalistic traditions, which have been quite strong in European drama, have always had a presence in American drama (in forms such as expressionism, surrealism, even camp and neo-melodrama), the preponderant mode has remained firmly a Naturalistic one. There have, of course, been many notable exceptions to Naturalistic theater in the U.S. Some prominent ones include The Living Theatre of Judith Malina and Julian Beck, the work of Joseph Chaikin and Roberta Sklar and the Open Theatre, El Teatro Campesino's Boal-influenced people's theatre, Richard Schechner's Environmental Theatre approaches, the Wooster Croup, the campy, postmodem productions of Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theater and of the WOW Cafe, and many other experimental and avant-garde theaters. (2) The most immediate precursor to Anna Deavere Smith's work is that of Adrienne Kennedy, whose 1964 Funnyhouse of a Negro takes a highly post-structuralist, anti-Naturalistic approach to character and identity, (3) and whose A Movie Star Has To Star in Black and White, which Smith directed in 1980, Smith credits as the beginning of her non-Naturalistic approach to personae and psychic life (Tate 198). Interestingly, the European anti-Naturalistic form that is most clearly a precursor to post-structuralist theater -- Brechtian alienation and Epic Theater--has had very little presence in American drama, and particularly in mainstream (Broadway and off-Broadway) theater, as can be seen in actors' training approaches. …

In Search of Security: Migrant Agency, Narrative, and Performativity

Abstract: This article explores a performative conceptualisation of security, foregrounding the experiences of an asylum seeker from Ghana in Greece, named Sonny. This article follows Sonny’s search for security, analysing both his journey to Greece and to refugee status (something that he was still waiting for) and the narrative through which he told his story to me. I argue that Sonny’s search for security illustrates how security might be produced by security-seeking actions performed by an agent other than the state. It accesses security on an ontological level that is performative in that security is constituted through actions, and is known through attending to experience. This security allows for incorporation of intersectional identities, subaltern identities and diverse experiences. The argument is situated in the context of migration and the migrant journey as offering unique scope for analysis in international relations that is capable of moving beyond the state. It briefly surveys the human secu...

Relevance, responsibility, critical performativity, testimony and positive marketing: contributing to marketing theory, thought and practice

Abstract: In this commentary, I chart recent changes at the Journal of Marketing Management (JMM). These include the introduction of a senior editorial board, a revised main editorial board and a modified te...

Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea by Sandra Fahy (review)

Abstract: Sandra Fahy, Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 272 pp.The most precious thing for man is life, but socio-political life is more precious than that of the physical body, and the life of the social community is more precious than that of individuals.-Kim Jong Il (2014)It is within the transition from the 1980s to the 1990s, encompassing the collapse of the Soviet Union, the death of "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung, and a series of devastating natural disasters, that one can place Sandra Fahy's Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea. The book is a linguistic analysis of some 30 oral accounts of the famine years from defectors1 now residing in Seoul and Tokyo, and is the first of its kind to present such ethnographically evocative material in English. In the years signaling the end of communism, American political rhetoric, popular news media, humanitarian discourse, and academic efforts have lent to the consolidation of an unshakeable image of the DPRK2 as an evil-totalitarian- military-dictatorship-nuclearized-Stalinist-cult-regime where "the people" suffer under the excess of power. Fahy's work gestures toward a much-needed counterpoint that positions "ordinary" north Koreans as "active agents making sense and negotiating the difficulties of their lives" (3). Although the book does much to achieve that end, it succeeds only partially, as it also perpetuates the very narrative it seeks to dispel.The book's six chapters are organized chronologically, following the emergence and development of the famine (Chapters 1 and 2), its critical stages (Chapters 3 and 4), the decisive points of defection (Chapter 5), and the aftermath (Chapter 6). Each segment features extensive passages from Fahy's interviews interspersed with analysis and historical context- a practical way to utilize oral accounts, but not the most imaginative given anthropology's commitment to writing and the question of representation. Fahy's long-term engagement with defectors is premised on the idea that a better understanding of "[w]hat North Koreans did, how they understood things, how they made sense of difficulties" during the famine would not only "challenge the notion that North Koreans are brainwashed" (8), but also "explain how countries such as North Korea have survived as long as they have" (2). However suggestive, her aim to examine the relationships between famine and language, power and discourse, and to answer the "natural question" of "why people didn't rise up in the face of such deprivation and difficulty" (8) reproduces assumptions about socialist experience that need to be critically examined. This review focuses on Chapter 3, "The Life of Words," and Chapter 5, "Breaking Points," in an effort to retrofit the analytical and theoretical apparatus most often employed in the study of north Korea.Chapter 3, for instance, takes the "disconnect between discourse and reality" (84) as its starting point, making reference to Austinian performativity, only to shape it as a perpetual performance of dissimulation or to describe a life lived in lies (102). This type of analysis is not unfamiliar to the field of postsocialism (and postcommunism), and is problematic because it relies on simplistic binaries of truth/lie, oppression/oppressed, state/people, control/resistance, public/private that have been used to portray life under socialism. Alexei Yurchak's (2006) concept of "performative shift" provides an alternative framework. A similar perspective should be afforded by Caroline Humphrey (1994), but her concept of "evocative transcripts" is taken up as part of the chapter's analysis and regrettably not addressed in the context of larger debates in postcolonial studies. Scholars in this field have shown that ideological language and ritual discourse cannot be explained in terms of false consciousness or models of mimicry. The task now is to situate the famine experience and the many rich ethnographic moments Fahy assembles within north Korea's socialist legacy. …

Teacher or coach? How logics from the field of sports contribute to the construction of knowledge in physical education teacher education pedagogical discourse through educational texts

Abstract: The main purpose of this paper is to focus attention on educational texts as central conveyers of discourses of sport into physical education teacher education (PETE) and by extension into physical education (PE). A considerable volume of research suggests that sport and games continue to be dominant elements of curriculum and practice in contemporary PE. Given the issues of masculinity, physicality and performativity resulting from such continuing sport-focused PE practice, it is relevant to question how such practices are discursively produced or reproduced. In this regard, one area has received only scant attention, namely the potential influence of educational texts used in PETE. Using the theoretical frameworks provided by Michel Foucault, Basil Bernstein and Norman Fairclough, this paper considers educational texts as important contributors to the discursive construction of knowledge in PETE, and thus also as a central resource for studying—and challenging—those discourses that influence on the PE t...

Measuring ‘progress’: performativity as both driver and constraint in school innovation

Abstract: In this paper, we describe one secondary school’s radical attempt to rethink the shape and purpose of education for its pupils, and its subsequent return to more traditional methods in the face of pressures of performativity and accountability. Framing our analysis within activity theory and its emphasis on contradiction as a driver for change, we describe the school’s move towards a thematic curriculum and ‘personalised learning’ as a process of productive tensions which enabled the development of new approaches to education. While these innovations were considered to be of major benefit to both teachers and pupils, a fundamental contradiction between the focus on individual development underpinning the new approach and the demands of accountability in a persistent culture of performativity proved to be insurmountable. We argue that this particular contradiction highlights the dominance of measurability in judgements of school success and individual progress, with consequences for the pupils’ lon...

Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia

Abstract: Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia. By Doreen Lee. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016. Softcover: 278pp. Almost two decades after the fall of the Suharto regime in May 1998, we still know very little about the student movement that was the driving force behind Indonesia's turn to democracy. In the post-Suharto era, the student movement lost the limelight to other actors better equipped for the game of politics, and thus moved ever deeper into the realm of collective memory as a feverish episode in history, aligned with the longer history of pemuda (youth) activism in Indonesia. Yet, as Doreen Lee persuasively argues in Activist Archives, it is from the edges of history that "pemuda fever" continues to "infuse the present with urgency and legitimacy" (p. 3), animating a "youthful culture of democracy" that firmly established radical styles and ideas within the political and cultural landscape of Jakarta. Remedying the dearth of literature on post-New Order student activism, Activist Archives offers a sophisticated ethnography of "Generation 98", ingeniously structured around key tropes of the "material and ideational spaces" that student activists inhabit. With a keen eye for detail and paradox, Lee delves deep into the micropolitics of these spaces, starting with the "Archive". She shows how activists' feverish "drive to document, consign, and assemble signs of pemuda nationalism" (p. 11) served as an "authenticating practice" to compete with state discourse, which was, however, complicated by the concurrent need for secrecy, epitomized by the tacit rule: "Burn after reading". By highlighting the social life behind the documentation, Lee uncovers significant findings that many other researchers might have overlooked. A charming example is a scene reconstructed from scribbles found on the back of official statements used during the 1997 subversion trials; it shows how two activists, waiting for their turn to testify, exchanged insolent jokes, conveying "the undercurrent of youthful nonchalance and puerile lightheartedness even during the gravity of the subversion trial" (p. 55). Youthfulness also pervades the chapters on "Street" and "Style", which show how the performativity of protest and the carefully cultivated pemuda look helped to make subversive symbols of the left trendy and less threatening, thus creating "a new model of citizenship for Indonesian youth by making political participation desirable and accessible" (p. 91). In an engaging section on the production and circulation of protest T-shirts, Lee further illustrates how this visual economy served purposes of collective identity as well as propaganda. But while she properly contextualizes the iconography in political history, crucial differentiations in style between different activist communities, which symbolize the deep fractures in the post-Suharto student movement, are neglected. Not all student activists identified with the appearances of the Molotov cocktail-throwing urban warrior pictured in two illustrations (pp. 92--93). Though this image dominated protest scenes and media reports in the early years of reform, it was acceptable to certain groups only, and rejected by others opposed to their mode of protest. Leaving the image unproblematized risks making a caricature of negotiated self-presentation, as happened with the cliched image of the revolutionary pemuda of 1945 that many Indonesia scholars uncritically accepted. The chapter on "Violence" presents a more careful analysis, introducing the notion of "student counterviolence" as a dynamic practice that solidifies and simultaneously disrupts students' moral superiority over the state. This is illustrated by various fascinating vignettes. But most gripping is the story of former student activist Iblis, who was abducted and tortured by the military in the 1990s. With great sensitivity, Lee recounts his sense of devastating defeat at realizing his nothingness as a sacrificial scapegoat subjected to his torturers' whims. …