WES-Oct-2015-ARTC-347.R3 The academic game.pdf (210.8 kB)
The academic game: Compliance and resistance in universities
journal contribution
posted on 2018-04-30, 08:14 authored by Senia Kalfa, Adrian Wilkinson, Paul J. GollanThis article draws on the sociology of Bourdieu to explore how academics respond to managerialist imperatives. Bourdieu’s metaphor of the game is applied to a case study of a regional Australian university, which underwent significant changes in 2007, the most notable being the introduction of performance appraisals. In-depth interviews (N=20) reveal evidence of symbolic violence: staff compliance with and complicity in the changes. This is evident in the way that the interviewees, mostly early career academics, chose to play the game by concentrating their efforts on increasing their capital within the new order. To further support this argument, signs of resistance to the new regime were explored. Findings show that vocal resistance was sparse with silence, neglect and exit being the more realistic options. The article concludes that it is academics’ illusio, their unwavering commitment to the game, which neutralizes resistance by pitting colleagues against each other.
History
School
- Business and Economics
Department
- Business
Published in
Work, Employment and SocietyVolume
32Issue
2Pages
274 - 291Citation
KALFA, S., WILKINSON, A. and GOLLAN, P.J., 2017. The academic game: Compliance and resistance in universities. Work, Employment and Society, 32 (2), pp.274-291.Publisher
SAGE © The AuthorsVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2017Notes
This paper was published in the journal Work, Employment and Society and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017017695043. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.ISSN
0950-0170eISSN
1469-8722Publisher version
Language
- en