Differentiated eliteness: socialization for academic leadership

ABSTRACT

This article examines how different forms of eliteness are reflected and produced in discursive practices in texts and participant testimonials published on two websites describing American university leadership development programs. It emphasizes the way that these practices operate to thematize and differentiate forms of eliteness (academic vs. administrative) that have a long tradition of being represented as antithetical forms of knowledge, expertise and ways of life, and to socialize participants with claims to one kind of eliteness to another. Through the examination of the use of titles, characterizations of program participants as pedagogical subjects, narratives of personal transformation and “skills discourses” [Urciuoli, B. 2008. “Skills and Selves in the New Workplace.” American Ethnologist 35 (2): 211–228.], the analysis shows how discourse is implicated in the production and reproduction of neoliberal subjects and perspectives on institutional functions and roles.

KEYWORDS:

• Eliteness
• academia leadership
• neoliberalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Alexandra Jaffe is Professsor of Linguistics and Anthropology at California State University, Long Beach. In addition to her long-term research on Corsican language politics, she has written about orthography, stance, language in the media and tourism.

Notes

1. Peer “coaching” draws on language and imagery from both sports as well as self-actualization and improvement discourses and literatures in business and management, commodifying mentor and collegial relations.

2. “Silos” is a term popularized by Senge’s ([1991] 2006) work on academic cultures that refers to members of an organization working separately in different structural units and not communicating across them and often evoked as part of a critique of faculty disinclinations to work across disciplines or recognize market forces.