May 2014 (Field notes, at work): It puzzles me whether the new financing and steering model really has an impact on students’ motivation or is it just our lecturers who are being flexible and making sure that students pass their courses. I know that I am skeptical, perhaps too skeptical. In the 360 degree evaluation I received some feedback that I am too critical to-wards the performance indicators. Yet I am not willing to play along with discursive practices, which seem to urge everyone to follow the dashboard and perceive performance only as outputs. I have argued several times with our managers about this. A discussion with one of our middle managers was particularly annoying. She has a notebook in our meeting; a picture of the model is taped onto the notebook cover. She taps it and explains to me the brilliance of it. I still don’t get it. Or maybe I just don’t want to get it. Maybe it is the naïve and idealistic me who fights back. I’m irritated:
I claim that the way we apply the model leads to practices, which collide with our core tasks. It turns our attention to managing numbers and puts the blame of not reaching the required outputs on students and lecturers.
She disagrees.
After our debate I print the UAS Act and underline the paragraph which explains our core tasks. The thought that we are gradually forgetting the purpose of HE bothers me. Much later, she forwards me an e-mail sent to our students with reference to our discussion (3/2015): “You are one of a kind! The best!! You have gained at least 55 ECTS credits during the year 2014. This means that because of your effort, we get the funding from our ministry. You see, ¼ of it comes from the number of diligent students who manage to complete at least 55 ECTS credits a year. My only worries is that how am I able to also help your fellow classmates to do the same. Pls help me out! Use this digital notice board to tell me what motivates you to speed up your studies? It won’t take more than a minute. The link is here.
Thank you in advance!” Behind the link is a virtual notice board where students explain their motivation. The notice board has a background pic-ture of a train. I suppose it is a metaphor: those who gain 55 ECTS credits are on the right track. My first reaction is that to approach this issue from the point of view of the students’ motivation is a good start. But then my skepticism towards the model and the performance indicators takes over:
what about those students, who did not reach 55 ECTS credits? I realise that my reaction stems from a pedagogical viewpoint: is it even possible to
‘speed up’ learning by extrinsic motivators?
‘So tired of breathing in numbers. Trying to stop my racing heart.
Oh, all I know is that I want it to stop and I don’t know where to start.’
Silent Partner, La Roux This reflexive vignette has been crucial for me in addressing the differ-ence between my felt sense of self and the positions afforded to me in the matrix of discourses. This discussion annoyed me, because I per-ceived the discursive practices around performance indicators seeking to shape our students as profitable units of use in a market economy (Davies, 2006a) or as Foucault (1984b) denotes, ‘to distribute the liv-ing in the domain of value and utility’ (p. 266). Students are thus seen as resources, which bring money.
It also annoyed me because it pointed the disciplinary gaze of the intensified performance management towards me and my colleagues.
It rendered visible something I did not want to see: an image of an ef-ficient-and-effective output machine called Futuria and me as a docile body subjected to the management practices, which control the perfor-mance of our employees and students. This power marks us all as ‘mon-ey-makers’: our value is planned, controlled and measured through various organisational practices. Soon we are all tired of breathing in numbers and trying to stop our racing hearts because this gaze detects, measures and classifies the deviations, and reveals when we are not acting upon rule (Foucault, 1977a). Nevertheless, we serve the gaze, because we are under it and there is no place to hide.
This vignette is also a typical example of what happens ‘when organ-isations seek to define the interest of others in their own terms so that they can be controlled for the benefit of the corporation itself ’ (Pullen and Rhodes, 2015). My position in the matrix has enabled me to resist this mode of subjection because those of us who work in the matrix have no direct responsibility of the outputs set in the performance agreements. However, instead of being open to the experience of differ-ence, I drew those promoting intensive numbers’ management into my own system of ethical knowledge. In other words, I prioritised my own sense of ethical subjectivity and judged those who were questioning my sense of righteousness (see also Mcmurray et al., 2011). Because of my urge to reproduce the subjectivity of a development specialist through the conventional discourse, I was also unable to perceive affective sen-sations as unfolding my inability to address the experience of difference between my sense of self and the social expectations afforded in the matrix of discourses.
These awkward encounters ‘where nothing happened but everything changed’ eventually made me aware of how I misrecognised the other.
They also made me aware of the irony related to my struggles ignited by affective sensations and the experience of difference at the level of my subjectivity. This irony is very much related to my position as the Quality Manager; in general, the role of quality managers in any organ-isation is to promote systematic planning, controlling and measuring procedures. These role expectations are inherited from the industry and ISO 9000 quality management framework, but are not in my opinion
as such applicable in HEIs. Nevertheless, I am subjected to a particular kind of managerial position due to my work. I will elaborate on this in the following chapter.