‘Leadership is a sacred matter’: women leaders contesting and contextualising neoliberal meritocracy in the Indonesian academia

ABSTRACT

Feminist scholars have critiqued neoliberal meritocracy as discriminating against female academics through the persistence of gender-biased assumptions, closed procedures of recruitment and promotion, and patriarchal network connections. While these scholars demand fairer meritocratic competition, we explore possibilities to (re)imagine academic career and university leadership beyond the dominant discourse of neoliberal meritocracy. Based on interviews with female deans in Indonesian universities, we identified two alternative discourses (in)forming their subjectivity as university leaders, which may both challenge and contextualise neoliberal meritocracy. The first is the Islamic notion of leadership as amanah (God-given responsibility), and the second is a view of university as family. We demonstrate that understanding university leadership through these discourses enables and fosters a sense of trust, nurture, harmony, relationality, and spirituality; which are in contrast with neoliberal meritocracy’s objectivism, individualism, corporatism, and entrepreneurialism. Nevertheless, neoliberal meritocracy is quick to co-opt these contextual ways of being for its neoliberal agenda.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• university leadership
• meritocracy
• neoliberalism
• amanah
• Indonesia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We are cognisant that the analysis here might be (mis)read as uncritically taking for granted the traditional (heteronormative, patriarchal) family institution. While here we draw on the notion of family to destabilise the neoliberal university, we also committedly support any critical endeavours to rework the traditional meanings of family.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Teguh Wijaya Mulya

Teguh Wijaya Mulya is a lecturer in the Faculty of Psychology, University of Surabaya. He has a doctorate in education from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Informed by feminism and poststructuralist theories, his research has been centred around the identification and destabilisation of dominant discourses in various domains, including higher education, gender, sexuality, and religion. His work has been published in journals such as International Journal for Academic Development, British Journal of Religious Education, Asian Studies Review, and Psychology and Sexuality.

Zulfa Sakhiyya

Zulfa Sakhiyya is Assistant Professor at the English Department, Faculty of Languages and Arts, Universitas Negeri Semarang (State University of Semarang), Indonesia. Zulfa has had more than 10 years’ experience in researching educational policies, discourse and gender in Indonesian context, and published in the area. Zulfa is currently a research fellow at the Centre for Innovation, Policy and Governance to assess knowledge production, diffusion and research policy-nexus in Indonesia. She was also a research fellow at Universities in Knowledge Economy (UNIKE), a four-year collaborative research project investigating the dynamic relationships between universities and knowledge economies in Europe and in the Asia-Pacific Rim funded by the European Commission.