When performativity fails: Implications for Critical Management Studies

This article argues that recent calls in this journal and elsewhere for Critical Management Studies scholars to embrace rather than reject performativity presents an overly optimistic view of (a) the power of language to achieve emancipatory organizational change and (b) the capability of lone Critical Management Studies researchers to resignify management discourses. We introduce the notion of failed performatives to extend this argument and discuss its implications for critical inquiry. If Critical Management Studies seeks to make a practical difference in business and society, and realize its ideals of emancipation, we suggest alternative methods of impact must be explored

The Neoliberalisation of Higher Education in England: An Alternatives is Possible

In this article, we provide a critical explanation and critique of neoliberal policy. We attempt an innovative focus ranging from the wider contemporary political and ideological shifts, to specific higher education influences and consequences, of neoliberalism. We do this in three parts that follows a narrative logic where we explore the bigger picture, which we then locate concentrating on specific and particular examples with a long view of class struggle. In the first part, we lay out neoliberalism and explicate its basic principles in abstraction. This is necessary for part two, where we contextualise neoliberalism specifically within the English higher education system with specific reference to the policy agenda of the Government. In the third and final part of the article we suggest an alternative higher education model that simultaneously exists and flourishes with and against the neoliberal hegemony. We conclude by suggesting the possibility of class formation and struggle in this moment of history when neoliberalism is expanding and deepening

Towards a university of the common: reimagining the university in order to abolish it with the Really Open University

The autumn of 2010, in the UK, was characterised by a series of protests against the proposed tripling of university tuition fees and the removal of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA). These protests were set within a broader international background of contestation around universities and higher education reforms. The focus of this article lies on the activities of a group, which emerged within this context, called the Really Open University (ROU), and its efforts to engender a reimagining of the university. Specifically, this paper argues that the activities of the ROU were attempts to create new, radical imaginaries of the university and were linked to broader efforts to re-conceptualise knowledge production and pedagogy. The central point is that ultimately the ROU’s invitation to ‘reimagine the university’ was a provocation to abolish the university in its capitalist form, through a process of reimagining the university, exodus from the university machine and creating of a university of the common

The co-operative university: Labour, property and pedagogy

I begin this article by discussing the recent work of academics and activists to identify the advantages and issues relating to co-operative forms of higher education, and then focus on the ‘worker co-operative’ organisational form and its applicability and suitability to the governance of and practices within higher educational institutions. Finally, I align the values and principles of worker co-ops with the critical pedagogic framework of ‘Student as Producer’. Throughout I employ the work of Karl Marx to theorise the role of labour and property in a ‘co-operative university’, drawing particularly on later Marxist writers who argue that Marx’s labour theory of value should be understood as a critique of labour under capitalism, rather than one developed from the standpoint of labour

Strike, occupy, transform! Students, subjectivity and struggle

This article uses student activism to explore the way in which activists are challenging the student as consumer model through a series of experiments that blend pedagogy and protest. Specifically, I suggest that Higher Education is increasingly becoming an arena of the postpolitical, and I argue that one of the ways this student-consumer subjectivity is being (re)produced is through a series of ‘depoliticisation machines’ operating within the university. This article goes on to claim that in order to counter this, some of those resisting the neoliberalisation of higher education have been creating political-pedagogical experiments that act as ‘repoliticisation machines’, and that these experiments countered student-consumer subjectification through the creation of new radical forms of subjectivity. This paper provides an example of this activity through the work of a group called the Really Open University and its experiments at blending, protest, pedagogy and propaganda

‘Messy Democracy’: Democratic pedagogy and its discontents

This paper reflects on a recent participatory installation by the artists’ collective @.ac, entitled Messy Democracy, as a case study to raise questions concerning the ‘distribution of the sensible’ within the neoliberal art school. The project set up a quasi-autonomous artists’ space within Hanover Project gallery 9 April–3 May, 2018 at University of Central Lancashire, Preston. This exhibition functioned as a space of collective pedagogy, co-labour and ‘dissensus’ situated in relation to the wider operation of the department of Fine Art. It also sought to operate as a critical alternative to contemporary models of the art school, rooted in notions of usefulness and romantic self-realisation, but re-structured in the service of ‘commodification’ and ‘financialisation’ in wake of the Browne Report (2010). Most importantly, Messy Democracy represented a ‘theatocractic’ ‘undercommons’ for alternate and counter-hegemonic subjectivities to emerge. However, hierarchical logics, resulting from the hegemonic ‘distribution of the sensible’ stubbornly persisted even within this nascent pedagogic democracy

Toward critical pedagogies of the international? Student resistance, other-regardedness and self-formation in the neoliberal university

Anxieties regarding colonial and neoliberal education have generated multiple calls for critical international pedagogies. Scholars of critical pedagogy have analyzed the pedagogies of the neoliberal project, whose ethos and economic imperatives aim to produce apolitical consumers and future citizens. Such calls, this article argues, articulate a concern about other-regardedness, critiquing the impact of neoliberalism on the cultivation of student values and relations toward politics, society, and others. How can we articulate a critical international pedagogy informed by, and enhancing, students’ and future citizens’ other-regardedness toward those “superfluous” and “disposable” others outside the classroom and the formal curriculum? To this end, we mobilize Michel Foucault’s thinking of “counter-conduct” to illuminate how students resist being conducted as self-interested and apolitical consumers. Such practices remain largely unexplored in examinations of recent student protests and occupations. Examining the 2005 student occupation of a French university against the local government’s abandonment of asylum-seekers, we discuss students’ own processes of social participation and self-formation, thus exploring the possibilities and tensions for advancing a critical and other-regarding pedagogy. Greater attention to students resisting the historically blind and market-driven rationalities and techniques of governing—inside and outside classrooms and curricula—marks an important point of departure for critical pedagogies of the international

Leadership and learning landscapes: the struggle for the idea of the university

This paper focuses on the academic involvement in the design and delivery of new teaching and learning spaces in higher education. The findings are based on research conducted at 12 universities within the United Kingdom. The paper examines the nature of academic involvement in the design and decision-making process of pedagogic space design, revealing some of the complexities and the tensions within this area of academic leadership. The research found that innovation and creativity on particular projects is often restricted by the project management decision-making processes and that broader institutional aims are often underplayed once the design process goes into project mode. The paper concludes by calling for greater academic involvement in the design process in ways that allow for critical reflexivity based on discussions around the concept of ‘the idea of the university’