Managing Neoliberalism and the Strong State in Higher Education: Psychology Today

Abstract

This article locates significant changes in the discipline of psychology in recent years in the context of transformations of higher education that in turn are a function of the emergence of “neoliberal” capitalism, which deregulates welfare and education services and places responsibility on the individual. The article reviews theoretical resources, from Marxism, poststructuralist theories of power, and feminism, and brings them to bear on narratives of the “paradigm revolution” in psychology—the attempt to shift research from laboratory-experimental method to a qualitative approach attentive to meaning and experience. These debates can now be seen to resonate with deeper political-economic changes that have taken place at the level of institutional management practices and subjectivity—changes profoundly gendered in line with the neoliberal emphasis on “emotional labour.” The article concludes with an account of the consequences for experience, rhetoric, affect, and self-abasement in these neoliberal conditions and for how we might understand the role of “psychologisation” in critical psychology, qualitative research, and the broader culture.

Keywords:

• critical psychology
• gender
• neoliberalism
• power
• psychology
• qualitative research

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank anonymous reviewers of a draft paper for their helpful and sharp comments. I dedicate this paper to Erica Burman, now Professor of Education at the University of Manchester, whose own story about the difficult events described here has yet to be told to you.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ian Parker

Ian Parker is a professor of management at the University of Leicester, UK. He was co-founder (with Erica Burman) and is current co-director of the Discourse Unit (www.discourseunit.com), which is an interdisciplinary networking resource for radical academics and which hosts Annual Review of Critical Psychology (an open-access peer-reviewed online journal). He was involved in radical psychology groups, including Psychology, Politics, Resistance (the newsletters of which are on the Discourse Unit site). He is interested in therapy (and is trained as a psychoanalyst) but is more interested in social change (he is a Marxist).