Dear all
I was greatly affected by the Stefan Grimm story when I read it, and so many thanks to Andrew for unleashing a discussion that's attracted real animo in the group.
Echoing Alison's point, I was at a union meeting this week where we heard of both the real damaging effects of work pressure, and also the roles of managers (who don't face those pressures) saying that people were very good at coping with those pressures. There's so much evidence piling up of the extremely negative effects that these new target management regimes have on people; for me what has been compelling has been the way that they are 'made' and enforced locally, despite this rhetoric that they are a supposedly unavoidable part of academic life.
My concrete contribution I hope relates to the issue of performance targets; performance is what you do, not the outcome that it has; the issue about trying to management outcome targets is that if there aren't good pathways from the performance to the target then you what you are doing is futile.
what Alison describes below at Newcastle are a mix of performance and outcome targets. And what's most worrying are the outcome (income) targets, because we know that success rates for funding proposals have hit a real low in all sectors, to the point where it has become more a lottery; so you can 'perform' by writing a good proposal but that becomes completely invisible to the managers because you are judged on an outcome on which you have no influence.
And like all indicators, the have a framing effect; for me what is worrying is the way that they purport to have an objectivity; if you don't hit an outcome target, then the responsibility passes to you rather than to the person who set the ill thought-through target for you. So what you are really being judged on is how lucky you are, not how well you are performing (assuming you are good enough), and that's a rather pernicious basis for managing an institution, because you have people who think they are good or bad purely on the basis of their luck, and luck can run out.
You can say that it's individuals' own faults for not being in a field where the chances of success are higher, but given how long human capital in academia takes to build up and the proven fact that seemingly pointless knowledge can entirely unexpectedly become incredibly useful - scientifically and societally - that's a just a strange basis to run a knowledge portfolio.
In my reading, the only way that this can be challenged is by speaking up for each other, and in particular the lucky ones speaking up for the unlucky ones, here in the Netherlands, the more popular courses speaking up for the less popular courses, the seniors speaking up for the juniors.
Solidarity, in short, and that's a real challenge at the time when everything, tenure track, publish or perish, h-indices, journal ranking lists, is being set up to individualise, and critically to convince the lucky seniors that they are successful because they are better than the unlucky juniors. So in that sense it's great to hear the 'seniors' speaking up for the collective in this conversation as well as the 'juniors'.
There's a few movements like Science in Transition that can help to do this, but Alison nails the point here that the unions are organisations that actually exist to build this solidarity, even if they have sometimes become sidetracked for entirely understandable reasons into thinking more of the 'individual member offer' than the 'collective vision and movement'.
And of course unions aren't 'out there', they are their members, so at least in the UK, and the Netherlands (two countries that I at least know about) this suggests at least one starting point for us in starting to challenge and contest these problems.
So strength to Alison, and all those affected!
Best wishes
Paul.
-----Original Message-----
From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alison Stenning
Sent: vrijdag 30 oktober 2015 9:29
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Sadness
Hi all,
In the light of all this, I'd be really interested to hear what colleagues' experiences, in the UK and beyond, have been of "performance expectations", or indicators, or whatever.
Here at Newcastle, the university is in the process of introducing these, first for research, then for teaching. The research ones relate to income, publications, supervision of PhD students. Income expectations vary by seniority and according to two tiers of disciplines (high income and low income). Geography is a high income discipline within our faculty (of humanities and social sciences).
These "expectations" will be used in assessing performance (though performance and development reviews), promotion and recruitment of new staff.
It's not yet entirely clear what will happen if we don't meet the expectations.
All of this makes me incredibly sad, that this is more and more the shape of universities, that these are the wishes of our managers, that there is so little imagination about what a university could be, despite wider neoliberalisations, that this reinforces a culture of expectation and anxiety, and so on.
More hopefully, there was a really well attended union meeting earlier this week, where there were discussions of strike action, a vote of no confidence in the VC, and other plans for non-compliance.
It would be really good to hear how others are dealing with this kind of thing, and how widespread these kind of formal expectations are across Geography.
In solidarity,
Alison
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