A Symposium from the Centre for Higher Education
and Equity Research (CHEER)
Theorising Affect in Academia
Convenor: Professor Louise Morley, Director, CHEER, University of Sussex
Discussant: Janice Malcolm, Director, Centre for the Study of Higher Education,
University of Kent
Rationale
This symposium aims to demonstrate that there is a powerful affective economy of higher
education. Higher education policy is frequently constructed as a rational, linear technology
of change, unimpeded by the complexities of affect. Emotions are conceptualised as entities
that can be constructed and managed via the right intervention. Aspirations can be raised,
change can be embraced and capacities can be built and enhanced. Yet the messiness of
emotions plays a crucial role in shaping professional identities, educational and career
aspirations, social and pedagogical relationships and organisational cultures. The Cartesian
dualism of mind/body has served to devalue, dismiss and decontextualise the non-rational,
rendering affective domains abstract and elusive. Higher education policy reform has an
impact on affect e.g. fear, anxiety, pride, as staff and students contemplate uncertain futures,
their positioning in the prestige economy and the value of higher education in rapidly
changing global economies.
The papers in this symposium will each identify and engage with different aspects of the
affective domain. Valerie Hey considers the intersections between audit and affect, as the
discursive and material shift from higher education as a private, rather than a public good is
producing antagonisms between what students expect as consumers of an expensive service,
and what academics are expected to produce to maintain their positions in highly audited
prestige economies. Louise Morley interrogates the leaderist turn and some of the gaps and
silences in the global literature on women’s under-representation in senior leadership
positions in higher education, and explores how the affective economy often influences
women’s aspirations and their willingness to occupy leadership positions. Jannie Roed
examines how doctoral students can become extensions of the audited selves that are so much
part of academic identities in the neo-liberal academy, and investigates the emotional labour
that is involved in doctoral supervision - particularly in relation to the policy imperatives for
timely successful completions. Miriam David analyses the important part that passionate
attachments have played in innovating new maps of learning in higher education including
women’s and gender studies, and will highlight the importance of transcending feelings of
despair with the post-neo-liberal university in order to stay energised around feminist change
projects
Abstracts
1. Valerie Hey
Stand and Deliver?: Affect Overload & Intersected Antagonisms
Higher education is cast in the English context as a private rather than a public good. This
adjustment to the consumer side however, complicates the prior persistent demands for
academic staff’s labour to be rendered auditable as evidence of their output excellence –
criteria used to evaluate them and support or block their career success. So if producers’
advancement is made by one measure and student consumers understand their university
experience as entitlement to scholars’ time by another measure - the stage is set for some
awkward conjunctions. As austerity bites deeper, students could over-invest in a service
model of education. It is a reasonable prediction that the hostile pursuit of individual
advantage stoked by these master signifiers will trump the ‘old-fashioned’ implicit
psychological contract between scholars and students and collegiality. Hence, we may
encounter a widened range of affective antagonisms.
2. Louise Morley
Is Higher Education Leadership an Identity Cage for Women?
A powerful cultural ideology has emerged in higher education reform that suggests that the
essential ingredient in successful organisational transformation is that of leadership. The
leaderist turn assumes that individual agency, unimpeachable characteristics and structural
positions will result in some organisational members being authorized to exert and display
managerial power. The narratives of how certain people are identified, or identify themselves
as legitimate leaders are open to further investigation.
This paper engages critically with the international literature and explanatory frameworks that
have analysed women’s absences from higher education senior leadership positions and will
highlight the lack of attention paid to the affective economy that constructs or depresses
aspirations and agency. Much of the global literature assumes that counting more women into
existing systems, structures and cultures is an unquestioned good. There is scant discussion of
women’s resistance to entering leadership in post neo-liberal and austerity-driven workplace
cultures.
3. Jannie Roed
The Collegial Gaze in Doctoral Supervision
Policy initiatives relating to doctoral education are increasingly based on the assumption that
the supervisory process can be strategically managed. Such initiatives ignore the emotional
labour involved in doctoral supervision. Timely, successful completion is a policy driver for
doctoral studies in the UK. To support students and supervisors in achieving this goal, some
universities have introduced measures to assure student progression. Such measures may
involve students leading public seminars or students appearing in front of panels to account
for their progress.
At such events, supervisors too are under scrutiny from their colleagues and institutions.
However, the affective implications of this aspect of supervision are rarely addressed. This
paper explores how institutional regulations relating to progression, team supervision and the
doctoral examination contribute to the emotional labour experienced by supervisors. The
paper explores how doctoral supervisors exercise agency in negotiating structures within their
institutions when such structures challenge supervisory authenticity.
Papers
1. Stand and Deliver?: Affect Overload & Intersected Antagonisms
Professor Valerie Hey
Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER)
University of Sussex, UK
Email: v.hey@sussex.ac.uk
Context
One billion pounds was cut from the UK higher education budget in 2009-2010. The
university has been hitherto an influential public institution (Holmwood, 2011; Inglis, 2011)
generating a range of crucial if unequally distributed social, educational and cultural
opportunities. The Browne Report (BIS 2010) gestured to this plurality but, given that the
appetite for public financing had diminished, was tasked to make recommendations for
delivering a more ‘sustainable’ – effectively a privatised system. Browne proposed a new
settlement redistributing the cost from the public to the graduate purse (albeit on a sliding
scale and with bursaries and other emoluments). This logic was recast in the subsequent
White Paper as ‘Students at the Heart of the System’ (BIS, 2011) coating the increase in
student indebtedness with the allure of their power as the consumer voice.
The vocabulary of the market has become viral in the higher education sector. Recent
pronouncement by Steve Outram – a senior advisor for the HEA ‘Students as partners change
programme’, condenses the new ‘terms of trade’ thus:
‘It’s a different mind-set. It’s not ‘This is what we will do to you’. It’s not even ‘This
is what we will do with you’ It’s more ‘Tell us what you would like us to do’
(Guardian Education June 12th 2012, p35).
Indications of this new subject position of ‘students as customers’ drop into my email box in
increasing numbers. Students intent on ‘complaining’ are routinely invoking the subject
positions of being the ‘fee-paying customer’ and thus of ‘you’ being ‘the (failed) service
provider’ of the ‘product’. Surprisingly little is known but much is assumed (Hey & Morley,
2011; Hey, 2011; Lynch, 2009) about the seemingly endless appetite, capacity and
capabilities of higher education (HE) to ‘deliver’ these changes – to absorb, manage and
endure which almost always seems to require someone does more work (Palmer and Dunford,
2002;Watson,2010). All of this has consequences for institutional flourishing, but for
academic ‘providers’ in the context of a recession, this holds some specific personal and
emotionally loaded apprehensions. It is these I wish to acknowledge and describe not least
because, change can be perceived as systems driven, rather than as a process inhabited by
different bodies in space and in relationships.
What are the constraints on the already high levels of productivity achieved in the UK
research and teaching communities? As Universities UK evidence shows, (see the website
www.universitiesuk.ac.uk) the UK is second only to the USA in terms of research
productivity but with far lower levels of investment but with far less resources. Will providing
more ‘key information sets’ stoke an ‘entitlement culture’ that erodes the psychological
contract (Robinson and Rousseau 1994) between academics and students, previously reliant
on an investment in academic professionalism. What about any student demands ‘unmet’ –
what about our evaluations? How much time do we have to dispose of when we are already
called upon to develop research, publish and make an ‘impact’? (Evans, 2010)
The effect of work intensification have already been remarked on (Probert, 2005), the
consequent general rise in levels of stress have been quantified and reported to the (UCU,
2008) by Kinman and Jones. In a recession, precariousness, identified by Cate Watson,
(2010), is now added to, work intensification. Fears about work commitments and pressures
to perform bear down most fiercely on junior and casualised staff in any organisation but
given the coincident rising expectations of students exercising their voice, we could be in for
a perfect storm.
The Affective Loading of Change and its ‘management’: Immeasurable Stress?
In this paper, I argue for a recognition of the affective loadings on academics (and
professional staff) entailed in responding to these ‘privatisation’ logics which could place
‘immature consumers’ (Brown, cited in Swain, 2012, Education Guardian).as unaccountable
arbiters of pedagogic relations and teaching quality to expect what cannot be given in terms of
the competing demands on staff.
I do so to question the tendency to consign the discussion of ‘emotion’ in higher education to
the realm of pathology – a move that effectively ‘privatises’ such concerns under the heading
of individual ‘stress’. Robotham & Julian, (2006 p.114) argue ‘measuring stress’ is
inadequate to the task of fully understanding it, hence I wish to reconceptualise it and its
converse - well-being through a psycho-social vocabulary (Hey & Leathwood, 2009; Hey
2011). The paper will seek to move from seeing ‘stress’ in terms of individual psychology to
work with the idea of ‘social quality’ – a concept related to matters of organisational levels of
trust (Ward and Meyer, 2009). This rethinking will register the force of organisational culture,
notably the psychic and social entanglements that make up the ‘relations of ruling’.
The agonistic forces of competition constructing the habitus of HE is hardly new of course –
HE’s have had audit instruments aplenty : some applied to overall university performance
(NSS, THE, Global rankings); and other mundane but potentially shaming evaluative routines
for the individual academic, such as the Research Excellence Framework. But many
commentators have noted the increased hostility of related professional reviewing processes
(Gill, 2009) which produce a displacement of anger onto the ‘other’, about what is in effect a
shared pain of being overstretched – this tendency to retribution rather than collective
resistance seems even more likely now when one has to do more (students and their voice)
with less (academics and their time).
This equation implies that the most resourced groups (be they elite parents and HEI’s and
individual students and academics) will, though ‘the logic of necessity’ strive to consolidate
their privileged field advantage –by bring into being appropriations of each other, a sort of
concerted grand larceny of a once public asset though their conscious or unconscious forms of
individual agency and intentionality (Hey and Morley, 2011). In sum, the violent tempo/er of
higher education is likely to heat up. My paper points to some emerging evidence that this is
the case.
References
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the heart of the system' http://c561635.r35.cf2.rackcdn.com/11-944-WP-students-atheart.pdf.
The Browne Report - An independent review of higher education funding and student finance
in England.
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emotion Contemporary Social Science Special Issue, Challenge, Change or Crisis in
Higher Education? 6 (2): 207-222.
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Educational Research Journal iFirst Article 1-17
2. Is Higher Education Leadership an Identity Cage for Women?
Professor Louise Morley
Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER)
University of Sussex, UK
Email: l.morley@sussex.ac.uk
The Leaderist Turn
Leadership has replaced management in post neo-liberal higher education (HE) change
discourse. The cultural ideology of leaderism suggests that certain subjectivities, values,
behaviour, dispositions and characteristics can strategically overcome institutional inertia,
outflank resistance and recalcitrance and provide direction for new university futures
(O’Reilly and Reed, 2010, 2011). Potent cultural templates or ‘scripts’ circulate for how
leaders should be - often based on larger cultural and historical formations (Alvesson et al.,
2008). Leaders are expected to demonstrate authority, affective agency and possess excellent
interpersonal and communication skills. However, leaders also have to negotiate intersections
with other simultaneously held identities, and this is where some dissonance may occur, with
cultural scripts for leaders coalescing or colliding with normative gender performances. This
paper interrogates the global literature on women’s under-representation in HE leadership and
discusses the affective dimensions of crafting and managing leadership identities. It raises
questions about who self-identifies, and is identified by existing power elites, as having
leadership legitimacy.
Missing Women
Women’s under-representation in senior leadership positions is a theme in studies from the
Global North (e.g. Bagilhole & White, 2011). It is also visible in studies from the Global
South e.g. from Ghana (Ohene, 2010); Kenya (Onsongo, 2004); Nigeria (Odejide, 2003) and
Pakistan (Rab, 2010). Diverse theoretical frameworks and vocabularies are marshalled to
examine the factors that may drive or depress women’s aspirations, career orientations and
success. The global literature can be classified into at least five analytical frameworks:
gendered divisions of labour; gender bias and misrecognition; management and masculinity;
greedy organisations, and missing agency (Morley, 2012).
Leadership is often perceived to be at odds with the demands of motherhood, domestic
responsibilities, and work/life balance. Lynch (2010) suggested that the academy is
constructed as a ‘carefree zone’ which assumes that academics and their leaders are zero load
workers, devoid of familial and care responsibilities (Grummell et al., 2009). While these
arguments are important, it does not account for why some women who are ‘carefree’ are also
absent from senior leadership (Currie et al., 2002). Explanations invoking care as a barrier fail
to challenge essentialist and heteronormative assumptions that all women live in nuclear
families and that, within those families, women do and will continue to take majority
responsibility for domestic arrangements. Such assumptions overlook changing relations
between women and men, and how modern forms of gender identity are more fluid,
multifaceted and varied than previously (Billing, 2011).
Misrecognition is the way in which wider society offers demeaning, confining or inaccurate
readings of the value of particular groups or individuals. Gender bias has been theorised in
terms of the dominant group ‘cloning’ themselves- appointing in their own image to minimise
risk (Gronn & Lacey, 2006). How leadership roles are constructed determines the selection
process in so far as particular qualities are normalised, prioritised or misrecognised (Grummel
et al., 2009). The male preference that results is both unconscious and unintentional (Hey,
2011), with bias more likely to occur if assessments are based on obscure criteria with
confidential evaluation processes (Husu, 2000). Hence the emphasis on transparency in
appointment processes (Rees, 2010).
It is hypothesised that a good leader is defined according to normative masculinity
(Binns & Kerfoot, 2011). The skills, competencies and dispositions deemed essential
to leadership including assertiveness, competitiveness, autonomy and authority are
embedded in socially constructed definitions of masculinity (Knights & Kerfoot,
2004). A contentious theme in some literature is that women and men have innately
different and essentialised leadership dispositions. Binns & Kerfoot (2011) discussed
the ‘female advantage’ literature (Rosener, 1990), which claimed the existence of
superior female leadership traits e.g. empathy and relationality. Billing (2011)
recommended that we need more sophisticated, less binaried analytical frames.
Leadership has been classified as an all-consuming activity, generating an uncontrollable
commotion of workplace demands. Devine et al. (2011) claimed that there is an assumption
of 24/7 availability of leaders. Fitzgerald (2011) noted how leadership is exhausting, with
unrelenting bureaucratic demands and institutional pressures. Women HE leaders in
Woodward’s UK study (2007:11) reported ‘unmanageably large workloads’. These
observations have led to leadership being described as ‘greedy work’ (Currie et al., 2002;
Gronn & Lacey, 2006). Devine et al. (2011:632) discussed leaders requiring ‘an elastic self’,
and ‘a relentless pursuit of working goals without boundaries in time, space, energy or
emotion’.
Women’s under-representation in leadership has focussed on three areas - fix the women, fix
the organisation and fix the knowledge (Schiebinger, 1999). The concept of women’s missing
agency and lack of self-efficacy, self-esteem and leadership aspirations has prompted a range
of mentoring and development programmes to build capacity and empower women to be
more competitive, assertive and risk-taking. Gender and organisation scholars have argued
that rather than seeing the women as requiring remedial support, it is the organisations that
require transformational change. For example, Cockburn (1991:12) contrasted the ‘short
agenda’ e.g. individual women’s achievement, with the ‘longer agenda’ e.g. an engagement
with gender and power.
Why Bother?
A dominant view in the global literature is that increasing women’s representation in HE
leadership is an unquestionable good. Many women desire entry to the influence and change
agency of leadership positions, but many do not. There is scant discussion of whether the
emotional and temporal investments deliver a healthy return. HE leadership can be rotational
and fixed term, involving multiple and conflicting affiliations and unstable engagements with
hierarchy and power. It can also include working with resistance and recalcitrance in order to
colonise colleagues’ subjectivities and guide them towards the goals of managerially inspired
discourses including post neo-liberal austerity cultures. Leadership involves an affective load
that incorporates identity work to manage self-doubt, conflict, anxiety, disappointment and
occupational stress. Furthermore, the corporate approved identities and narratives for what
constitutes an effective leader can be a form of identity cage which restricts, rather than builds
capacity and creativity. A key question is how leadership narratives, technologies and
practices for universities of the future can be more generative, generous and gender-free.
References
Alvesson, M., Lee Ashcraft, K., and Thomas, R., (2008). "Identity Matters: Reflections on
the Construction of Identity Scholarship in Organization Studies." Organization 15(1): 5-28.
Bagilhole, B. and White, K. (eds) (2011) Gender, Power and Management: A Cross-Cultural
Analysis of Higher Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Billing, Y. (2011) "Are Women in Management Victims of the Phantom of the Male Norm?
Gender, Work and Organization. 18(3): 298-317.
Binns, J. and Kerfoot, D. (2011) "Editorial: Engendering Leadership: Dedicated to the spirit
and the scholarship of the late Joan Eveline." Gender, Work and Organization 18(3): 257262.
Cockburn, C. (1991) In the Way of Women: Men’s Resistance to Sex Equality in
Organizations, New York: ILR Press.
Currie, J., Thiele, B. & Harris, P. (2002) Gendered Universities in Globalized Economies:
Power, Careers and Sacrifices. (Lexington: Lexington Books.
Devine, D., Grummell , B., and K. Lynch (2011) "Crafting the Elastic Self? Gender and
Identities in Senior Appointments in Irish Education." Gender, Work and Organization. 18
(6): 631-649.
Fitzgerald, T. (2011). Troubling leadership? Gender, leadership and higher education. Paper
presented at the AARE Conference. Hobart, Australia, 30 November.
Gronn, P., and Lacey, K. (2006) Cloning their own: Aspirant principals and the school-based
selection game, Australian Journal of Education, 50(2): 102-121.
Grummell, B., Devine, D. and Lynch, K. (2009) ‘The careless manager: gender, care
and new managerialism in higher education. Gender and Education, 21(2): 191–208.
Hey, V. (2011) Affective Asymmetries: academics, austerity and the mis/recognition of
emotion. Contemporary Social Science: Special Issue: Challenge, Change or Crisis in Global
Higher Education 6 (2): 207-222
Husu, L. (2000) Gender discrimination in the promised land of gender equality. Higher
Education in Europe XXV (2): 221-228.
Knights, D. and Kerfoot, D. (2004) Between representations and subjectivity: gender
binaries and the politics of organizational transformation. Gender, Work & Organization, 11
(4): 430–54.
Lynch, K. (2010). Carelessness: A Hidden Doxa of Higher Education CHEER/ ESRC
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3. The Collegial Gaze in Doctoral Supervision
Jannie Roed
Principal Lecturer/ Doctoral student in CHEER
University of West London, UK
Email: Jannie.Roed@uwl.ac.uk
This paper explores the emotional labour involved in doctoral supervision. It focuses on ways
in which institutional regulations and expectations guiding progression and examination in
particular can cause additional emotional labour for supervisors. As doctoral students
progress through their studies, they are required to demonstrate their skills through giving
papers at conferences, contributing to seminars or defending their work in an oral
examination. At such public events it is not only the student who is under scrutiny but also the
supervisor, as a poor performance can reflect negatively on the academic advisor. The paper
is based on interviews with fourteen doctoral supervisors from five UK universities – three
post-92 and two pre-92 institutions – and representing eleven disciplines.
Doctoral education is not only about production of new knowledge. It is also about the
development of individuals and the shaping of new identities. Crossouard (2010) has shown
how the doctoral learning experience has a powerful impact on individuals’ views of
themselves both during their doctoral studies and after they have completed their degree.
Similarly, when exploring motivations among students for pursuing a doctoral degree,
Leonard, Becker and Coate (2005) found that the learning process significantly influenced
identities with regard to students’ self-worth and their professional ambitions. Green
(2005:154) too has described doctoral supervision as a ‘field of identification’, arguing that
the transformational processes taking place in the supervisory space are about negotiating and
re-positioning identities between students and supervisors. Powerful emotional dimensions to
the doctoral learning process are emerging from the students interviewed in all of these
studies.
However, it is not just students’ identities that are shaped or re-positioned through doctoral
studies. Doctoral supervision is far from just being a strategically managed project (Morley
2004). Supervisors, too, may experience strong emotional responses to the supervisory
process which can have an impact on their self-image and identities. Such responses are often
intensified when the supervisory process is exposed to the public gaze, particularly in relation
to progression and examination.
It has been suggested that the audit culture replaces a system based on autonomy and trust by
one where visibility and accountability become paramount (Shore and Wright 2000), and this
has had a profound impact on doctoral supervision. McWilliam (2004) has gone as far as to
argue that the role of the supervisor is no longer to be a mentor or academic advisor. Instead,
supervisors have to function as auditing agents for the university whether they approve of this
or not. This implies that doctoral supervisors invest emotional labour when working with their
students. Morris and Feldman (1996) argue that emotional labour occurs when an
individual’s authentic feelings (what he or she actually feels) are incompatible with what is
required by an organisation.
Hey (2011) has theorised the academic work environment in the current UK government’s
economic austerity agenda in relation to the articulation of affective dimensions of academic
work. With increased competition between higher education institutions and continuous
restructuring within the sector, she argues that it is paramount for academics to focus their
energy on presenting their work in auditable form, because only measurable output matters to
the organisations. More importantly, the author calls for an acknowledgement of the fact that
power is affect-laden and that when discussing emotional labour, the desires that drive power
and the ability to induce certain feelings in other people should be considered (Hey 2011:
212). Seen from this perspective, it is not just the power of line-managers that impact on the
emotional well-being of academics, but also the power of colleagues and students. It seems
that university management relies more than ever on emotional labour being performed by its
staff, but also on academics auditing each other.
In the neo-liberal audit culture which permeates UK universities, doctoral supervision has
become a high-risk business. Universities and doctoral supervisors must ensure that the
students they admit to their doctoral programmes will complete and complete on time.
However, apart from ensuring timely progression and successful completion by their doctoral
students, supervisors also need to maintain their own values and standards in order to protect
their professional reputation and academic identity. In other words, doctoral supervisors must
hold themselves to account as well as being held to account while supervising (Clegg and
Rowland 2010). And throughout the whole process they are under the gaze of their
colleagues. This situation requires doctoral supervisors to negotiate their own supervisory
authenticity continuously.
One of the key pressure points for doctoral supervisors is the oral examination where they
have little control over what happens. Yet, the performance of their students influences how
supervisors are regarded in their professional field. In an Australian study, Holbrook et.al.
(2004) found that when doctoral students performed poorly, examiners tended to blame it on
the supervisor. This is yet another way in which academic colleagues scrutinise the
performance of supervisors.
A key argument in this paper is that some of the measures implemented in UK universities in
order to ensure timely completion for doctoral students can be regarded as ways in which
institutions share or even shift responsibility for the high-risk business of doctoral studies.
Such measures often masquerade as quality assurance initiatives. For example, the QAA
Code of Practice Consultation document which was published in January 2012 states the
importance for doctoral students to have a supervisory team with one principal supervisor as
the point of contact (QAA 2012, Indicator 10). But evidence from my study suggests that
supervising in teams can cause serious distress in supervisors when teams break down or
when personal agendas are played out within teams to the detriment of the least powerful
team member. In addition, Manathunga (2012) has argued that team supervision is yet another
surveillance tool instigated by management to encourage colleagues to evaluate and assess
each other throughout the supervisory process.
The paper is structured around supervisors’ personal stories of working within and around
institutional structures and expectations.
References
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