Individual Academic Productivity vs New Managerialism in Academic Research

The paper considers individual academic productivity and the new managerialism in academic research as a set of social relations, common and opposite interests of a scholar and a university. The balance of interests is a necessary condition for regulating the contradictions among participants in public relations, including academic research. Reforming higher education results in new managerialism spreading wider and in scientific results paid attention to. The increasing accountability with a lack of mutual trust and information asymmetry creates the illusion of an imbalance of academic researchers’ interests in favor of management. The power potential of the new managerialism can become an instrument of both pressure and encouragement of individual academic productivity. As is shown in our review, this productivity, mainly published papers, is influenced by the principles of its assessment. The evolution of approaches to the academic results promotion provides a large variety of criteria for the selection of indicators to assess scientific activity. The game theory allows to reduce this variety to one common ground, where winning is considered to be the basis of relationships in academic research. As a result, there is a matrix model of four strategies – the extreme forms of scholar-and-management relationship manifestation within the system of academic research. Only one of these strategies means a balance of interests and long-term cooperation, the other three imply the contradiction of individual academic productivity vs the new managerialism and are short-term. The use of winning in a game as a basis and criterion of assessment for the individual academic productivity normalization contributes to opportunistic behavior neutralization. The author makes the conclusion that the type of strategy affects the combination of simple and qualitative indicators and professional expertise when assessing scientific results. It is reasonable to choose the indicators of assessment according to the most balanced strategy of regulating the contradictions among participants in academic research.

Managerialism and the Military: Consequences for the Swedish Armed Forces

This article analyzes civil–military relations and the issue of civilian control through the lens of new managerialism. It illustrates that the means and mechanisms applied by governments to govern the military actually shape its organization and affect its functions in ways not always acknowledged in the civil–military debate. We start by illustrating the gradual introduction of management reforms to the Swedish Armed Forces and the growing focus on audit and evaluation. The article thereafter analyzes the consequences of these managerialist trends for the most central installation of the armed forces–its headquarters. It further exemplifies how such trends affect the work of professionals at the military units. In conclusion, managerialist reforms have not only changed the structure of the organization and the relationship between core and support functions but have also placed limits on the influence of professional judgment.

The Politics of Intercultural Collaboration in Higher Music Education: Challenges Seen from a Leadership Point of View

Internationally, various mandates and policy directives require higher music education institutions to engage in intercultural collaboration. These include fulfilling national policy demands for internationalization in higher education, providing students with experience of working internationally to increase their employability, and conducting proper diversity management so as to facilitate diversity-conscious and responsible interaction with employees, students, and the broader educational community. In this chapter, the topic of intercultural collaboration in higher music education is approached from a different starting point, asking what, from a leadership point of view, creates obstacles to such collaboration and what makes it challenging or difficult either at the levels of individual participants, administrators, or the institution. Twelve leadership representatives from three different institutions of higher music education were interviewed about their experiences with intercultural collaboration and the benefits and challenges of engaging in such interactions. From the interviewees’ experiences, their work of attempting to govern or manage situations of complex intercultural interaction while simultaneously negotiating between the different interests expressed within the frames of their respective institutions featured prominently in the empirical material. In this chapter, these negotiations and deliberations are theorized and discussed attending to perspectives borrowed from literature on intercultural competences, leadership in higher education, and new managerialism.

Venturing From Home: Writing (and Teaching) as Creative-Relational Inquiry for Alternative Educational Futures

This article explores the ecology of contemporary higher education by foregrounding the ethical relation between its authors. The article expresses their commitment to throwing off familiar academic conventions in order to promote human flourishing in a sector that has been colonized by new managerialism and the associated mechanisms of “performance management,” surveillance, and exclusion. The authors write into the emblems of the naajavaarsuk (the ivory gull) and isumataq (the Inuit storyteller). They explore collaborative writing as an ethical, relational practice whilst exposing the lived problematics that have become the “new normal” in the contemporary academy, for instance, the fetishization of “student satisfaction.” The latter has gained traction in the UK in recent years, and in extreme cases can call forth acts of ethical violence that induce deep and long-lasting effects. Their account is visceral rather than abstract, rooted in lived experience and in theory. The authors conclude that the precondition for human flourishing in conditions of constraint is neither all-out resistance nor quietist acceptance of the status quo. It is to open up a space for education that inheres in our relation to the other, and quietly to resist being defined and limited by practices of monitoring and surveillance.

“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.

Efficiency in equipment import processes: UNIVASF's case

This study aims to describe and analyze the administrative flow of equipment import process at UNIVASF considering the principle of administrative efficiency. A qualitative single case study research was carried out, with a survey and analysis of actions, administrative acts developed into equipment import processes, from 2004 to 2014, to foster, and support scientific, technological and innovation research at UNIVASF. The results show that the principle of efficiency, a promise of the new managerialism, does not resonate with the evidences pointed out in this research, due to the higher time spent to perform the phases, especially the fiscal one, due to obstacles in the administrative and legal systems.

“New managerialism” in higher education: the case of United Arab Emirates

PurposeThe aim of this study is to assess the managerial practices in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) higher education sector through the lens of “new managerialism”.Design/methodology/approachAn extensive review of new managerialism literature in higher education was conducted to develop a structured survey questionnaire. Using 176 useable responses obtained from the country-wide survey of academic staff, the underlying factor structure of new managerialism was first established using exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and then ANOVA was carried out to check whether there existed any difference in the six factors as well as for the individual items within each factor across the three types of Universities in the UAE, namely public universities, private-local owned universities and private-foreign owned universities.FindingsThe study unearthed a six-factor framework (monitoring and evaluation, transparency, bureaucracy, stakeholder engagement, research productivity and academic freedom and flexibility) of new managerialism comprising of 20 managerial practices. Of the six factors, significant difference was found for bureaucracy, stakeholder engagement and academic freedom and flexibility across different types of universities.Originality/valueIn terms of novelty, the study is the first attempt to explore new managerialism in higher education in the Middle Eastern context.