Ninjas, zombies and nervous wrecks? Academics in the neoliberal world of physical education and sport pedagogy

Abstract

Scholars have drawn some damning conclusions on the current state of the academy. They argue that neoliberal developments such as corporatization and privatization are undermining research and teaching quality, disrupting social relations and impacting negatively on the health and well-being of academic staff. Academia is, according to these scholars, coming to be peopled by hypercompetitive and combative ‘ninjas’, cynical and unmotivated ‘zombies’ and jaded and anxious ‘nervous wrecks’. Against this negative depiction of academics, the aim of this paper is to provide an illustration of an alternative identity that is formed and performed within the field of physical education and sport pedagogy (PESP). This illustration is achieved through the presentation and analysis of an account that shows some of the individuals inhabiting the world of PESP. The account is based on autoethnographic research and relies largely on reported speech and reflective notes to build a description of the author, in the early stages of mid-career, working with his colleagues to write a section of this paper. A Foucauldian framework that includes the concepts of governmentality and care of the self is employed to consider how the author becomes a neoliberal subject with some possibilities for resisting technologies of power. The paper is concluded with reflections on the process of resisting and the significance of local socio-political contexts as issues for further discussion.

Keywords:

• Academia
• Neoliberal
• Foucault
• Autoethnography
• Physical education
• Sport pedagogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Dean Barker http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4162-9844

Notes

1. It is difficult to find critiques of the neoliberal university that do not refer to metrics. Tourish and Willmott (2015) however, provide a particularly detailed discussion of the English ‘Research Excellence Framework’ along with a brief description of the University of Queensland’s ‘Q-index’. Burrows (2012) too, discusses different ‘metric assemblages’ in the UK at length.

2. For Clarke and Knights (2015), careerism refers to ‘the preoccupation with establishing an (unattainable) secure identity that tends to deflect or render opaque any sense of a nascent ethical or embodied engagement that could be a response to ambiguity and tension around new managerialism’ (p. 3).

3. Here, I cannot help thinking of a discussion that I had recently with a senior academic who was collaborating with an economist to calculate the value of PE and health lessons in monetary terms (see also Kårhus, 2010, for a discussion of how Norwegian higher education institutions are redefining bachelor degrees in physical education to ‘meet the logic of the marketplace’, p. 227).

4. Beach (2013) suggests for example, that the notion of integrating teaching and research in higher education – a fundamental principle in Swedish higher education—has been challenged by rounds of neoliberal reform and that academic careers are increasingly shaped by either teaching or research.

5. My PESP colleagues received a complete draft of the first four sections of this paper (the sections titled: Introduction, neoliberal universities, neoliberal academics: ninjas, zombies and nervous wrecks? and Neoliberal sport science and pedagogy) and were asked to provide commentary.