The Effective Academic Executive

Abstract

As Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland from 2000–2012, Graeme Turner led one of the longest running research investments in Cultural Studies' history. Holding these threads together, in conjunction with the sheer hard work of Centre affiliates and administrators, was an exemplary management style. Turner's brand of Cultural Studies is defined by an attention to the art and politics of management alongside the customary business of doing research. It is Cultural Studies' lack of engagement with management theory that has made this type of work difficult to appreciate, even while it is just this kind of engagement that is necessary to ensure the survival of the field. Acknowledging the significance of Turner's management politics, its relevance to his broader intellectual project, and its importance for the field of Cultural Studies more broadly, this paper pays tribute to a leader whose career demands a more nuanced vocabulary for institutional work within and outside the university.

Keywords:

• Australian Cultural Studies
• Graeme Turner
• management
• academic labour
• leadership
• organization

As Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Queensland from 2000–2012, Graeme Turner led one of the longest running research investments in Cultural Studies' history. Countless numbers of students, researchers and administrators benefited from this effort, and as a research fellow at the Centre from 2004–2008, I am one of them. The CCCS is a unique organizational accomplishment in Australian academia. Its open intellectual mandate fostered a new generation of internationally regarded scholars in areas as varied as Asia-Pacific popular culture, Internet studies, cultural history, anthropology, media studies, critical theory, disability studies, science and technology studies and international communication. Holding these threads together, in conjunction with the sheer hard work of the Centre's affiliates and administrators, has been Turner's exemplary management style. His role as a mentor and keen institutional operator is a combination as crucial as it is rare. Turner's brand of Cultural Studies is defined by an attention to the art and politics of management alongside the customary business of doing research. It is Cultural Studies' lack of engagement with management theory that has made this type of work difficult to appreciate. The political registers that have dominated the field often show suspicion if not outright indignation towards the business of administration and management. This allergic reaction constitutes an anti-intellectualism that at times rivals the very snobbery Cultural Studies initially set out to oppose.¹ To begin to improve this situation, and create a more nuanced vocabulary for institutional work within and outside the university, this paper acknowledges the significance of Turner's management politics, its relevance to his broader intellectual project and its importance for the field of Cultural Studies more broadly.

Cultural Studies' aversion to management theory is surprising given its impact on universities, which stand as the key location of practice for the field. Critical analysis of management discourse largely takes place in Business Schools and the discipline of Organizational Studies, with its own rigorous tradition of publication. Emerging subfields such as Critical Management Studies, and theories of organization from a worker's perspective (the journal ephemera or conferences like Computer Supported Cooperative Work) often show affinities with the labourist traditions typical of early (British) Cultural Studies, even if scholars are not often in contact with each other. Management theory is of course part of the broader landscape for criticism in analyses of university life more generally, from Bill Readings' (1997) The University in Ruins to Mary Evans' (2004) Killing Thinking. If these publications address the consequences of management practices on the university institution as a whole, Cultural Studies remains overdue for a mode of engagement that is fitting the experience of our discipline and its strengths.

Those closest to accounts of management theory I am seeking typically identify as sociologists, whether in the case of Paul Du Gay's (2000) defence of bureaucracy or Nigel Thrift's Knowing Capitalism (2005). In different ways, these writers identify the structural transformations taking place in knowledge institutions over the course of several decades. Both recognize that changes to organizations necessarily involve changes to people, and the kinds of subjectivities that are valued and rewarded by formal incentives. Building on these efforts, I want to extend this principle to outline some of the benefits of a more substantial engagement with management theory in Cultural Studies. Following Turner's example, as managers Cultural Studies academics can regard their work in the university as part of a broader ethics, one that puts service to the field on equal footing with individual research progress. This is an important strategy of accumulation, consolidation and defence in the face of growing tendencies towards auditing and accountability that pit academics against each other. In addition, I suggest that as scholars, Cultural Studies academics might use their technical skills to produce a more aggressive response to the mandates underwriting their experience, to question common-sense thinking. The more open form of address I will advocate below is intended to bring transparency to the sometimes overly inflated and fantastical discourses of efficiency and impact that are applied to university work.

The occasion of a festschrift offers a moment to assess what is at stake in any discipline. For Cultural Studies, a reluctance to engage critically and coherently with management theory and practice risks a naiveté in the forms of institutional politics that are required to ensure there is a field to defend in years to come. A certain blindness to the idea of treating scholarly work as work is one factor that prevents much reflexivity amongst academics implicated in wider structural forces that clearly include managerial trends (Gill 2009, Gregg 2009a, 2011). As Andrew Ross (2000) argued over a decade ago, academics' ‘sacrificial labour’ provides a useful model upon which the exploitation of discounted labour in other creative industries can be legitimated. Today, it is the content as much as the temporality of labour that constitutes academics' contribution to the knowledge economy. ‘Knowing capitalism’ depends on ever greater transfer and traffic between public and private research institutions. As Thrift (2005, p. 33) convincingly argues, ‘social theory now has a direct line to capitalism’: this is simply the business of innovation in the global economy and the university's role therein. But what would it mean to bring the theories of capitalism to the attention of Cultural Studies, to reverse this move? What critical insights might flow from a direct encounter with the popular pedagogy of management?²

Many readers will note that my title borrows from the 1966 book, The Effective Executive, by the icon of management theory, Peter Drucker. One of the world's leading ‘management gurus' (Huczynski 2006), Drucker epitomizes the can-do ethos of corporate America and a genre of motivational business thinking dating back at least as far as the Depression. Drucker's advice in The Effective Executive captures techniques of entrepreneurial self-management suited to new kinds of professionals navigating the instability of work in large corporations (Kanter 1993). The book's opening lines are a memorable reflection of its simple premise:

Whether he works in a business or in a hospital, in a government agency or in a labour union, in a university or in the army, the executive is, first of all, expected to get the right things done. And this is simply saying that he is expected to be effective. (Drucker 1966, p. 1)

This passage isolates the unique qualities of the superior manager: the results-oriented executive. It also captures many of the expectations bestowed upon Turner by colleagues, as I will illustrate in more detail shortly. Drucker rode the wave of publishing and marketing opportunity that emerged in tandem with the rise of the corporation and the growing discipline of management studies. In the barrage of self-help publishing that accompanied the growth of this influential class, Drucker is simply the tip of the iceberg, part of a billowing genre of extra-curricular guidance. These manuals for time- and self-management were the domestic variety of management theories championed in more formal avenues and teaching institutions, from scientific management to human relations, to theories of chaos and flux (Crainer and Dearlove 1999, Thrift 2005). Drucker's symbolic role in the broader repertoire of post-Fordist business practice is immense. Focusing specifically on the mindset of the manager, he offered the tools and reassurance to prove that ‘effectiveness can be learned’. These maxims served as popular counsel for a generation of newly minted middle-managers seeking viable authority and tactics as much as a paycheck. Recognizing this history is useful background for understanding the kinds of professional subjectivity taken for granted in universities today, and the modes of performance that are taken as common sense.

My recourse to Drucker is intended as a gesture to suit a Cultural Studies approach to management, given that the field has always taken popular phenomena as generative of vernacular theory. In the case of Graeme Turner's formative work (e.g. Turner 1986, Fiske et al. 1987, Turner and Tulloch 1990), this is especially the case – as we will see, the battle to secure the viability of teaching popular culture provided much of Turner's early university experience. Bringing Cultural Studies traditions and methods to bear on management theory recognizes the industrial significance of their precepts as much as their ideological function. As du Gay writes:

these discourses of work reform arise in specific political contexts, and have potential consequences, but they are not merely functional responses to, or legitimations of, already existing economic interests or needs. Rather than simply reflecting a pre-given social world, they themselves actively ‘make up’ a social reality and create new ways for people to be at work. (du Gay in Thrift 2005, p. 39)

Against this version of reality, this essay combines Drucker's advice to readers with classic mentoring tips from Turner that have proven routinely useful in my own career. This fusion of academic and business history with ‘anecdotal theory’ (Gallop 2002, Morris 2006) is offered as one response to the complex forces affecting employee subjectivity in this phase of capitalism. Cultural Studies' methods are characteristically partial (Frow and Morris 1993). Invoking the personal alongside an account of management theory provides empirical context for and materiality to the various pressures faced by academics. It also points to shifts in organizational behaviour that have taken place as ideals of professional instruction suited to a pre-Internet bureaucratic life (and Cultural Studies' institutional beginnings) give way to the chronically connected, hyper-informed, data determined workplaces of the present. It is these conditions that pose new kinds of threat to academic practice, whether it is at the level of our minds or bodies (Barcan 2013) or the ideas of civic good that drove Cultural Studies in the past. It is in these fraught circumstances that scholars must continue to find an operational ethics and for which Turner's career offers an instructive example.

The poverty of management theory

Cultural Studies' aversion to management theory is understandable within the field's British lineage, which always had a distinct anti-capitalist bent.³ Figures like Raymond Williams balanced the radicalism of projects like the May Day Manifesto with the established traditions of Trinity College, following formative teaching experiences in Workers Education Association classes. Intellectuals of the first New Left – EP Thompson (1978) and Perry Anderson (1980) among them – famously argued over any engagement with theory as the appeal of Althusserian Marxism took hold. Suggesting that Cultural Studies should engage with the tenets of management might therefore appear as a perverse extension of this heritage. To tease out this possibility further, though, we can discern an alternative path for a Cultural Studies of management if we place Turner in sympathy with another British Cultural Studies pioneer, Richard Hoggart, author of The Uses of Literacy (1957) and founder of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (BCCCS). Hoggart brokered the initial investment from Sir Allen Lane of Penguin Books that led to the establishment of the Centre with additional funding from Chatto and The Observer (Lee 2003, p. 75). Moving to Birmingham to take a Professorship of Modern English Literature, Hoggart cited a sense of responsibility to create an institutional foundation for the values espoused in his groundbreaking book. Directorship of the BCCCS only moved to Stuart Hall when Hoggart moved to Paris for a position with UNESCO. Factoring in his later stint as Warden of Goldsmiths College, Hoggart's career is a portrait of public service. His life's work enacted a belief in defending the dignity and empathy of working-class people, the universal right to a cultural and intellectual life (Owen 2008).

There are few better descriptions of a bureaucratic worldview than that contained in the title of Hoggart's memoir of his time at UNESCO, An Idea and its Servants (1978). Turner's record of institutional work fits this mold, albeit with a distinctly antipodean bent. His experiences as a student in Australia, the UK and Canada established a belief in a public service model of education and a vision of university life with little nostalgia for the aristocracy of the sandstone campus.⁴ As an academic, Turner's management style fused the service ethos of the bureaucrat with the performance emphasis of the executive. He took seriously the responsibilities of office, especially in the roles that came later in his career: as CCCS Director, President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and leader of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Cultural Research Network. Each of these leadership positions carried an interest in regenerating the disciplinary areas with which Turner shared allegiance. They ensured the material and affective infrastructure necessary to support a continuing community of scholars. At a time of success for Cultural Studies and other New Humanities disciplines, Turner focused on the long game. Securing funding was only the start of the job: the further step was to see every victory as a bastion to be guarded and defended from later attack. When many Cultural Studies academics took the critique of neoliberal economics as a priority – its impact on funding for universities serving as just cause – indeed, at a time when working with government was out of favour with his peers (see Frow 2006), Turner's determined dialogue with management advanced the organizational front needed to win institutional space for others. While aspects of his style were certainly unique (his fondness for colourful language being one), the amount of effort Turner dedicated to improving and finessing the skills needed to advance Cultural Studies' success should not be underestimated. Following Drucker, this work can be regarded as the discipline of learning to be effective.

Life at the CCCS, or, how to be a research manager

The effective executive focuses on contribution. He looks up from his work and outward towards goals. He asks: What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve? His stress is on responsibility. (Drucker 1966, p. 54)

According to Drucker (1966, pp. 24–25), effective executives:

• know where their time goes

• focus on outward contribution

• build on strengths

• concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results

• make effective decisions.

Turner illustrated all of these qualities as CCCS Director. Time management, for instance, was his true forte. Few people would be able to remember Graeme ever being late for anything. Punctuality is a deceptive skill. It is a measure of leadership to be able to protect others from knowledge of the many competing demands on one's time. Graeme maintained a remarkable rate of publication and grant-based success throughout the CCCS years – key measures of his ‘outward contribution’ – in addition to the many roles he occupied for the university. Yet he always had time for a friendly chat when it was needed. As junior scholars, struggling to balance the new expectations and duties expected of us, Graeme gave us simple techniques to stay on course, including pragmatic advice on how to say no and decline offers politely. The phrase: ‘I'm sorry, I'm fully committed’ is the elusive and magical sentence he introduced to me early on, as a simple default response to an impossible request. It was only later that I would learn just how few academics seemed capable of imagining such a statement.

Graeme's tips for navigating meetings were another revelation. They included establishing pre-determined departure times and communicating them with organizers in advance (even if the reason for departing may have been a slight distortion!). ‘Getting the right things done’ (Drucker 1966, p. 1) meant taking a ruthless approach to pure administrative process. Avoiding time-sapping meetings required deliberate strategies: ordering agenda items according to importance, working behind the scenes before the event, and being prepared to walk out of conversations that veered from accomplishing goals.

In the CCCS itself, the secret to ongoing success was to ‘concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results’. This is one way to explain the substantial publishing record and grant-winning success the Centre enjoyed for over a decade. Like its neighbour in the Forgan Smith Tower – the Centre for the History of European Discourses the CCCS punched above its weight in terms of funding acquired and spent. Put another way, the Centre operated according to the Human Resources truism: ‘people are our most valuable asset’. Researchers were not required to uphold Graeme's personal intellectual project. Fellows were selected based on the quality of their work on merit, regardless of theoretical or disciplinary specialty. The freedom to explore and compose a path of one's own made the Centre a highly supportive and unique environment. Without the mandate of a singular conceptual agenda or programme, it was not surprising that colleagues referred to my workplace as simply ‘Graeme's Centre’. The perception that Graeme was the driving force is a reflection of the personal interest he took in establishing the institution and close working relationships with those who joined it. Once Graeme decided to support someone, it was really only a matter of faculty politics as to whether the person was funded. Of course, it is the point of this paper to explain why, when these battles were fought, so many times he won.

Graeme's leadership had multiple benefits. As an experienced university administrator, he protected postdoctoral scholars from the currents of institutional pressure, separating the research experience from the logistical work of reporting, lobbying and leadership. He created a space for sympathetic collegiality, an experience best captured in the simple format of the monthly staff meeting. In these get-togethers, administrators, junior researchers and professors all shared updates, opinions and DIY catering, making matters of hierarchy and status temporarily irrelevant. Graeme enacted in these gestures his own egalitarian hopes for the university as a community of democratic participation. It would only occur to me many years later, in international universities with far greater capacities to bestow rewards on the highly ranked, that I realized the significance of this perspective. The God Professor of the Anglo-American academy would rarely lower himself to the trivia of organizing tea and biscuits.

The CCCS enabled a privileged group of scholars a cocoon from the more contentious and messy reality of academic and departmental politics. The Centre's research-only mandate put emphasis on value for money: contracts of three to four years were timed to capitalize on the productivity and ambition of researchers at the early stage of their career. These positions allowed precious time for experimentation and the refinement of ideas needed to generate useful, topical research. The CCCS gave support and space for scholars to consolidate their viability in an increasingly demanding outside job market. If this protection had downsides, however, it was that few of us had enough exposure to the full assault of institutional politics that would take place in the inevitable transition to other jobs. Our time as postdocs separated us physically and intellectually from the classroom conditions of teaching, for instance, and some of the larger changes to academic labour affecting others.⁵ The difference in working locations was more than just a question of pace – how to juggle teaching in relation to writing and fieldwork – it was also a matter of reconfiguring access and availability to a much larger pool of people. Research fellows are encouraged to believe that writing is the main route available to prove their worth to an audience or a public. As a teacher, indeed in almost any other knowledge profession, the reality of a job's impact is more localized. The audience for your ideas comes down to earth.⁶

Leaving the Centre meant coming to terms with a teaching and research environment defined by new technologies of availability. In my experience, this included catching on to a constant stream of communication from students and co-workers through email, online courseware and social media. Colleagues who were largely invisible in corridors or offices would have no trouble emailing endless amounts of requests, updates and messages at all times of the day and night. Meanwhile, those with whom I shared most day-to-day contact were non-continuing, contract-dependent students and administrators. These were dear colleagues, to be sure, and their contribution to the delivery of undergraduate teaching was essential to the success of the department. I found it hard to reckon with the reality that these talented young professionals worked such long hours in course organization, student counselling, preparation and evaluation but had little say in shaping the curriculum, or developing the long-term identity of a department or school. The phantom of job security haunted their efforts.⁷ For all of us, teaching administration meant keeping abreast of a myriad of tasks imposed by automated deadlines and reminder bots from software packages designed to normalize screen-based interaction. These systems worked together to create a scenario where even face-to-face teaching involved obligatory and repetitive online content, optimized for remote consumption (McKay and Brass 2011).

Ad hoc academics

The decade in which the CCCS first flourished, then, coincided with key management tendencies that affected the material work of Cultural Studies. The uptake of new communication technologies, the intensification of productivity measures, the packaging of higher education for an international export market and the embrace of interdisciplinarity are just some of these decisions that impacted the character of university life and teaching. The growing numbers of Ph.D. graduates available as a cheap labour pool set up a parasitic relationship between employers seeking to deliver courses flexibly and workers whose insecure positions fostered compliance. The further effect of this split in responsibility for undergraduate instruction was the acceleration of performance metrics for teaching, research and service, with consequences for their possible compatibility.

Ruth Barcan (2013) usefully describes this setting as a ‘palimpsest’ university: an institution operating as a vaguely corresponding copy of its original vision; a finite shell of its former self. On the surface, the academic professoriate continues to embody the hopes and traditions of higher education, but a fundamental tension exists between the scholarly and corporate ethos espoused by management. ‘The servant of too many masters’, Barcan writes, ‘academics must not only submit themselves to the exigencies of each regime’ but also ‘maintain life in a number of different systems simultaneously’ (Barcan 2013, p. 121). It ‘is not so much that a new paradigm has succeeded an older one’, but that academics are ‘trying to uphold the values and practices of an older regime at the same time’ (Barcan 2013). Academics are thus invited to take individual responsibility for smoothing out the contradictions inherent to large, bureaucratic organizations. Successful employees are those able to become self-managing subjects, or what I term, drawing from Jencks and Silver (2013/1972), ‘ad hoc’ professionals.

Ad hoc professionals use what is to hand to cobble together the affective and technical infrastructure for career continuity and success. These highly qualified but precariously employed workers engage in expansive forms of immaterial labour (Gorz 2010). These off-the-clock, self-sought and self-taught strategies are targeted at producing a professional subjectivity able to withstand the management requirement for ‘flexibility’. If the shift to performative professionalism is central to ‘the new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski and Chiappello 2005), it is especially prevalent in the world of contemporary academia, where the autonomous work culture long cherished by tenured faculty often leads to irregular hours with few defined limits. In the context of highly mediated work worlds, however, where collegiality is so often defined by presence in an inbox, this experience has the potential to be intensely individual (Gregg 2011). For academics, the combined impact of non-continuing jobs, online course offerings, remote work and management by email is the psychological challenge posed by ad hoc professionalism.

As Barcan (2013, p. 113) notes of academia: ‘we have witnessed a shift from an era where professionalism meant that one could be trusted to one in which professionalism means that one is obliged to provide regular evidence of one's activity and one's competence’.

Not only do we do our work, we also do substantial forms of ‘meta-work’ (Fisher 2011, p. 127), such as asking for work (e.g. grant applications); creating and maintaining the conditions in which to do work (learning new software; dealing with computer problems; technical in-servicing); reporting on work (to our managers, to the government, to external stakeholders); updating our public profile; and undertaking other forms of professional development (e.g. mandatory courses on equity in the workplace, intercultural sensitivity and so on). (Barcan 2013, p. 125)

This ‘hyperemployment’ (Bogost 2013) risks becoming an all-consuming project for today's aspiring professionals, leaving little energy or ‘hope’ for the alternative work and lifestyles Barcan endorses. As Turner (2012, p. 172), acknowledges, in the final pages of What's Become of Cultural Studies?, this has particular significance for young people entering the industry:

new academics are often given unrealistic targets for their output and their impact; they are required to become well published almost immediately upon completing the apprenticeship of the PhD; and the oppression of the performance indicator or the unpredictability of the tenure process requires them to continually monitor their progress in ways their predecessors rarely had to do, let alone at such an early stage in their careers. Senior academics in the field have a duty of care to these young people to provide advice and mentoring so that they might successfully manage their relation to their institution. In general, there is not a lot of evidence that this duty has either been accepted or discharged. Largely, the young researcher is left to deal with their anxieties alone. (Turner 2012)

Turner's take on the competitive nature of the high-performance university is welcome recognition of the changing circumstances for Cultural Studies' practice. It is further evidence of the need to understand the management principles serving to encourage and reward particular subjective states within organizations. One way of approaching this is to consider the difference between today's measures for professional relevance and those of Cultural Studies' beginnings. Turner offered just this kind of history lesson in a keynote address to the State of the Industry conference in Sydney in 2009 – an occasion when the working conditions for cultural research took centre stage. In an effort to assuage the career angst of his young colleagues, and in a gesture that underscored the shared concern that this vital network for sharing experience and research across generations was coming to an end, Turner took the uncharacteristic move of offering his own experience as evidence in his remarks. I quote these details at some length here, as this speech has never been published:

I took my first academic job in 1971. I was 24. When I started, I was not asked to undergo performance appraisals or report against key performance indicators, raise interest in my research from industry partners or end users, submit research grant applications, address university requirements for community engagement, set out a research program, or indeed publish. Universities were not businesses, they were organized around disciplinary departments, and salaries had just been boosted by the Whitlam government. Over the first three years of my academic career my salary trebled.

I was, though, teaching 16 hours a week in a CAE where very few of the staff had active research interests and where the delivery of the teaching program was the only thing on anybody's mind. The disciplines in which I was later to build my career – cultural and media studies – did not exist. Until they did, I was told that I could do research in these areas if I wanted, but I could not teach in them. Those of my colleagues who had completed a PhD more or less stopped researching after that was done. (Turner 2009, n.p.)

This passage is emblematic of Turner in its modest attention to empirical details. Any benefits he enjoys as a new academic are placed in cultural and historical context, with salaries and research guidelines linked to government policy and fluctuations in management practice. The priorities for Cultural Studies practice could hardly have changed more with the passing of time. For today's wanna-be academics, the Ph.D. is only the beginning of a lifelong exercise in research performance. A ‘career’ is less a carriage through the stages of life, as in the original meaning of the term, but an effort to build reliable correlations between the expectation of ongoing employment and the stylistic illustration of activity. In documents that attend funding and promotion applications, researchers are only as good as their last three years. Incentive structures pivot on proving excellence across teaching, research and service roles. In the national funding pool, publication activity is quantified by timeliness as much as disciplinary impact. Researchers cannot trade-off past glories or become complacent in their achievements.

There is much to lament about these changes, but Turner's reflections give us pause for consideration. The fact that the imperatives for demonstrable academic success have changed so much in the course of a few decades is proof that with further changes in management fashion, these measures will only change again. What's more, in the long view regularly adopted by Turner, one can acknowledge the substantial accomplishment that there are now Cultural Studies grant categories to apply for, and teaching and research jobs that provide the possibility of employment. It was Turner's generation that turned these previously inconceivable opportunities into expectations for others.

The larger concern for Cultural Studies is the extent to which the field has become ‘among the Humanities disciplines where everyday practice has become increasingly professionalized, strategic and institutionally oriented’ (Turner 2012, p. 172). For Turner (2012, p. 10), ‘the principles of privatization, entrepreneurialism and individualism are anathema … to cultural studies thinking’ since they threaten the Humanities' role of producing skills and qualities directed towards defending the public good for its own sake. If some elements of neoliberal economic reform have been less problematic for Turner – the growing number of accountability instruments applied to scholarly work, for instance – this is because they can be used to show evidence of Cultural Studies' impact and success. Among Humanities academics, Turner has been a vocal supporter of methods that can help to demonstrate the value of Cultural Studies research, especially in relation to more established disciplines that traditionally traded cultural cache for patronage. Among other things, the rise of audit culture enabled powerful claims for resources.

Spending time with ‘The Suits' did not come naturally to Graeme. He dislikes corporate culture's macho self-importance as much as he hates the ostentatious elitism of the traditional university. He is typically unimpressed by overt trappings of power and as CCCS Director he minimized participation in ‘after hours' networking events that mixed business with leisure. This latter was partly a hangover from his time as a Chair of the Department of English, where avoiding the wrath of angry colleagues was a necessary form of self-defence. But it was also an example to others that it is possible to reject parts of corporate culture that do not conform to personal principles.

Engaging with management thinking was however a key part of Turner's armoury of perseverance, empathy and foresight in shaping a research and disciplinary agenda. This sophisticated political manoeuvring has often been misrecognized as simple advocacy or government lobbying at best, a surrender to administration at worst. An alternative view is to see this as a multifaceted engagement with the instruments of control in a managerial culture focused solely on results. Turner bore witness to new modes of management in his rise through the ranks of the university. Taking these changes seriously meant coming to terms with the challenge of providing evidence to protect himself and others as the rules of the game changed. Turner's attention to the art of management enabled him to be proactive as a research leader – always looking to be on the front foot – meeting the touchstones for performance required of a university governed by shifting metrics for ‘excellence’ (Readings 1997).

The rules of the game

At each university, at each stage of his teaching and research career, Turner embarked on the dogged political work of figuring out the levers to power and where these were open for debate. As he relates in interview:

I’ve perhaps been more naturally interested in how the structures in the university system work, how they change, what they enable when they change, and how to work the system to make use of what it enables each time. And in my case, I really needed to know this stuff because every job I took involved setting up cultural studies from scratch in an institution that didn’t really want it, and where there was no space for it. So the politics of that are institutional politics. And I just got pretty good at it, I guess, because I did it so many times (Turner in King 2010, pp. 152–153).

These comments highlight the variations of power and agency that are available within large organizations if management is taken as a legitimate outlet for political acumen. They show how Cultural Studies techniques – of identifying sources of power, of searching for openings – can be used to advance an agenda. As Turner elaborates:

I like seeing how the political power works in an institution and then seeing how you can make it work for you. I haven’t set out to become the Vice Chancellor or anything like that. I don’t find that interesting. I’m not interested in a career in administration; I’m interested in how the system works so I can use it. Ever since I decided Cultural Studies was my main interest, my project really has been to develop it in Australia and protect its interests once it was developed. That's what I’ve done. (Turner in King 2010, pp.152–153)

For an international audience, this helps to situate the significance of Turner's political battles on campus, and the sheer will that drove his engagement with management structures of the university. Turner pressed the cause for Cultural Studies from the ground up: it was a local political practice that responded to the needs of his field and his colleagues in periods of persistent institutional pressure (see Byron 2015). While it was not a role he sought – Turner maintains a healthy Australian disdain for the stuffy elitism he perceives in the role of ‘Vice Chancellor’ and the like – it is a duty to which he responded given the needs of the field and the principles he sought to maintain. The role of bureaucrat came naturally because of his unwavering belief in the value of the university as a public good.

That Turner did this while management trends were moving swiftly to enshrine the logic of competitive individualism is a compelling and – in Barcan's (2013) terms – hopeful story. For every success Graeme enjoyed that may have been seen as a personal accomplishment, there were always opportunities for others attached. This has been a feature of his recent role as a Federation Fellow at the University of Queensland, which attracted multiple postdoctoral positions for young scholars, and was a notable strength of the ARC Cultural Research Network Turner led for five years from 2005–2009. One of the reasons Turner continues to be so fondly admired, I suggest, is that his victories have tended to translate as collective triumphs. Turner's ability to deliver results at both ends of the academic political spectrum – the level of institutional influence and the sharing of winnings upon success – has been an effective counter the individualizing dimensions enshrined in the performance management measures favoured by university administrators.

In praise of organization

For Cultural Studies to deny the role of management in determining its fate is to accept a certain hysteria over the question of organization.⁸ It omits recognition of the field's ultimate endorsement by many universities as much as it shirks responsibility for maintaining investment in a project that would prefer to consider itself radical. ‘Once our place in the higher education establishment has been secured … it becomes implausible to continue to indulge in fantasies of our independence from that formulation’ Turner writes (2012, p. 66). Avoiding outright confrontation with management discourse has led to a separation between Cultural Studies' theory and everyday practice. Disappointingly, given the field's history, it has often meant a purely tactical approach to labour politics: a culture of complaint and withdrawal, a decline in union activism and a process of inward retreat and isolation.

Turner's willingness to contest and negotiate management dictates is a mode of professional perseverance only few contemporaries in Australian Cultural Studies have matched or followed.⁹ As I have implied, this reluctance is partly due to the changing nature of academic employment, where the experience of collegiality is placed under strain by short-term contracts, competition for security and results-oriented resource rewards. If university managers move their core business from the provision of higher education as a civic service, Turner's style of bureaucratic manoeuvring will prove difficult to replicate in future. But his example shows that a corporate emphasis and an engagement with management are not necessarily detrimental to Cultural Studies' renewal and continued flourishing.

As Drucker (1966, p. 57) explains, ‘every organization needs performance in three major areas: it needs direct results; building of values and their reaffirmation; and building and developing people for tomorrow’. In Turner, Cultural Studies benefited from a leader who excelled across these three areas. His work was consistently results-oriented, both in his own research and in the advice he gave to others. His belief in the value of the university played out in his indefatigable service and in the areas he chose to publish and comment. His stewardship of the CCCS delivered a systematic investment in the future generation of scholars, ‘building and developing people for tomorrow’. In these ways, he was clearly an effective academic executive.¹⁰

In speaking of the palimpsest university, Barcan admits that while the demands of scholarly and corporate life are not the same, they can ‘work in concert with each other’ (Barcan 2013, p. 108). For a protracted time, Turner has been maestro of this concert. He conducted the art of management in such a way as to prove that administration was not a surrender to power but a creative process of channelling resources that can equip others to organize. If Turner's particular blend of the bureaucratic ethos with the deliverables of the executive worked well for his term as a research director, the question it raises for others is whether the same solutions will suit the university to come (Edu-Factory Collective 2009, Rogerro 2011). As a field, we are challenged by Graeme's legacy to work together to influence the terms of our own management, especially so that no one individual carries the responsibility for the field and its forward momentum. The model of service underpinning Turner's contribution produced an ironic counter-effect. As an institutional warrior, he mastered ‘the rules of the game’ for others' benefit. But the very success of Turner's advocacy, and the quiet determination he applied to mastering these techniques, protected many of his peers and subordinates from learning these same skills for themselves. Following Graeme, we must address this deficit and tackle management ‘common sense’ (Gramsci 1971) with all of the resources our disciplinary heritage provides. Ad hoc professionals turn to each other for support to withstand the turbulent conditions of work in the knowledge industries, to find methods for succeeding in spite of them. We may not all seek to be executives, but collectively we can be effective.

Notes on Contributor

Melissa Gregg is a Principal Engineer at Intel Corporation studying the future of work. Her publications include Work's Intimacy (Polity 2011), The Affect Theory Reader (co-edited with Gregory J. Seigworth, Duke 2010) and the forthcoming Counterproductive (Duke). Before joining Intel, Melissa was on faculty in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney (2009–2013) following successive postdoctoral fellowships at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland (2004–2008).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A former Cultural Studies Department Chair offered this perspective in a discussion of this paper in earlier form. I would like to maintain confidentiality of the author as the comment appeared on a private social media page.

2 This paper draws on a more extensive account of management theory and the rise of productivity thinking to be published in Gregg (forthcoming).

3 For the purposes of this essay, I am limiting my account of Cultural Studies history to the tradition that Turner adopted and helpfully explained to so many students in his definitive overview text, British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (2002).

4 He was equally disdainful of the commercial mindset that threatened the quality of already existing degree programmes. His critique of digital media and creative industries courses in later writing (Turner 2012) came from the basis that they were market-driven, erasing traditional values of Humanities education and threatening the civic purpose of the university.

5 Conscious of this split, in 2008 Graeme Turner, Mark Andrejevic and I offered a graduate course for UQ Masters and Ph.D. students combining our shared research interests. My own position at the CCCS from 2004–2006 was an exception to the typical three-year, research-only postdoc. Funding for my fellowship included a 25 percent share with the School of English, Media Studies and Art History, providing valuable lecturing, tutoring, convening and marking experience with undergraduates at various stages in their degree.

6 As a corporate researcher I often explain this as the major shift in perspective that a transition to industry work brings: the audience for your writing and communication typically narrows to the company, and by implication, the industry. Depending on the size of the company, this can mean a smaller or larger impact than university teaching and research.

7 The period I describe here, from 2009 to 2012, gave rise to a number of conversations about the experience of so-called casual or ‘sessional’ teachers in Australia, including the State of the Industry conference mentioned later in this article. This event was a collective effort with a team of colleagues – Clif Evers, Emily Potter, Fergus Grealy and Graeme Turner, among others – shepherding participation from 40 speakers across 20 universities nationwide. See Gregg (2009b). Following this event, public discussion of precarious academic work conditions and the consequences of online course offerings has been a feature of Australian blogs such as Music for Deckchairs (http://musicfordeckchairs.wordpress.com), the website of University of Wollongong academic Kate Bowles and landmark publications such as Whelan et al.'s (2013) Zombies in the Academy: Living Death in Higher Education.

8 This argument arises from helpful conversations with Mark Hayward.

9 Ien Ang, Tony Bennett, Stuart Cunningham, John Hartley, Ian Hunter, Elspeth Probyn, Krishna Sen and Mandy Thomas were just some of Turner's fellow travellers securing the institutional ground for Australian Cultural Studies research in the period I worked at the CCCS (2004–2008).

10 Of course, the executive world envisioned by Drucker and many of his contemporaries was a male-dominated domain with few female leaders. The challenge of creating a university work culture that values women as managers is something the present generation of Cultural Studies practitioners needs to overcome. It has not been pleasing to see so many inspiring female peers leave the University of Queensland in recent years for better working conditions. On women's experience as university managers, see Deem and Ozga (1997). On the proportion of Australian female academics in low-rung precarious academic employment as opposed to leadership positions, see Welch (2012).