Responsibilisation and leadership in the neoliberal university: a New Zealand perspective

ABSTRACT

We examine how discourses of leadership and responsibilisation are used in contemporary universities to deepen neoliberal administration and further the corporate university's business plan by restructuring and redescribing academic work. Strategically, responsibilisation discourse, promoted as ‘distributed leadership’, is a technology of indirect management. Responsibilisation language stipulates ‘expectations’ for workers and integrates academic work (teaching, learning, research, service) into an administered regime recognising and rewarding successful conduct (‘leadership’) in the university. We intervene in this responsibilisation discourse by critically analysing texts about distributed leadership in one New Zealand university context. Linking Foucault's analysis of earlier forms of liberal governmentality with critical discourse analysis, we explore how administrative structures, power relations, and regulating management discourse seek to reshape employee behaviour in the neoliberalised, post-democratic university. We present a case study of one university's ‘Leadership Framework’, which exemplifies a new form of ‘post-neoliberal governmentality’ in higher education, embedding self-governance within increasingly instrumentalising centralisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical discourse analysis
• higher education
• governmentality
• academic leadership
• responsibilisation
• New Zealand universities
• entrepreneurship in higher education

Notes

1 See, inter alia, the following universities’ Human Resources websites: http://www.hr.uq.edu.au/leadership-development: http://www.odlc.utoronto.ca/: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hr/osd/resources/competencies.php: http://hrweb.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/LeadershipCompetencyModel.pdf: https://hr.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/383717/hr-policy-framework.pdf: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hr/osd/resources/competencies.php: http://map.ais.ucla.edu/portal/site/UCLA/menuitem.789d0eb6c76e7ef0d66b02ddf848344a/?vgnextoid=a728afba00c42010VgnVCM1000008f8443a4RCRD

2 Notably, the University of Berkeley, California. See http://hrweb.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/attachments/LeadershipCompetencyModel.pdf. Retrieved 25 January 2015.

3 Interviews, University of Auckland, 28 August 2014.

4 M. Amsler, personal communication.

5 http://www.ddiworld.com/company#.VMRXB75BmfQ.

6 Interview, 28 August 2014.

7 Vice-Chancellor presentation, Head of Tāmaki Innovation Campus Seminar Series, 2 August 2013.

8 M. Amsler, personal communication, 9 December 2014.

9 Since research and writing for this essay were completed (January 2015), the University administration has revised the Leadership Framework and online supporting documents (www.auckland.ac.nz/leadershipframework; accessed 27 September 2015). At least one 2013 document (hr-38s) is no longer available. New versions of the LF documents specifically targeted to academics are titled ‘5D Leadership Capabilities for Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Research Fellow, Professional Teaching Fellow and Senior Tutors’ and ‘5D Leadership Capabilities for Senior Academic Leaders Associate Professor and Professor, Academic Head and Dean’ (2015c = https://www.staff.auckland.ac.nz/assets/staff/HR/career-development/documents/5D%20Leadership%20for%20Academics.pdf). These new documents outline in micro detail the responsibilities and expectations for academic ‘leadership’ at each rank. Most of the structure, language, and format of the new documents or versions remain the same as in the two LF documents discussed here, but a few changes are worth mentioning. First, the new title of the LF reflects the University administration's increased reliance on commercial/corporate models and frameworks for organisation in higher education. The newly titled University of Auckland ‘5D Leadership’ model may or may not be derived from Scott Campbell and Ellen Samiec's popular, business-directed text 5D Leadership: Key Dimensions for Leading in the Real World (2005). Second, the new gridsheets for ‘5D Leadership Capabilities’ for junior and senior academics each identify 24 categories of capabilities and behaviours, two of which refer to ‘Scholarship/Professional Development’ and one to ‘teaching and learning’.