“Hiding within the Glass Cage”: Performance Management as Surveillance—A Case of Academic Spaces as Resistance Spaces

Universities have become toxic sites characterised by anxiety, depression and humiliation. Following new managerialism, leadership and management in universities have been driven by the mandate of achieving efficiency, which has led to the implementation of stringent performance management systems, increasing accountability and authoritarianism. While performance management is justified as an accountability tool that drives efficiency and effectiveness, its demand for absolute transparency has created “panopticons” and “glass cages”. These have produced a stifling atmosphere in academic spaces, often characterised by competing demands for high research outputs and quality teaching, thus placing academics in subjected positions where their agency is threatened. In view of academics silently constructing uncontrolled and uncontrollable spaces to avoid increasing surveillance, I argue that academics are resisting universities’ demand for the invading transparency of performance management. Through a critical social constructionist case study of academics and heads of departments, this article explores the paradoxical position of performing academics—those functioning within the “performative culture” while undermining neoliberal performative inscriptions. Framed by the notion of power and resistance and drawing on critical geography and workplace resistance literature, the study reveals that academics’ acts are going against the controlled daily grind of systematised practices that are often meaningless in relation to quality education. They are reimagining and reconstructing lecture halls, stairs, offices and conference spaces as “invisible” free spaces outside direct managerial control.

Film and the Anarchist Imagination

Hailed since its initial release, this book offers the authoritative account of films featuring anarchist characters and motifs. The book delves into the many ways filmmakers have portrayed anarchism's long traditions of labor agitation and revolutionary struggle. While acknowledging cinema's predilection for ludicrous anarchist stereotypes, the book focuses on films that, wittingly or otherwise, reflect or even promote workplace resistance, anarchist pedagogy, self-emancipation, and anti-statist insurrection. The book ranges from the silent era to the classics Zero de Conduite and Love and Anarchy to contemporary films like The Nothing Factory, while engaging the works of Jean Vigo, Jean-Luc Godard, Lina Wertmuller, Yvonne Rainer, Ken Loach, and others. This updated second edition reflects on several new topics, including the negative portrayals of anarchism over the past twenty years and the contemporary embrace of post-anarchism.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides a brief background of anarchism. The competing varieties of anarchism endeavor to reconcile the seemingly conflicting claims of individual autonomy and collective struggle. Despite significant differences between the classical anarchists, the term “communal individuality” allows one to recognize affinities between the evolving connotations of anarchy embedded in the works — and deeds — of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin. In addition, a productive tension between individuality and communal solidarity fuels the fascinatingly contradictory work of two thinkers sometimes not considered part of mainstream anarchism — William Godwin and Max Stirner. In the years since the first edition of this book was published in 1999, the so-called “post-anarchist” turn has posed a challenge, in both activist and academic circles, to the canonical anarchism of Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin. The book focuses on links between anarchist self-activity and films that not only reflect, but often actively promote, workplace resistance, anarchist pedagogy, and anti-statist insurrections. It also broadens the definition of “anarchist cinema” to include discussion of films not made and produced by anarchists.

Workers' resistance in special economic zones in Poland

PurposeThis article compares workers' resistance in foreign direct investments (FDIs) in the automotive and electronics sectors in two special economic zones (SEZs) in the north-east and south-west of Poland. It aims to investigate why, despite the shared characteristics of the SEZs, that there are different outcomes in terms of the balance of formal resistance through trade unions and informal resistance through sabotage.Design/methodology/approachA spatial framework of analysis is posited to examine how global capital, national employment frameworks and regional institutions play out in local labour markets and shape workers' sense of place and their capacity for workplace resistance. The research study is based on interviews with trade union officials and non-union employees in four foreign investment firms in Poland.FindingsThe findings point to the importance of the type of production in influencing the structural power of organised labour and the social agency workers influenced by their understanding of place.Originality/valueAnalysing workplace resistance and industrial relations from a spatial perspective.

Understanding and Analysing Resistance to Management Ideas

This chapter presents three approaches towards analysing workplace resistance to management ideas. The first (industrial relations) has primarily focused on union resistance. The second (labour process theory) considers individual and collective resistance in a context of antagonism between labour and capital. The third (post-structuralism) has sought to introduce subjectivity and identity into the analysis. The chapter gives a brief contextual sketch of resistance to management ideas before presenting the three approaches. It then considers ‘productive’ resistance, which suggests that resistance can facilitate organizational change, and examines whether this position can be considered to constitute a fourth approach. The authors conclude that it would be premature to do so because (1) it is under-explored, (2) it contains different strands, and (3) it shares similarities with previous approaches. Nevertheless, it helps to open up promising avenues for future research and some of these research directions in resistance to management ideas are considered.

Gig workers will slowly redress the benefits imbalance

Subject ILO employment-protection recommendations. Significance Ever more workers are engaged as self-employed, independent contractors without traditional protections and benefits, including a minimum wage, holiday and sick pay, and protection against dismissal. However, challenges to this status are increasing both at work and through the courts. Impacts The use of self-employed independent contracts for organising work will continue spreading far beyond the gig economy. ‘Employed’ workers gained ‘rights’ through social dialogue; similar conversations will now addressing future classification and rights. Self-employed workers lack a collective voice, which will lead to new forms of workplace resistance growing in effectiveness. New ways of arranging protections may undermine the existing ‘gig economy’ model; some platforms will adapt and flourish; some will fail.

Introduction

This introduction contextualizes black women’s politics within the historical and social landscape of political culture in black Washington. While African American women’s political activism stretched back to the seventeenth century, it was during the 1920s and 1930s that their political campaigns gained more visibility, and Washington, D.C. was a key location for this process. Inspired by the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and emboldened by World War I’s message of democracy, black women formed partisan organizations, testified in Congress, weighed in on legislation, staged protest parades, and lobbied politicians. But in addition to their formal political activities, black women also waged informal politics by expressing workplace resistance, self-defense toward violence, and performances of racial egalitarianism, democracy, and citizenship in a city that very often denied them all of these rights. Jim Crow Capital connects black women’s formal and informal politics to illustrate the complexity of their activism.

The Day of the Rally: An ethnographic study of ‘ceremony as resistance’ and ‘resistance as ceremony’

The literature on organisational culture suggests that ceremonies or rituals reinforce control. By contrast, this article contributes to the literature on resistance, culture and ceremony by arguing that ceremony can also be understood as a form of resistance. It does so through drawing on ethnographic research, first, to explore how a ceremonial 1-day rally during an academic dispute was productive for frontline employee resistance (ceremony as resistance). Second, it considers how such resistance can also be productive in generating consent, for it is infused with and reproduces established norms, subjectivities and power relations (resistance as ceremony). Finally, it is asserted that resistance can be productive in fostering a subjectivity characterised by stability and instability and so practices such as a rally are necessary to try to stabilise both the organisation and the subjectivity of resistance. The article therefore illustrates the ambiguity of productive resistance which has been neglected to date. These insights and arguments indicate that all forms of workplace resistance are decaf, for they are imbued with the context and norms through which they arise. Nevertheless, resistance remains dangerous for those in positions of authority because it means that power is never totalising and so outcomes continue to be uncertain.