Surviving the performance management of academic work: evidence from young Chinese academics

ABSTRACT

Despite predominant macro-level changes of performance management at Chinese universities, little attention has been paid to how the disciplinary technologies have been interpreted and enacted at the level of individual academics. Using qualitative data with 26 participants at a Chinese research university, this study provides evidence of collective compliance with the performative imperatives. The study indicates that tacit compliance has been reinforced through the coercive powers of reward, punishment, and bureaucratization and consolidated through the normative influences of the Chinese Confucian culture and subjectification via creating new notions of ‘academic success’. Moreover, the process of perverse learning, during which opportunistic behaviors are taken to ‘play the game’, has contributed to the emergence of performance paradox. In addition, the findings do not indicate any vocal resistance in public but conscientious efforts have been taken in private by some of the participants to navigating through the performance paradox in order to alleviate the dysfunctional consequences caused by the perverse learning.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic work
• performance management
• performance paradox
• young Chinese academics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Ya-Ting Huang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8097-765X

Jian Xu http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2275-6197

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by National Youth Project, National Office for Education Science Planning (China). The grant number is [CIA170272].