Lost souls? The demoralization of academic labour in the measured university

ABSTRACT

In this conceptual paper, I contend that the soul of academic labour is becoming lost in performativity. Performativity, I explain, is a form of regulation and control that deploys technical rationality and judgements to incentivize and punish academics. Indeed, performativity is central to the culture of measurement within contemporary universities. This, I contend, is demoralizing academic labour as performativity only measures and values those dimensions of academic labour that can be captured by quantitative performance indicators. To critique this process, I firstly locate performativity within a moral economy perspective. I argue that the university economy is no longer structured by the moral norm of education as a public good. It has been restructured, commodified and marketized by neo-liberal capitalism. Secondly, I explore how the reorganization of institutional practices and academic identity within the university by performativity wreaks terror in the academic’s soul. Thirdly, I critique the unsatisfying post-structural reduction of the soul to a synonym for subjectivity and offer a sociological conception of the soul as the spiritual dimension of academic labour emerging from deep, rich social relations of production. My conjecture is that the soul is the moral energy and purpose central to species-being: the peculiarly human ability to transform the socio-human world for the good of all. Finally, I suggest that within the soulless technical measure of academic labour that now dominates the university lies the possibility for developing a more soulful normative measure. My aim then is to articulate a dialectical humanist conception of the soul of academic labour in order to critique the reductive positivism of the measured university.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic labour
• dialectical humanism
• performativity
• soul
• species-being

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the reviewers and the editor for their critical constructive feedback. Such a rigorous but humane collegial review process is in itself a negation of the negation of de-moralizing performativity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a detailed discussion of the Marxian concepts of abstract and concrete labour and the associated concepts of use and exchange value, see Sutton (2016b).

2. See also Markovic (1974, pp. 73–74) who states that: ‘One of the most distinctive characteristics of man (sic) is his creativity. In contrast to all other living beings man constantly evolves his tools, his methods of work, his needs, his objectives, his criteria of evaluation.’ Part of the purpose of this paper is to begin to explore the possibilities of alternatives to performative criteria of the evaluation of academic labour.

3. On the dialectical nature of cognition in Marxist Humanism, see Kosik (1976, Chapter 1).

4. In Bottomore’s popular translation of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Fromm, 2011), the term ‘spiritual’ is translated as ‘mental’. Yet, in Kosik (1976) and Marx (1997) translated by Easton and Guddat, the term spiritual is used. This does raise interesting questions concerning the politics of interpretation. In my endeavour to put the metaphysical back into Marxism, I find the latter translation more sympathetic.

5. Kosik (1976) defines dialectics as a form of critical thinking that attempts to understand and explain the human being’s place in the universe by penetrating beneath surface appearances to the essence of phenomena. Dialectical thinking understands socio-human reality as a structured but evolving whole.