Dear colleagues,

 

We would like to draw to your attention this stream included in the 2019 CMS conference, hoping you will consider contributing to it. The deadline is tomorrow, but there is still time! Apologies for cross-posting.

 

 

‘Academic failure’: Challenging how academic career success is understood, and imagining alternatives

 

 

Convenors:

Olivier Ratle - [log in to unmask]

Angelika Schmidt - [log in to unmask]

Andrea Mária Toarniczky - [log in to unmask]

Mike Marinetto  - [log in to unmask]

 

Academics in the contemporary University allegedly suffer many ills: they are increasingly pressed for time (Menzies & Newson, 2007; Vostal, 2015); they tend to experience important life-work conflicts (Dorenkamp & Süß, 2017; Ylijoki, 2013), and as an occupational group, they are highly at risk of experiencing various personal difficulties (Glick et al., 2007) and health issues, such as professional burnout (Zábrodská et al., 2018). Less visibly, the audit culture associated with new public management (Tourish et al., 2017), and the normative and homogenising pressures of journal rankings and university rankings and league tables (Mingers & Willmott, 2013) have all contributed to creating a profound sense of identity insecurity (Knights & Clarke, 2014) – something exacerbated in the case of early-career academics, who often experience the effects of the system in a particularly brutal way (Robinson et al., 2017). Middle-career and senior academics are not spared either in the Darwinian-like dog-eat-dog world of academia. Recently in the press, Oswald (2018) noted that academics in their forties are at greater risk of suicide than the rest of the population (Oswald, 2018). Oswald suggested that university life since the 1970s has become “psychologically unhealthy and status-obsessed”. He said: “It is almost as though we have consciously designed a system to maximise stress and fear”. In the quest for high student satisfaction scores and highly-ranked journal publications, many individuals are left feeling worthless. The theme of the conference, ‘Precarious Presents, Open Futures’, seems a particularly apt opportunity to reflect on the existing career norms governing the life of academics, and imagining alternatives.

 

Faced with difficulties, frustrations, and a general sense of inadequacy, academics can turn to a wide literature geared at helping them adjusting to this reality and achieving a ‘successful’ career, whether it is in the form of career advice from established scholars (e.g. Frost & Taylor, 1996), technologies of the self (e.g. Eden, 2008), or writing guidance (e.g. Jensen, 2017; Silvia, 2007). What these texts generally fail to do is to question and challenge the norms underpinning them – namely, what it means to be a successful academic, and the reasons why one should follow the dominant norms of career success. They also seem to lionise academic success and overlook the sheer ubiquity (and virtues) of academic failure. In the search for excellence and success, there is a reluctance in academe to confront and, dare we say it, even celebrate failure. And we have to admit that success may bring more than we had bargained for. This paradox is something that the literary world, more than the world of academia, has been willing to consider. In The Catastrophe of Success, Tennessee Williams, acknowledged that “Security is a kind of death”.

 

It is not surprising that in recent years, alternative views which challenge those norms have emerged. This has taken numerous forms, such as: documenting the heterogeneity of practices and career projects in the contemporary University (Gale, 2011), analysing practices of resistance and attempts to lay one own’s path (Bristow et al., 2017), challenging the culture of speed characterising contemporary academia (Berg & Seeber, 2016) where there is little time to care for students and colleagues (Clarke & Knights, 2015), counter-spacing (Jones, 2018), rejecting the ethos of ‘excellence’ in research (Butler & Spoelstra, 2012), or intervening to counter the long-terms effects of physical and mental strains – the ‘hidden injuries’ as embodied and affective detrimental states (Mountz et al., 2015). 

 

Contributions to this stream could include but not be limited to answering one of the following questions:

 

• What are the alternatives to the dominant narrative of academic career success? How can these alternatives be enacted and sustained? How to create space for them?
• How is the dominant narrative of academic career success resisted? What are effective strategies of resistance? How can options be widened?
• How are alternative narratives of academic career and success gendered?

• How do career narratives vary across different national university systems? What about the understandings of ‘success’ and ‘failure’?
• What is the ‘ideal’ academic, and how are those norms transmitted and shaped by universities and by career management practices? 
• Do we valorise success and overlook the creative opportunities of failure, and should we regard failure more as a creative virtue?
• How can the practice of caring and the ethics of care transform the narratives of academic career?
• How can the embodied injuries challenge the dominant narrative of academic career success?

 

We hope that the sessions will attract different kinds of contributions: conceptual or empirically-based, but also polemical, essay-based, and aiming to critically intervene and change practices.

 

Submission of abstracts

 

Please submit a 500 word abstract (excluding references, one page, Word document NOT PDF, single spaced, no header, footers or track changes) together with your contact information to Olivier Ratle ([log in to unmask]). The deadline for submission of abstracts is January 31st 2019, and we will notify you of our decision by the end of February.

 

References

 

Bristow, A., Robinson, S. & Ratle, O. 2017. Being an early-career CMS academic in the context of insecurity and ‘excellence’: The dialectics of resistance and compliance. Organization Studies 38: 1185-1207.

Butler, N. & Spoelstra, S. 2012. Your excellency. Organization, 19: 891-903.

Clarke, C., & Knights, D. 2015. Careering through academia: securing identities or engaging in ethical subjectivities. Human Relations, 68: 1865–1888;

Dorenkamp, I., & Süß, S. 2017. Work-life conflict among young academics: antecedents and gender effects. European Journal of Higher Education, 7: 402–423.

Eden D. 2008. Thriving in a self-made niche: How to create a successful academic career in organizational behavior. Journal of Organizational Behaviour, 29: 733–740.

Frost, P.J., & Taylor, M.S. 1996. Rhythms of academic life: Personal accounts of careers in academia. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Gale, H. 2011. The reluctant academic: Early-career academics in a teaching-orientated university. International Journal for Academic Development, 16: 215–227.

Glick, W.H., Miller, C.C. & Cardinal, L.B. 2007. Making a life in the field of organization science. Journal of Organizational Behaviour, 28: 817–835.

Jones, D.R. 2018. Could slow be beautiful? Academic counter-spacing within and beyond “The Slow Swimming Club”. Journal of Management Inquiry, 27: 420–435.

Knights, D., & Clarke, C. 2014. It´s a bittersweet symphony, this life: Fragile academic selves and insecure identities at work. Organization Studies, 35: 335–357.

Menzies, H., & Newson, J. 2007. No time to think: Academics’ life in the globally wired university. Time and Society, 16: 83–98.

Mingers, J., & Willmott, H. 2013. Taylorizing business school research: On the ‘one best way’ performative effects of journal ranking lists. Human Relations, 66: 1051–1073.

Mountz, A., Bonds, A., Mansfield, B., Loyd, J., Hyndman, J., Walton-Roberts, M., Basu, R., Whitson, R., Hawkins, R., Hamilton, T., & Curran, W. 2015. For slow scholarship: A feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal University. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 14: 1235–1259.

Oswald, A. 2018. Middle aged academics at greater suicide risk than students. Times Higher Education, June 28, available at: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/middle-aged-academics-are-greater-suicide-risk-students

Robinson, S., Ratle, O., & Bristow, A. 2017. Labour pains: Starting a career within the neoliberal university. Ephemera, 17: 481–508.

Tourish, D., Craig, R., & Amernic, J. 2017. A mania for assessment: How an audit culture undermines the purpose of universities. In T. Huzzard, M. Benner & D. Kärreman (Eds.), The corporatization of the business school: Minerva meets the market: 34–55. London: Routledge.

Vostal, F. 2015. Academic life in the fast lane: The experience of time and speed in British academia. Time and Society, 24: 71–95.

Ylijoki, O.-H. 2013. Boundary work between work and life in the high speed university. Studies in Higher Education, 38: 242–255.

Zábrodská, K., Mudrák, J., Šolcová, I., Květon, P., Blatný, M., & Machovcová, K. 2018. Burnout among university faculty: The central role of work–family conflict. Educational Psychology, 38: 800–819.