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Abstract
This study examines the impact of managerialist policies on care relations in higher education. It is based on a study of 10 higher education institutions in Ireland. The paper shows that a care-free worker model is ingrained in systems of performance appraisal, especially for academics in universities, and increasingly in the Institutes of Technology, although it also impacts on support staff in other professions and occupations. It assumes a life of boundary-less working hours and unhindered mobility. The market-informed tools of performance appraisal, especially audits and metrics, cannot measure essential care work because care is a process and disposition, not a product. Because it is not countable caring becomes invisible as do the people who do it. The managerial ideology of ‘work–life balance’ merely operates as a mask that conceals how over-working is normalised. There is no legitimate language to name over-working for the structural problem that it is. When work organisations disregard care commitments outside of work, and even within it, these are then repackaged and fed back to women/carers as personal problems and failures. The idealised care-free worker model operates as a care ceiling over women particularly; it is taken as given, even natural.
Notes on contributors
Kathleen Lynch is Professor Emerita in Equality Studies at University College Dublin where she is also a Full Professor (Adjunct) in the School of Education. She has published many articles and papers on equality, especially equality in education, and on care and social justice. Her co-authored books related to the subject of this paper are: New Managerialism in Education: Commercialisation, Carelessness and Gender (2012, 2015) and Affective Equality: Love, Care and Injustice (2009) (published in Spanish, 2014 and in Korean 2016). She is currently writing a new book on Care and Capitalism due for publication in 2021 (Polity Press, Cambridge).
Mariya Ivancheva is a Lecturer of Higher Education Studies at the University of Liverpool. Her academic work and research-driven advocacy focus on the casualisation and digitalisation of academic labour, the re/production of intersectional inequalities at universities and labour markets, and the role of academic communities in processes of social change, especially during transitions to/from socialism.
Dr Micheál O’Flynn is an independent researcher who has published several academic papers on capitalism and social class issues. He is also the author of Profitable Ideas: The Ideology of the Individual in Capitalist Development (2009) and Marxist Perspectives on Irish Society (ed.) (2011).
Kathryn Keating is a policy researcher with an interest in gender, work and finance. She has researched, taught, and produced policy reports and academic publications around issues of reproductive justice, labour, and care.
Monica O’Connor is a senior researcher at the Sexual Exploitation Research Programme (SERP), School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice, University College Dublin and a Research Fellow at the WiSE Centre for Economic Justice, Glasgow Caledonian University. She has recently published The Sex Economy (2019) with Agenda Publishing U.K. The book challenges the framing of prostitution as a legitimate and acceptable form of work for women that should be legalised and regulated as a normal part of the market economy.
Notes
1 Unfortunately, comparative data for Ireland is not available at time of writing
2 see www.irc-equality.ie
3 Of the six, two were universities, two were institutes and the others were State recognised colleges of higher education.
4 The core study involved 102 interviews Interview schedules were individually developed according to staff roles or functions in the colleges. All interviews were recorded, transcribed, coded and analysed, using Nvivo initially. They were subsequently crosschecked and analysed manually by the research team. Interviews varied considerably in length from 30 min to almost 2 hours.
5 85 of the interviewees were in the four main research colleges, and 17 in 6 other colleges. These 17 were strategically chosen for their knowledge of equality-related policies in their universities and colleges.
6 Figure A2.1 of the Cassells Report (2016) shows the drop in core State income to higher education for the period 2008–2015: government funding fell from 73% of higher education income in 2008 to 52% in 2015; this represents a drop of 21%. At the same time Figure A2.2 shows student intake increased by 25% to over 190,000 in 2015 from just over 150,000 in 2008. While student fees increased substantially over that time and now represents 22% of income compared with just under 5% in 2008, nonetheless, it does not compensate for the increased intake as higher education income overall declined from just over 1.9billion in 2008 to 1.8 billion in 2015.