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This paper has been written in the style of a provocative essay. This paper aims to show how neo-liberalism has become the leading “policy doctrine” in higher education (HE) systems across the globe. This has put increasing systemic political and economic pressure on many universities which not only undermine but also “colonize” the Lebenswelt or “lifeworld” (Habermas, 1987) of academics.

This study draws on concrete empirical examples based on the authors’ subjective experiences within the higher educational sector and secondary sources.

The authors highlight and illustrate how the increasing dominance of “neo-liberal science” principles (Lave et al., 2010) severely damage the quality of knowledge production and working conditions of ordinary academics in both national and international academic communities.

This paper provides insights into the practical implications of the spread of “neo-liberal science” principles on the work and employment of academics.

The authors aim to trigger critical discussion concerning how emancipatory principles of teaching and research can be brought back into the Lebenswelt of academics to reverse some of the destructive effects to which this paper refers to.

This chapter introduces a metaphor—the house—and applies Habermas’ philosophy to examine the environment where knowledge production takes place. The analysis shows the dominance of “the systemic paradigm,” which is characterized by increased bureaucratization and commercialization. This paradigm has severe consequences for two core features of universities: the open-ended search for deeper understanding and the principle of autonomy. The chapter advances the idea of reclaiming the political dimension of the epistemic endeavor and presents a series of initiatives which help to advance tourism scholarship by non-conforming to the steering conditions of this paradigm and instead reclaiming the personal and subjective; promoting multiple knowledges; and building alternative platforms of knowledge production, cooperation, and dissemination.

In recent years, the concept of “reification” has virtually disappeared from debates in social theory, including critical social theory. The concept was at the center of the revitalization of Marxist theory in the early twentieth century generally known as Western Marxism. Georg Lukács in particular introduced the concept to express how the process described in Marx's critique of alienation and commodification could be grasped more effectively by combining it with Max Weber's theory of rationalization (see Agger, 1979; Stedman Jones et al., 1977).¹ In Lukács's use, the concept of reification captured the process by which advanced capitalist production, as opposed to earlier stages of capitalist development, assimilated processes of social, cultural, and political production and reproduction to the dynamic imperatives and logic of capitalist accumulation. It is not just interpersonal relations and forms of organization constituting the capitalist production process that are being refashioned along the lines of one specific definition of economic necessity. In addition, and more consequentially, the capitalist mode of production also assimilates to its specific requirements the ways in which human beings think the world. As a result, the continuous expansion and perfection of capitalist production and its control over the work environment impoverishes concrete social, political, and cultural forms of coexistence and cooperation, and it brings about an impoverishment of our ability to conceive of reality from a variety of social, political, and philosophical viewpoints.

Smart governance ultimately relates to the ability of political administrations to elicit trust and public confidence. Political administrations normally generate rational policies that arise from their context-sensitive goals. The capability of an administration to develop and implement policies is measured as efficacy, which can influence the value and stability of an administration. However, policy development and implementation is not only an attribute of a political administration but also of its bureaucracy. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of bureaucracies, representing them as complex and dynamic.

A traditional blueprint model of a bureaucracy comes from Weber, seen to be a servicing body for the implementation of political policy decisions resulting from a process of governance. An alternative model arises from the fictional works of Kafka, which is underpinned by a firm conceptual basis of a bureaucracy that confronts that of Weber. Agency theory will be used to model bureaucracies, and comparisons will be made between the Weber and Kafka conceptualisation.

There are broad models of a bureaucracy that arise from different propositions such as a Weber and a Kafka model, the latter being more representative of administrations. Any attempts to measure comparative efficacy across political systems or administrations may well lead to failure due to the distinctions in the nature of the bureaucracies that they maintain. The paper argues that the Weber model is an unattainable boundary representation of a bureaucracy. In contrast, Kafka’s more pragmatic conceptualisation can be modelled as a pathological autonomous system that is both complex and adaptive. Such pathologies can be harmful to the implementation of socially improving policies.

The paper shows that even where a political administration has policy initiatives that can improve society, these can be corrupted and misdirected by its bureaucracy, mistakenly believed (by the administration) to be dedicated to the service of the administration, rather than the bureaucracy’s own self-interests.

No other approach has been able to graphically represent the relative natures of different bureaucracies, or their pathologies.

Purpose – In this chapter, we explore how normalization of exclusionary practices and of privilege for seemingly same professionals and disadvantage for seemingly different professionals in academic healthcare organizations can be challenged via meaningful culturalization in the interference zone between system and life world, subsequently developing space for belonging and difference.

Methodology – This nested case study focusses on professionals’ narratives from one specific setting (team) within the broader research and research field of the Dutch academic hospital (Abma & Stake, 2014). We followed a responsive design, conducting interviews with cultural minority and majority professionals and recording participant observations.

Findings – In the Netherlands, the instrumental, system-inspired business model of diversity is reflected in two discourses in academic hospitals: first, an ideology of equality as sameness, and second, professionalism as neutral, rational, impersonal and decontextual. Due to these discourses, cultural minority professionals can be identified as ‘different’ and evaluated as less professional than cultural majority, or seemingly ‘same’, professionals. Furthermore, life world values of trust and connectedness, and professionals’ emotions and social contexts are devalued, and professionals’ desire to belong comes under pressure.

Value – Diversity management from a system-based logic can never be successful. Instead, system norms of productivity and efficiency need to be reconnected to life world values of connectivity, personal recognition, embodied knowledge and taking time to reflect. Working towards alternative safe spaces that generate transformative meaningful culturalization and may enable structural inclusion of minority professionals further entails critical reflexivity on power dynamics and sameness–difference hierarchy in the academic hospital.

What ought we morally to do in a tourism academia dominated by metrics, quantification and digital codification? The purpose of this paper is to address this question by presenting the idea of “hyper academia” and exploring ethical perspectives and values related to hyper-digital cultures.

Drawing inspiration from classical and post-disciplinary traditions, the topic is exposed in a creative and multi-layered way using conceptual, philosophical and artistic tools. It is structured in four sections: An introductory essay on gratitude, a philosophical thought experiment, a literary short story and a manifesto.

Gratitude referencing is a method of personalizing the attribution of influence in scholarship and restoring the importance of depth and slowness over speed, novelty and quantity. The thought experiment allows us to see how we make value judgements on academic work under different scenarios. The dystopian short story shows the radical power that such a genre has to create emotional engagement whilst activating our critical reflexivity. Finally, the manifesto answers the question of what we morally “ought to do” by inviting scholars to engage with five duties.

This paper looks beyond previous descriptive studies of academic rankings and metrics, inviting tourism scholars to reflect on the values and moral justifications behind our evaluation cultures.