Till Örebro universitet

Existing theorizations on how the proliferation of market-based technologies within universities come to foster so-called academic performer subjectivities have mainly drawn attention to their coercive and seductive powers. However, while these theorizations help explain why researchers either unwillingly adapt to, or identify with and cherish, their neoliberal ideals, they are less useful to explain recent empirical results showing that many researchers willingly comply yet are very critical of the very same ideals. Drawing upon an interview study of Swedish researchers, we address this theoretical gap in the literature by analytically disentangling three important qualities of the technologies per se, in terms of them producing performance numbers characterized by Specificness, Ongoingness, and Emptiness (SOE). These three qualities do not only have the dual power to interchangeably provoke bitter and sweet feelings, but also to foster the adoption of an academic performer subjectivity. In fact, it is precisely by provoking bittersweet feelings that these qualities break the sharp edges of pure coercion and seduction, thereby fostering a type of low-affective, yet highly persuasive form of reasoning about pros and cons of market-based technologies, which make their neoliberal ideals seem acceptable and reasonable at the end of the day.

Neoliberalism has emerged as a key concept for understanding how contemporary universities around the world are organized and managed. As a rationality of government, this political-economic ideology is grounded in the belief that human activities in general, and educational ones in particular, are best orchestrated when left to the rationality of the market. The authors discusses how extant research within several scientific fields such as accounting, management, sociology and higher education has provided a number of important insights into the unintended and largely detrimental effects that such a market-based rationality of government has tended to bring about in contemporary universities. Notwithstanding the many important insights generated in this literature though, extant research is according to the authors mostly based on smaller sample studies, which raises the question of whether they are generalizable to a larger sample of academics. Related to this, there is a lack of cross-sectional evidence of the extent to which Swedish universities and researchers display the same type of effects as described in the international literature. Also, the authors claim we know fairly little about whether these alleged effects are universal in character or differ between different categories of academics. After all, recent findings suggest that certain groups of researchers, not least junior researchers and/or women, may be even more negatively affected by the increasing reliance on market-based controls. Based on this, and drawing upon evidence from a survey among a large number of researchers at Swedish universities, the aim of this chapter is to more systematically map out the effects of market-based controls on research(er) quality, autonomy and innovation, motivation and stress, and furthermore, explore the extent to which these alleged effects are more prevalent among junior researchers and women, respectively. In brief, the authors present empirical evidence suggesting that today's reliance on neoliberally oriented forms of governance is perceived as negatively affecting research quality, academic freedom and stress. They also show that these negative effects are generally perceived to be more accentuated among junior academics and women as opposed to men and academics holding senior positions.

Foucault-oriented research has since long argued that the proliferation of performance measurement systems (PMSs) within academia threatens perceived researcher autonomy and identity through normalization and stigmatization of deviants. The theoretical model developed in this study nuances these claims by suggesting that effects of PMSs will differ depending on whether they are enacted as important for superiors (vertical control), colleagues (horizontal control), the researchers themselves (self  control), and  how  they  are  constructed by  these very  systems. Overall, the structural equation modelling analyses conducted on questionnaire data from some 700 Swedish researchers strongly confirm the model developed. Specifically, they show that PMSs enacted as a vertical form of control indeed threatens perceived autonomy and identity, and that horizontal control in the form of publish and peer pressure among colleagues works as a mediating mechanism which strengthens these effects. However, our analyses also show that when PMSs are enacted as important means of self control, this in fact increases perceptions of autonomy and reduces feelings of identity threat. We also find that the extent to which these systems construct researchers as high-performing is an important antecedent explaining how come they can be enacted in so different ways, and the effects thereof.

Neoliberalism has become a highly dominating and taken-for-granted way of organising the university sector around the world. In the critical educational literature, this market-based rationality has been scrutinised in detail over the past decades. However, rather scant attention has been directed to how university managers and administrators, apart from setting up quasi-markets, may intervene more directly to give the invisible hand of the market a helping hand. Aiming to address this lacuna, the purpose of the current article is to develop an empirically grounded taxonomy of different types of such interventions, and to theorise them in terms of the different facets of the neoliberal milieu that they reproduce and the various forms of subjectivising work among academics that they seek to engender. We do so by means of a qualitative study of so-called 'Grants Offices' at three Swedish universities. The findings arguably add to and problematise our understanding of how neoliberal markets work in academia in three different ways. First, while extant research has noted that university managers and administrators may intervene beyond the setting up of neoliberal markets per se, our study is to our knowledge the first one that identifies and systematises a broad array of such interventions. Second, it problematises the view of neoliberal markets as a form of monolithic entity that produces a uniform competitive pressure on academics. Third, and related, it furthers our understanding of the type of subjectivity that competitive milieus are assumed to bring about.

Anthony Giddens is generally considered one of the most prominent sociologists of moderntime. In this paper, we draw upon a micro-process case study to explore how his theory ofstructuration (ST) can be used to analyze the interplay between strategy and accounting inday-to-day-organizational life. In short, we find that strategizing and accounting shouldnot be viewed as two separate practices, but rather as two aspects ofoneand the samepractice, which form and feed each other in a recursive manner over time. Based on thesefindings, we also elaborate on how ST may be usefully applied to understand continuityand transformation of strategizing practices more generally. An overall conclusion is thatST not only provides a strong and consistent ontological framework for theorizing aboutthese practices, but also offers a rich conceptual toolbox which can be usefully appliedto better understand how and why structural continuity and change may coexist and inter-mingle in daily organizational life.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical model elaborating on the type of conditions that can inhibit (or at least temporarily hold back) "reactive conformance" in the wake of an increasing reliance on quantitative performance evaluations of academic research and researchers.

Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative study of a research group at a Swedish university who was recurrently exposed to quantitative performance evaluations of their research activities.

Findings: The empirical findings show how the research group under study exhibited a surprisingly high level of non-compliance and non-conformity in relation to what was deemed important and legitimate by the prevailing performance evaluations. Based on this, we identify four important qualities of pre-existing research/er ideals that seem to make them particularly resilient to an infiltration of an "academic performer ideal," namely that they are (1) central and since-long established, (2) orthogonal to (i.e. very different from) the academic performer ideal as materialized by the performance measurement system, (3) largely shared within the research group and (4) externally legitimate. The premise is that these qualities form an important basis and motivation for not only criticizing, but also contesting, the academic performer ideal.

Originality/value: Extant research generally finds that the proliferation of quantitatively oriented performance evaluations within academia makes researchers adopt a new type of academic performer ideal which promotes research conformity and superficiality. This study draws upon, and adds to, an emerging literature that has begun to problematize this "reactive conformance-thesis" through identifying four qualities of pre-existing research/er ideals that can inhibit (or at least temporarily hold back) such "reactive research conformance."

This abductive case study of MCS design change in a Swedish university shows how social and technical forms of control can be underpinned and held together by different institutional logics (forming so-called ‘socio-technical dyads of MC’), which gave them different, yet complementary functionalities to achieve organization-wide goals. Specifically, a since-long established neoliberal logic nurturing values of individualized freedom, market-based competition, and an entrepreneurial spirit was complemented with a programmatic logic nurturing the opposite values of centralized decision-making, and the homogenization and prioritization of research efforts. By integrating recent theorizing on MC complementarity and institutional logics when interpreting these findings, this study not only extends these literatures in several important respects, but also offers a novel way of conceptualizing MC as a system.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore how actors subjected to public performance evaluations may “contest commensuration,” i.e. may seek to influence how such ratings and rankings will be construed among important stakeholders.

Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative study of press releases, and interviews with department heads, is used as a basis for the analysis.

Findings: The empirically derived taxonomy of public responses to a state-initiated performance evaluation of educational programs shows that actors may mobilize an array of commensuration management tactics so as to maintain or improve one’s relative positional status. Such tactics may have at least three different foci, namely, on the comparison object (i.e. on the new grouping of actors), the comparison dimension (i.e. the standardized format for comparison) and the comparison rate (i.e. the rate received), respectively. The authors also find that not only are threats to positional status likely to spur commensuration management tactics, but also the opportunity to exploit a good rate.

Originality/value: The paper augments recent research that has problematized the so-called “reactive conformance thesis” by focusing on how evaluated organizations may directly try to influence external stakeholders through public responses. The study is also one of the first that analytically disentangles how they may skillfully exploit different forms of “plasticity” that are inherent in any type of commensuration.

Critical educational literature suggests that an increased reliance upon performative technologies is currently transforming the very foundations from which teacher subjectivities are constructed. Arguably though, the number of studies pointing to this risk or tendency is considerably larger than the ones theorising why this should be the case. Further, in those cases where the relationship between performative technologies and teacher subjectivities is theorised, the psychological mechanisms that the technologies appeal to are seldom brought to the fore. Based on this, the purpose of this article is to theorise the psychological mechanisms that performative technologies appeal to and work through, by means of identifying, systematising and elaborating extant understandings of such mechanisms in the critical educational literature. The results are presented in the form of a conceptual framework (referred to as the CMIS-framework) which suggests that one and the same performative technology may play many different roles, where each such role appeals to and works through a particular psychological mechanism. Importantly, depending on the type of psychological mechanism that is appealed to, the CMIS-framework suggests that this will lead to teachers (un)- consciously conducting particular forms of subjectivising work upon themselves, here referred to as compliance, mirroring, identification and self-realisation (CMIS).

Integrating recent theorizing on complementarity and situational strength with management control system (MCS) theory, we investigate how, why and under what circumstances companies may beneficially combine results control and two value-based controls (the use of belief systems and employee socialization practices) to handle the goal alignment problem that typically arises when managing company-level profitability. Drawing upon a survey of MCS practices in 103 strategic business units within the largest companies in Sweden, we find that the use of socialization practices reinforces the marginal return of results control, and vice versa. We also find that higher levels of environmental unpredictability both strengthen this synergetic effect, and reveal a similar complementarity effect of the simultaneous use of results control and the belief system. Our study thus contributes to the MCS literature by showing that; (i) results control may beneficially interact with two important, yet largely unexplored value-based controls, (ii) situational strength theory is highly useful for analytically disentangling the (dis)abilities of these controls in terms of them conveying clarity, consequentiality, consistency and constraint, respectively, and; (iii) the extent to which these controls convey non-overlapping, yet complementary abilities to address the goal alignment problem (required to produce synergetic effects on company-level profitability) is dependent on environmental context.