Showing papers on "Performativity published in 2017"

Artifice or Integrity in the Marketization of Research Impact? Investigating the Moral Economy of (Pathways to) Impact Statements within Research Funding Proposals in the UK and Australia.

Abstract: A focus on academic performativity and a rationalizing of what academics do according to measurable outputs has, in the era of higher education's (HE) neoliberalization and marketization, engendered debate regarding the ‘authenticity’ of academic identity and practice. In such a context, a ‘performative’ prioritization of leveraging ‘positional goods’, such as external research funds, presents a specific challenge to the construction of academics’ identity where in being entrepreneurial they are perceived to compromise traditional Mertonian edicts of scholarship and professional ideals of integrity and ‘virtuousness’. In this article, we consider how academics sacrifice scholarly integrity when selling their research ideas, or more specifically, the non-academic impact of these, to research funders. We review attitudes towards pathway to impact statements – formal components of research funding applications, that specify the prospective socio-economic benefits of proposed research – from (n = 50) academic...

When Do Theories Become Self-Fulfilling? Exploring the Boundary Conditions of Performativity

Abstract: Management researchers increasingly realize that some theories do not merely describe, but also shape social reality; a phenomenon known as "performativity." However, when theories become performative or even self-fulfilling is still poorly understood. Taking this gap in the research as our starting point, we develop a process model to show that new theories will only become self-fulfilling (1) if they motivate experimentation, (2) if experimentation produces anomalies, and (3) if these anomalies lead to a practice shift. On that basis, we identify six boundary conditions that determine whether theories will shape social reality. To illustrate our argument, we explore the conditions under which theories that postulate a positive link between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance may become self-fulfilling.

Towards a Performative Theory of Resistance: Senior Managers and Revolting Subject(ivitie)s:

Abstract: This article develops a performative theory of resistance It uses Judith Butler’s and Karen Barad’s theories of performativity to explore how resistance (to organizational strategies and policies) and resistants (those who resist such strategies and policies) co-emerge, within and through complex intra-actions of entangled discourses, materialities, affect and space/time The article uses empirical materials from a case study of the implementation of a talent management strategy We analyse interviews with the senior managers charged with implementing the strategy, the influence of material, non-sentient actors, and the experiences of the researchers when carrying out the interviews This leads to a theory that resistance and resistants emerge in moment-to-moment co-constitutive moves that may be invoked when identity or self is put in jeopardy Resistance, we suggest, is the power (residing with resistants) to say ‘no’ to organizational requirements that would otherwise threaten to render the self abject

Communication rights from the margins: politicising young refugees’ smartphone pocket archives

Abstract: Politicising the smartphone pocket archives and experiences of 16 young refugees living in the Netherlands, this explorative study re-conceptualises and empirically grounds communication rights. The focus is on the usage of social media among young refugees, who operate from the margins of society, human rights discourse and technology. I focus on digital performativity as a means to address unjust communicative power relations and human right violations. Methodologically, I draw on empirical data gathered through a mixed-methods, participatory action fieldwork research approach. The empirical section details how digital practices may invoke human right ideals including the human right to self-determination, the right to self-expression, the right to information, the right to family life and the right to cultural identity. The digital performativity of communication rights becomes meaningful when fundamentally situated within hierarchical and intersectional power relations of gender, race, nationality among others, and as inherently related to material conditions and other basic human rights including access to shelter, food, well-being and education.

Lost souls? The demoralization of academic labour in the measured university

Abstract: In this conceptual paper, I contend that the soul of academic labour is becoming lost in performativity. Performativity, I explain, is a form of regulation and control that deploys technical rationality and judgements to incentivize and punish academics. Indeed, performativity is central to the culture of measurement within contemporary universities. This, I contend, is demoralizing academic labour as performativity only measures and values those dimensions of academic labour that can be captured by quantitative performance indicators. To critique this process, I firstly locate performativity within a moral economy perspective. I argue that the university economy is no longer structured by the moral norm of education as a public good. It has been restructured, commodified and marketized by neo-liberal capitalism. Secondly, I explore how the reorganization of institutional practices and academic identity within the university by performativity wreaks terror in the academic’s soul. Thirdly, I critique the unsatisfying post-structural reduction of the soul to a synonym for subjectivity and offer a sociological conception of the soul as the spiritual dimension of academic labour emerging from deep, rich social relations of production. My conjecture is that the soul is the moral energy and purpose central to species-being: the peculiarly human ability to transform the socio-human world for the good of all. Finally, I suggest that within the soulless technical measure of academic labour that now dominates the university lies the possibility for developing a more soulful normative measure. My aim then is to articulate a dialectical humanist conception of the soul of academic labour in order to critique the reductive positivism of the measured university.

The ‘doublethink’ of data: educational performativity and the field of schooling practices

Abstract: This article provides insights into teachers’ and school administrators’ responses to the current ‘fetishisation’ of school performance data in Australian schooling. Specifically, the research investigates the accountability practices that emerged in a Queensland metropolitan primary school in response to this broader focus upon performance data. Drawing upon interviews with teachers and school administrators, literature and theorising on educational performativity and data, and Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the article reveals how performative, data-driven practices play out at the level of the school. This process reveals a ‘field of schooling practices’ characterised by contradictory and contested logics of deifying, delivering and denying data. We describe this as the ‘doublethink of data’, involving teachers engaging with performative processes for purposes of compliance but without any real sense of the value of doing so. The research reveals the extraordinary energy involved in this work, and cautions against these performative practices and associated technologies.

Toward an ethnography of the national economy

Abstract: What is a national economy? What does it measure, value, or represent? What does it do? This article argues for ethnographic attention to national economies as a serial global form, arguably the most privileged epistemological and political object of our unevenly shared modernity In dialogue with feminist approaches to the study of capitalism, economic anthropology, and the social studies of finance, this article asks how national economies become both intelligible, possessing representational unity or naturalized authority, and compelling—the stuff of fantasy and desire, power and subjugation Taking a series of national economic conferences in Equatorial Guinea as a point of departure, the article argues for the centrality of the state and questions of geopolitical scale in any approach to the national economy form Juxtaposing the literature on economic performativity with Equatoguinean political history and the power of US oil companies in the global South highlights the open-endedness of what Michel Callon has called economics “in the wild” and the as-if qualities generated at the crossroads of economic theory and postcolonial inequality This article thus aims to open up ethnographic possibilities in the face of national economies far beyond Equatorial Guinea’s borders

Performing Counter-Hegemonic Common(s) Senses: Rearticulating Democracy, Community and Forests in Puerto Rico

Abstract: Political ecologists have developed scathing analyses of capitalism’s tendency for enclosure and dispossession of the commons. In this context commons are analyzed as a force to resist neo-liberalism, a main site of conflict over dispossession, and a source of alternatives to capitalism. In this paper we elaborate a view of the commons as the material and symbolic terrain where performative re-articulation of common(s) senses can potentially enact counter-hegemonic socio-ecological configurations. Expressly drawing on the concepts of hegemony, “common-senses” (inspired by Antonio Gramsci) and “performativity” (developed by Judith Butler), we argue that counter-hegemony is performed through everyday practices that rearticulate existing common senses about commons. Commoning is a set of processes/relations enacted to challenge capitalist hegemony and build more just/sustainable societies insofar as it transforms and rearranges common senses in/through praxis. The paper draws on the experience of an ...

The Performativity of Choice: Postfeminist Perspectives on Work–Life Balance

Abstract: A strong emphasis on individual choice is considered to represent a particular neoliberal culture, and choice is claimed to substitute feminism. This article argues that the vocabulary of choice should not be seen only as a representation of a double entanglement of neoliberalism and postfeminism, but rather as a site for entanglement, and further explored as a performative concept. The argument is developed though empirical analysis of media texts on women combining career and motherhood. The metaphor of work–life balance is argued to function as a gendering frame as the particular combination of motherhood and career commitment is construed as conflicting dimensions of a feminine subjectivity. Within the gendered work–life balance framing the vocabulary of choice is performative, producing dichotomies and differences by the looks of individual agency. Thus, choice is not merely ‘covering up power structures’: the vocabulary of choice performs structuring power.

Becoming Refugee in Cairo: The Political in Performativity

Abstract: Global mobility continues to challenge and unsettle forms of citizenship, political engagement, and belonging in various ways. Within this voluminous and wide-ranging movement, it is particularly the figure of the ‘refugee’ that has come to question the “national order of things” (Malkki 1995). Paradoxically, refugees both disrupt this order by simply existing and depend on it to exist in the first place. The 1951 Refugee Convention defines a refugee as someone who “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country” (UNHCR 2010, 14).

Employability, managerialism, and performativity in higher education: a relational perspective

Abstract: This article combines Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and cultural capital with Lyotard’s account of performativity to construct a three-tiered framework in order to explore how managerialism has affected the academic habitus. Specifically, this article examines the adoption of group assignments as a means of developing teamwork skills in one Australian case study organisation. On a macrolevel, by viewing the employability imperative as one manifestation of managerialism in the higher education field, we argue that managerialism has created a performative culture in the case study organisation evidenced by an increasing emphasis on performance indicators. On a mesolevel, by examining how academics use group assessments to respond to demands made by governments and employers for ‘employable graduates’, we highlight the continuity of academic habitus. Finally, on a microlevel by drawing on alumni reflections regarding their experiences of group assessments at university, we are able to shed some light on their evaluation of this pedagogical tool.

Performativity, politics, and the production of social space

Abstract: Initially, critical human geographers struggled with performativity, exploring an assortment of ways for incorporating elements of it, along with performance theory more generally, into their work ...

Knowledge management and professional experience: the uneasy dynamics between tacit knowledge and performativity in organizations

Abstract: Purpose This paper interrogates the relationships between tacit knowledge (of professionals) and performance measurement regimes (of post-modern organizations). Drawing on Polanyi’s (1958, 1968) ideas about tacit knowledge and Lyotard’s (1984) theory of performativity with regard to criteria such as profit-performance the applicability and relevance of tacit, working knowledge in the internet age is assessed. The paper examines: the effects of context on knowledge management (KM); tacit knowledge and performativity around the production, validation and assessment of knowledge within organizations; KM and the mercantilization of knowledge and critical questions as to how performativity impacts tacit knowledge and KM in the digital era. Design/methodology/approach The paper deconstructs popular and fashionable narratives around tacit knowledge and KM to critically appraise approaches to knowledge construction and transfer in contemporary and commercial contexts. The study draws on various specific critical incidents in commercial practice to assess where (and why) things went wrong with KM practices in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and in more recent attempts at large scale corporate fraud. Findings KM should not trade exclusively in instrumentalized, performative knowledge. Tacit knowledge involves a sense of what is going on and this is not easily measured or codified. Experiential understanding of what is required when engaging with clients, colleagues, senior partners, other businesses (and cultures) and the political contexts in which employees work is central to tacit knowledge. So too are performance measures and reward systems and herein lies the “uneasy dynamic”. The nature of any transfer of tacit knowledge is problematic, but such employee know-how remains critical to organizational performance and validating the use-value of knowledge for the purposes of KM. Originality/value Researchers have used the theories of Polanyi and Lyotard, but rarely combined them to investigate KM practices critically in post-modern organizations. By using the two theories, this paper critically examines the contemporary construction of tacit knowledge from perspectives that include the different discourses and localized practices through which it is produced and consumed.

Performance, Photography, Performativity: What performance 'does' in the still image

Abstract: Auslander (2006) states that images generated from performance documentation and practices stemming from performance to camera could be considered ‘performative’ if they are meant to be seen as happening in the ‘now’ they are viewed, with the spectator as the current intended audience. This thesis takes Auslander’s supposition and situates the term performativity within an established academic discourse as a social, political or cultural ‘doing’ and questions what, apart from performing, performance ‘does’ in its transcription to a photographic image. I propose a ‘doing’ occurs because the intentional performance of a given act invokes the power of citation, in turn setting in motion broader cultural references. The contribution to knowledge this thesis makes is the proposition that aspects of the agency of performativity cannot be fully present in the moment of performance, but can be subsequently revealed by the photographic image as it affords the differance [distance/deferral] the spectator requires to consider the action within a wider structural unconsciousness. Originating from a conceptualist tradition of using ‘art as experiment’, the hypothesis is tested heuristically using a practice-based method of performance to camera. This is presented in the manner of autoethnographic fieldwork, which explores the time-based tensions between performance and photography in three different ways. Firstly, through instantaneous performance actions and the subsequent withdrawal of motion in the still image; secondly, the staging of one-off performance interventions and how they are perceived outside of the time and place in which they occurred via the photograph; and lastly, how repetition is used as a visual device to allow the spectator to ‘revisit’ their framework of understanding. By connecting critical reflection of these photographic investigations to theoretical perspectives, each chapter concludes how viewing the performance outside of the live act in the form of a photograph uncovers the ‘doing’ of its performativity. The final conclusion reviews why performativity surpasses the presence/absence binary previously perceived in photographic documentation, and how we might revise our usage of the term ‘performative’ in the area of performance to camera and studies of performance documentation in the light of these discoveries.

Professional responsibility, accountability and performativity among teachers: the leavening influence of CPD?

Abstract: In a climate of accountability and performativity, do teachers experience CPD provision as an externally imposed demand for conformity, compliance, to be accountable, or as a personal and professional rejuvenation that enhances their sense of professional responsibility? Through a qualitative study of secondary schools in England, this paper critically scrutinises the experiences of teachers in five case study schools to create a composite picture of the realities of their lives as they are buffeted and shaped by performativity while also examining the extent to which their CPD experiences may be perceived as enhancing their sense of professional responsibility. Critical analysis of the evidence suggests that the language of accountability is pervasive, and its logic gains currency by being imposed throughout schools where there is limited space to craft an alternative, thus performativity and conformity are more likely than dissent while enhancement of a sense of professional responsibility is re...

Supporting alternative organizations? Exploring scholars’ involvement in the performativity of worker-recuperated enterprises

Abstract: This article analyses the role of academics in the production and maintenance of alternative organizations within the capitalist system. Empirically, we focus on academics from the University of Buenos Aires who, through the extension programme Facultad Abierta, have supported worker-recuperated enterprises since their emergence in Argentina in the early 2000s. Conceptually, we build on prior studies on worker-recuperated enterprises as well as the ‘critical performativity’ concept that we define as scholars’ subversive interventions that can involve the production of new subjectivities, the constitution of new organizational models and/or the bridging of these models to current social movements. Our results uncover the multiple roles of academics in relation to these three facets and highlight the key interactions of these roles. In so doing, our analysis advances prior studies of worker-recuperated enterprises by clarifying how academics can support alternative organizations while offering a renewed conceptualization of critical performativity as a multifaceted process through which academics and workers interact.

Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship: An Ethnography of Academia

Abstract: Feminist scholarship is sometimes dismissed as not quite ‘proper’ knowledge – it’s too political or subjective, many argue. But what are the boundaries of ‘proper’ knowledge? Who defines them, and how are they changing? How do feminists negotiate them? And how does this boundary-work affect women’s and gender studies, and its scholars’ and students’ lives?

Primary school leadership in England: performativity and matters of professionalism

Abstract: This article presents interview data from a study involving nine primary school leaders. Five are leaders of local authority schools while four are leaders of schools within a large academy chain. The article examines their perspectives about the current regimes of performativity in the English education context and, in particular, the accountability demands of Ofsted. Mindful of contemporary concerns about the tensions between performativity and professionalism in education, the analysis highlights the different ways in which each group responds to external accountability demands. The article illustrates how investments in traditional and entrepreneurial professionalism continue to impact on how the current demands of performativity are understood. It highlights the significance of conceptualising educator professionalism beyond dichotomies that idealise the former at the expense of the latter and the importance of an ongoing critical focus on the ways in which professionalism is currently being ...

From Public Sphere to Performative Publics : Developing Media Practice as an Analytic Model

Abstract: This chapter reviews some of the criticisms of the universal idea of a public sphere. Drawing on recent scholarship in social movement studies, it shows how the dynamics of the "personalisation of contentious politics" and the idea of "networked publics" stand for a drastic shift in the way publics are nowadays created. The chapter outlines basic contours of practice theory and proposes that the performativity of practice itself is integral to understanding public articulations. It then outlines how media practice can be developed into an analytic model that allows understanding different levels of agency in relation to the formation of publics. The chapter argues that media practice can account for the emergence of new actors in public discourse, as well as the adaptation of established actors to new dynamics of communication. Although individual practices are invariably prone to variance across different sets of actors, we underline that structural patterns of practice offer a novel perspective on the emergence of publics.

Performative face theory: A critical perspective on interpersonal identity work

Abstract: Power operates not only through ideological and institutional control, but also through everyday interpersonal communication practices that sediment what is and ought to be. However, critical theorizing about power remains scarce within the sub-fields of interpersonal and family communication. To answer questions about operations of power in interpersonal identity work, performative face theory is set forth, which places Erving Goffman’s theorization of face in conversation with Judith Butler’s theory of performativity. Performative face theory suggests that discursive acts cited or repeated in negotiations of face constitute and sometimes subvert naturalized identity categories. Four theoretical principles are provided and an empirical example of childbearing identity is presented. Finally, implications of this novel critical interpersonal and family communication theory are discussed.

Theorizing voice: Performativity, politics and listening:

Abstract: The aim of this article is to develop a theory of voice. I claim that it is productive to use ‘voice’ as a theoretical tool that encompasses a speaker’s performance and body gestures. At the same time, this paper argues that it is insufficient to focus on the speaker. While there is recognition that voice(s) are a necessary part of a functioning political, democratic structure, this article reveals that any research on voice needs to also consider the politics involved in listening. Listening not only nuances the study of voice, but also includes those in positions of dominance whose power can be forgotten if discussion focuses exclusively on the political and social struggles that the disempowered undertake in order to make themselves heard. I draw on ethnographic research that was carried out in 2011 and 2012 in Botswana with indigenous Ncoakhoe (also known in literature as ‘San’) to show how voice was used (performativity) but also how the audience was often restricted. This reduced the political effec...

Embodying Brazil: An ethnography of diasporic capoeira

Abstract: The practice of capoeira, the Brazilian dance-fight-game, has grown rapidly in recent years. It has become a popular leisure activity in many cultures, as well as a career for Brazilians in countries across the world including the US, the UK, Canada and Australia. This original ethnographic study draws on the latest research conducted on capoeira in the UK to understand this global phenomenon. It not only presents an in-depth investigation of the martial art, but also provides a wealth of data on masculinities, performativity, embodiment, globalisation and rites of passage. Centred in cultural sociology, while drawing on anthropology and the sociology of sport and dance, the book explores the experiences of those learning and teaching capoeira at a variety of levels. From beginners’ first encounters with this martial art to the perspectives of more advanced students, it also sheds light on how teachers experience their own re-enculturation as they embody the exotic ‘other’.

Shame and performativity: Thoughts on the psychology of neoliberalism

Abstract: Organisational theorists use the term ‘performativity’ when examining how management maximises the efficiency of educated labour under neoliberalism. This essay will argue that performativity exploits the employee’s desire to achieve the ideal, yoking this to target setting and performance monitoring. Everything becomes quantified, including the self. Insecurity and failure lurk in the shadow of performativity and feelings of shame become pervasive, replacing guilt as an internal control mechanism. The paper will describe how the abject position of the self in the world of production finds some relief and compensation in the world of consumption where the self feels entitled to have what it wants and to have it now. The paper concludes by wondering whether, in countries like the US and the UK, neoliberalism’s new educated social classes have maintained their distinction from and dumped their shame upon the left-behind white working class, thereby reproducing the class divisions which currently fuel reactionary forms of populism.

“I Would Never Start a Fight but…”: Young Masculinities, Perceptions of Violence, and Symbolic Boundary Work in Focus Groups

Abstract: This article explores the link between masculinity and violence in socially integrated young men’s discussions about risk-taking and violence. Traditionally, violence, or rather the capability of violence, is depicted as a key cultural marker of masculinity. However, recent theoretical developments point to changes in the normative boundaries for performing appropriate masculinities not least among young people. These discussions about potential cultural changes form the backdrop of this article. By combining focus group methodology and an interactionist analytical approach, I investigate how the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate physical aggression is negotiated and how acceptable masculine identities are performed as part of these negotiations. Through this, the article sheds light on the narrow boundaries between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” violence, the highly situational character of these judgments and the intersections between gender and ethnicity in the performance of morally superi...