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1 – 10 of over 6000Internationalisation and academic mobility have long been integral parts, although serving different purposes in the higher education industry. Internationalisation has played a…
Abstract
Internationalisation and academic mobility have long been integral parts, although serving different purposes in the higher education industry. Internationalisation has played a crucial role in facilitating academic exchange, knowledge sharing, research partnerships and collaborative innovation. However, the rise of neoliberalism has introduced the market forces of global capitalism that have significantly impacted higher education worldwide – invading the sector with neoliberal market values. This chapter aims to explore the impact of neoliberalism on the internationalisation of higher education in Africa, with a specific focus on trends in international student mobility. The chapter argues that the influence of neoliberalism on international mobility extends beyond market dynamics, encompassing discussions on hegemony within international knowledge systems, where African countries and institutions often find themselves marginalised. The study relies on published materials and publicly available statistical data from both governmental and non-governmental organisations. By examining the interplay between neoliberalism and the process of internationalisation in higher education, this chapter sheds light on the intricate and multifaceted aspects of both concepts, as well as their practical implications for international student mobility. Moreover, the chapter reflects on the implications of neoliberal entanglements for the prospects of internationalisation in African higher education.
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Agnès Vandevelde-Rougale and Patricia Guerrero Morales
This chapter looks at the discursive dimension of the working environment in research and higher education organizations; more specifically at neoliberal managerial discourse and…
Abstract
This chapter looks at the discursive dimension of the working environment in research and higher education organizations; more specifically at neoliberal managerial discourse and at how it participates in shaping the way researchers, teachers and support staff perceive themselves and their experiences. It is based on a multiple case study and combines an intersectional and a socio-clinical approach. The empirical data is constituted by in-depth interviews with women conducted in Ireland and Chile, and includes some observations made in France. A thematic analysis of individual narratives of self-ascribed experiences of being bullied enables to look behind the veil drawn by managerial discourse, thus providing insights into power vectors and power domains contributing to workplace violence. It also shows that workplace bullying may reinforce identification to undervalued social categories. This contribution argues that neoliberal managerial discourse, by encouraging social representations of “neutral” individuals at work, or else celebrating their “diversity,” conceals power relations rooting on different social categories. This process influences one’s perception of one’s experience and its verbalization. At the same time, feeling assigned to one or more of undervalued social category can raise the perception of being bullied or discriminated against. While research has shown that only a minority of incidents of bullying and discrimination are reported within organizations, this contribution suggests that acknowledging the multiplicity and superposition of categories and their influence in shaping power relations could help secure a more collective and caring approach, and thus foster a safer work culture and atmosphere in research organizations.
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Robert Duncan M. Pelly and David Boje
The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the ideological impasses between educationally minded faculty and neoliberal oriented university administrators. To bridge and benefit…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the ideological impasses between educationally minded faculty and neoliberal oriented university administrators. To bridge and benefit from these two perspectives, Follettian integration is introduced. Specifically, the ensemble learning theory (ELT) and entrepreneurship centers are illustrated as Follettian interventions and their reasons for success are discussed.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is theoretical, but provides ethnographic anecdotes of the problems occurring during the rise of neoliberalism and academic capitalism in the public university. The successful use of the ELT and entrepreneurship centers is likewise explored anecdotally.
Findings
This paper illustrates the benefits of utilizing the ELT and entrepreneurship centers in two different university settings.
Research limitations/implications
While the sample sizes of this paper are small, the anecdotal examples provide the basis for reasoning by analogy.
Practical implications
This work illustrates two possible Follettian interventions that serve as a guide to assist university administrators and faculty to find common ground and better serve students and university communities.
Originality/value
The rise of academic capitalism and neoliberalism has devalued education and resulted in poorer educational outcomes and a modern generation with less intellectual capital. This is one of the first papers to utilize Mary Parker Follett’s theories of education and apply them to the impending identity crisis of the public university. The result is a win-win for both neoliberal administrators and faculty in the face of an impending identity crisis for the public university.
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Sheeba Asirvatham and Maria Humphries-Kil
The purpose of this paper is to reflect on career aspirations and experiences explored with senior women organizational scholars employed in neoliberally driven public…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to reflect on career aspirations and experiences explored with senior women organizational scholars employed in neoliberally driven public universities in Aotearoa (New Zealand) legally mandated to serve as a critic and conscience of society.
Design/methodology/approach
Over the 18 months period, three sequential research conversations were conducted with each of 12 participants known for their commitment to social justice and planetary well-being. The conversational approach allowed for spontaneous participant-lead development of ideas. Sequencing of conversations allowed for reflection on matters raised in previous conversations.
Findings
Vitality and creativity deemed essential to scholarly careers were reportedly under pressure. Career concepts in use indicate a protean commitment to self-direction but also recognized constraints of institutionally driven neoliberal output regimes. Detrimental impacts of neoliberal values permeating their employing institutions were offered spontaneously often in radical feminist terms but paradoxically given liberal feminist remedies.
Research limitations/implications
The 12 diverse transcripts of participant conversations generated remarkable similarities that indicate the influence of career articulations on the social construction of reality. The implications of this interpretation invite further reflection on the consequences of normalization of career metaphors and their implication in the intensification of institutional control, the weakening of professional autonomy and the system preserving restriction of career-related responsibilities.
Practical implications
Highlighting constraints to creativity and vitality necessary for scholarly work can inform further research into professional influences on justice and environmental matters in and beyond the Academy.
Social implications
In this paper a short review of Aotearoa (New Zealand) as in vanguard of neoliberal intensification globally, the implication of this doctrine in neoliberally driven universities and the impacts on career opportunities, degradations and responsibilities of scholars are explored.
Originality/value
The conversational research process contrasts with more tightly framed empirical research methods by generating spontaneous participant-led articulations of career-related dynamics explored and expanded over subsequent conversations.
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Esther Fitzpatrick and Sandy Farquhar
The purpose of this paper is to use duoethnography to explore experiences of service as work in the university, an institution increasingly shaped by neoliberal values. The…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to use duoethnography to explore experiences of service as work in the university, an institution increasingly shaped by neoliberal values. The authors trace the shift in emphasis within the university from one of a care-oriented form of service to a highly managerial form of service. The authors first interrogate childhood stories to make sense of the initial response to the role of service in a lecturer position, and then to the increasing organisational demand for leadership within the university.
Design/methodology/approach
As two women academics the authors see the work in teacher education as a particular form of service—as “our calling”.
Findings
This duoethnography reveals different histories in relation to service, but similar ways of thinking about the changing nature of service in the university. With particular regard to women in the academy, it reveals the desire for a more transformative approach, recognising the importance of collegial relationships, and valuing an ethics of care, in order to develop inclusive and transformative service and leadership in the academy.
Practical implications
This paper provides clear links to how changes in the university are understood and approached differently by people.
Originality/value
This paper argues for the importance of autoethnographic and duoethnographic explorations of the personal stories in the university to better understand wider definitions of service and leadership.
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This study aims to identify and explore the nature of ideas of the university in the present to demonstrate how the ideas both enable and constrain the emergence of its possible…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to identify and explore the nature of ideas of the university in the present to demonstrate how the ideas both enable and constrain the emergence of its possible futures.
Design/methodology/approach
An integrated literature review of work on the western university was undertaken to identify the defining elements of ideas discussed in the literature – purpose, social legitimacy and embedded future – for the university in each idea.
Findings
Four contested and co-existing ideas of the university in the present were identified, and the nature of their co-existence and their underpinning assumptions about the purpose and social legitimacy and the embedded future held by each idea are made explicit.
Research limitations/implications
The paper focuses only on public, non-profit western universities as they exist in Australia, Europe, the UK, Canada and the USA in the present. Whether other forms of the university such as private non-profit and private for-profit “fit” into the four ideas and university types identified here was not explored and is a topic for future research.
Originality/value
The paper draws on an extensive literature to identify a new frame to understand the evolution of multiple ideas of the university, the impact of these ideas on the empirical organisational form of the university and how they shape assumptions about the university’s possible futures.
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This chapter draws on Michel de Certeau's work on strategies and tactics to critique the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and, importantly, suggests a form of creative…
Abstract
This chapter draws on Michel de Certeau's work on strategies and tactics to critique the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and, importantly, suggests a form of creative resistance to it. The TEF operates as a strategy of English higher education to reduce teaching and learning to quantifiable proxy measures which are then used to hold academics' performance to account. The selection and use of these proxy measures introduces a specific relationship between academics and students rooted in the underlying neoliberal principles of exchange and private gain, reducing HE teaching and learning to a provider–consumer relationship. In defiance of this academics need to utilise increasingly creative tactics to enable them to conform to the requirements of the TEF while simultaneously resisting and subverting this provider–consumer relationship. De Certeau's work on la perruque, or wiggery, as alternative tactics disguised as work for an employer offers us a way to counter the pervasive presence of TEF. La perruque encourages us to make use of the structures and places provided to us by higher education institutions to make something alien to them, for example, reorganising classroom spaces in such a way that does not prioritise the presence of the lecturer or designing sessions and modules starting from existing student knowledge rather than assuming a deficit to be addressed. Each of these tactics of resistance is fleeting and temporary, but each provides academics with a creative possibility to navigate the tensions of neoliberal provider–consumer relationships on the one hand and collaborative knowledge production on the other.
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This chapter reflects on calls for and processes of the de-colonisation of academia and the study of media, communication and the digital. It asks: what does it mean to…
Abstract
This chapter reflects on calls for and processes of the de-colonisation of academia and the study of media, communication and the digital. It asks: what does it mean to de-colonise academia and the study of media, communication and the digital? How can academia be transformed in progressive ways? This essay takes a Radical Humanist and Political Economy perspective on de-colonisation, which means that it is interested in how capitalism, power and material aspects of academia such as resources, money, infrastructures, time, space, working conditions and social relations of production shape the possibilities and realities of research and teaching. This essay stresses the importance of defining (neo-)colonialism as foundation of debates about de-colonisation and engages with theoretical foundations and definitions of (neo-)colonisation. It identifies how material forces and political economy shape and negatively impede on the university and academic knowledge production. It provides perspectives for concrete steps that can and should be taken for overcoming the capitalist and colonised university and creating the public interest and commons-oriented university and academic system.
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Njoki Nathani Wane, Zuhra E. Abawi and Zachary Njagi Ndwiga
The chapter addresses the questions surrounding the politics of the academe as a reflective process. The three authors’ experiences are very different – spanning from tenured…
Abstract
The chapter addresses the questions surrounding the politics of the academe as a reflective process. The three authors’ experiences are very different – spanning from tenured professor to sessional instructor to professor in an African university. The narratives from the authors inform the readers of their goals to join the academy as faculty; their job search; being members of the staff and then; their experiences as members of the teaching force at various universities. The chapter is based on their experiences of navigating the politics of the academe. This chapter provides their narratives of what it means to be a professor, mentor, colleague, and researcher. Each story is told from their particular standpoint: two females and one male teaching in North American universities and Africa, respectively, two Black and one racialized female who can pass, but cannot because of her name. The analysis will address numerous complications involved in addressing expectations, establishing common grounds as educators from an international perspective, and providing narratives of how we have managed to maintain our goals and aspirations as members of the academe. The tensions involved will be problematized and explored from within the context of the academy and the associated constraints therein (Tatum, 1999). The objective of this chapter is to theorize the significance of navigating the politics of the academe to deflate arising tensions that may delay your passion for teaching. The chapter is informed by an anticolonial theoretical framework in light of converges and divergences of varying colonial contexts embedded in colonial Canadian society. The anticolonial framework draws on the specific settler-colonial Canadian context (Tuck & Yang, 2012). The chapter is divided into six parts: (1) introduction that provides a general overview of what it means to be faculty at a university, (2) situating ourselves, (3) theoretical framework, (4) Universities in general and more specifically, Canadian system and Kenyan, (5) discussion that provides an analysis or synthesis of our experiences, and (6) conclusion.
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The purpose of this paper is to explore the information behaviour of early career academics (ECAs) within humanities and social sciences (HSS) disciplines who are starting their…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the information behaviour of early career academics (ECAs) within humanities and social sciences (HSS) disciplines who are starting their first continuing academic position. The proposed grounded theory of Systemic Managerial Constraints (SMC) is introduced as a way to understand the influence of neoliberal universities on the information behaviour of ECAs.
Design/methodology/approach
This qualitative research used constructivist grounded theory methodology. Participants were 20 Australian and Canadian ECAs from HSS. Their information practices and information behaviour were examined for a period of five to seven months using two interviews and multiple “check-ins”. Data were analysed through two rounds of coding, where codes were iteratively compared and contrasted.
Findings
SMC emerged from the analysis and is proposed as a grounded theory to help better understand the context of higher education and its influence on ECAs’ information behaviour. SMC presents university managerialism, resulting from neoliberalism, as pervasive and constraining both the work ECAs do and how they perform that work. SMC helps to explain ECAs’ uncertainty and precarity in higher education and changing information needs as a result of altered work role, which, in turn, leads ECAs to seek and share information with their colleagues and use information to wield their personal agency to respond to SMC.
Originality/value
The findings from this paper provide a lens through which to view universities as information environments and the influence these environments can have on ECAs’ information practices and information behaviour.
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