On the Limits of Performed Compliance: Jill Carroll and the Rhetoric of Entrepreneurial Adjuncts

Abstract

This essay explores the rhetoric of “performed compliance” through an analysis of Jill Carroll's advice columns and manuals for adjunct faculty. Carroll attempts to invert the relationship of domination experienced by most adjuncts and calls for adjunct faculty to accept their fate through a performance that she labels “entrepreneurial.” Central to this idea is the acceptance of the economic inequalities that adjuncts are subjected to and the importance of not calling attention to the marginalized condition of the work they perform. This essay argues that this version of temp performativity offers little space for adjunct faculty to resist the conditions of their own marginalization and makes adjuncts complicit in their own oppression, with devastating consequences not only for adjuncts but for all those who toil in the academy.

Keywords:

• Adjuncts
• Corporatization
• Labor
• Performativity
• Resistance

The author would like to thank Charlotte Amaro and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Notes

The language here is problematic. Part-time is common, though it hardly does justice to the work lives of those off the tenure track who frequently put in as many, or more, hours than those in tenure lines. Adjunct, while most common and easily identifiable, seems equally ill-suited, as it implies that these faculty members are auxiliary when, in fact, up to 50% of faculty members comprise this category and are, from a teaching perspective, often more central to a university's operations than the tenure track faculty. I will opt in this essay for the term “contingent,” as it seems to best capture the precarious nature of the work performed and the conditions under which one works.

Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 2004 National Communication Association meeting in Chicago, Illinois, and the 2002 Midwest Popular Culture Association meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thomas A. Discenna

Thomas A. Discenna (Ph.D., Wayne State University, 2001) is an assistant professor of communication in the Department of Rhetoric, Communication, and Journalism at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.