April 2014 (In academia, PhD workshop): We are in a group session discussing about positive and negative words related to our PhD studies. I mention ‘management’ and ‘leadership’ as negative words, and I explain how I do not like how these words are presented in the mainstream man-agement literature. Suddenly the leader of our group session asks me: ‘Do you manage your children?’
May 2014, (At work): I am having a tense discussion over one of our performance indicators and some practices related to it with one of our top managers. I claim that we are trying to find quick fixes rather than really taking a close look at the practices and making changes to them in order to avoid ad hoc decisions and random actions. He looks at me and says,
‘Don’t you think you ought to be a Devil’s Advocate and promote practices which maximise our outputs?’
‘I can change, I can change, I can change, but who you want me to be?
I’m the same, I’m the same, I’m the same, What do you want me to be?’
Stranger Things Have Happened, Foo Fighters I, you, our family members, friends and colleagues – we are all pro-ducing ourselves as subjects of our own actions by using the models and resources that are found in our social contexts and are proposed, suggested and imposed upon us (Foucault, 1984b). The sense of being othered has disturbed me throughout this research. While conceiving of being the same, a representative of academia, for the majority of ac-ademics I am the other. I am perceived as a representative of the episte-mological terrain (Hemmings, 2012) rendered problematic within the
field of HE due to my position as a manager (What do you want me to be?). Because of this, the excerpts above have been crucial to me in un-derstanding how affective dissonance unsettles our sense of self. At first, I was unable to understand that the awkwardness of these encounters was related to my subjectivity. But as I began to reflect the technologies of the self I employed in maintaining the integrity of self (Hancock, 2008), I became aware of the gaps ‘between my own sense of self and the social possibilities afforded to me’ (Hemmings, 2012: 154).
In academia, I felt like being questioned due to my managerial po-sition. It was as if I was policed (Diprose, 2002) and reminded of the assumed, ‘true’ essence of myself. Hence, although for example the PhD workshops I attended in the spring 2014 were immensely enlightening, they were also very awkward. I had no idea why occasional comments related to my work as Quality Manager disturbed me; I was only able to register overwhelming feelings of anxiety and frustration. I poured out my feelings to fellow PhD students and in my writings without realis-ing that I am resistrealis-ing the subject position (and identity) of a neoliberal manager.
At work, the advice to become a Devil’s advocate bothered me, be-cause I translated it as a request to promote practices, where the end justifies the means. In order to ‘take care of myself ’ and to make sure that I ‘know myself ’, I confessed my struggles to my boss and asked if I am being naive and idealistic with my working role, because I do not feel comfortable with the idea of being a ‘Devil’s Advocate’. He assured that I must maintain my position as a critical development specialist.
In this role, the ends do not justify the means. Producing myself as a particular kind of subject, i.e. a development specialist, made me feel safe in my own skin, which is why I used it for self-production.
An analysis of the encounters illustrated in the beginning of this chapter reveals that the subject emerging from them is assumed to be ethically motivated by controlling others, politically active through promoting practices, which support the disciplinary effects of inten-sive numbers management and contextualised as being an advocate of neoliberalism (Mcmurray et al., 2011). The perception of who I am for the others ‘is already informed by social imaginaries that become
be-fore me’ (Diprose, 2002). These excerpts are thus examples of how ‘the other’ (i.e. me) is consumed into one’s own system of ethical knowledge (ibid.). They also exemplify how we make sense of encounters ‘as ethi-cally charged and to which spheres of knowledge’ we make reference to in doing so (Ibarra-Colado et al., 2006: 52). For example the awkward encounter of ‘the Devil’s advocate’ produced a gap between my sense of self and the expectations of becoming a resource-efficient-performer, who monitors indicators and sends e-mails to our units with headlines such as “Improve that indicator!”
This sense that ‘something is amiss’ (Hemmings, 2012: 150) in how I am recognised, ignited my indignation. To resolve this experience of dissonance at work, I suppressed it by remaining silent in the manage-ment meetings. However, the experience of difference troubled me so much that I had to let go of my position as a detached observer and voice my concerns. I began to criticise such practices, which underpin judgmental measurement through the monitoring of indicators. Table 5 illustrates how I have employed technologies of the self in producing myself as a development specialist. It also illustrated how I have expe-rienced the mode of subjection related a resource-efficient, neoliberal performer. The purpose of the table is not to make value-judgments, but to point out how we employ various resources in fashioning our-selves as ethical subjects in the matrix of discourses.
My resentment towards intensified numbers management did not properly address the real problems related to the steering and funding model; the problem was not the model as such, but the way it was ap-plied. By claiming that we are favouring ad hoc decisions and random actions, I was also exerting power over others by justifying that system-atic enhancement should be prioritised instead of quick fixes. Yet some of our managers conceive continuous improvement as generating extra costs because the logic of an economy of exchange related to it is difficult to grasp. The following quote, which is from a conversation I had with one of our top managers, is informative in this respect: ‘You should quit dabbling with quality issues and consider a real job. How about applying for a position as a Director in one of our Schools?’ (Field notes, 3/2016).
This quote reveals that specialist staff members, whose work cannot be
measured in quantitative metrics, are a problem to those manifesting numbers management doctrine. This manager would prefer seeing me working as a director, so that my ‘worth’ could be evaluated through the financial performance of a unit.
Table 5. Examples of technologies of the self
Technologies
Appealing to fulfilling the core tasks, prioritising quality over quantity, being a diligent civil servant whose salary is paid by
‘the tax payers’
Appealing to resource-efficiency and financial results, being an efficient neoliberal manager who is part of the machinery Ethical work Supporting practices related to
students’ learning and regional improving the quality of teaching and learning and RDI activities
Managing numbers, producing outputs
In my case, an affective shift was needed to focus on knowing different-ly (Hemmings, 2012) and to recognise the difference between my own sense of self and the social expectations I occupied with respect to my positions in academia and at work. For me, this shift meant that I took the subject position of the ‘Devil’s advocate’, but not as it was imposed, but as it is originally meant. Originally, it was a position in the Roman Catholic Church and the job of this individual was to take a sceptical view and to look for ‘the holes in the evidence’. The ‘Devil’s advocate’
should not be concerned with what is true, but ‘the system of truth and falsity’; the concern should be ‘how some things come to count as true’
(Ball, 2016).
Foucault (2001) refers to truth-telling as ‘parrhesia’. It has three mo-dalities: the truths told about us; the truths we tell about ourselves; and the truths we tell to others (Ball, 2016). Its function is not to demon-strate the truth, but to function as criticism. As I induced myself to take this position and began to reflect my assumptions of HE and individuals working in HE as autonomous and free thinking subjects, I understood how affective sensations are part of the experiences through which we orient ourselves as subjects. In other words, as I began to interrogate strategic profiling as a counter-discourse, I was able to reflect how affective dissonance prompted my self-production. As I understood how I sustained my sense of self through the conventional discourse, I identified myself anew (see also Thomas, 2009: 177) through strategic profiling. Table 6 in exemplifies the technologies of the self I employ in producing myself through strategic profiling.
Table 6. From a development specialist to a state-of-the-art advocate
Technologies and collaboration with the region within the strategic profile areas The mode of
subjection
Appealing to fulfilling the core tasks, prioritising quality over quantity, being a diligent civil servant whose salary is paid by
‘the tax payers’
Appealing to teamwork and co-operation, emphasising in-creased quality through strategic profiling, being an advocate of excellence through strategising Ethical work Supporting practices related to
students’ learning and regional co-operation
Supporting practices related to competence-based learning and solving open ended cases in close co-operation with companies and organisations
Moral way of being
Maintaining, assessing and improving the quality of teaching and learning, and RDI activities
Supporting practices which enable multidisciplinary collab-oration in order to be a strategic forerunner
However, to elaborate on this shift has been somewhat challenging.
Ashcraft (2017) points out that it is important to understand the affective demands and limitations of different modes of criticism.
She discussed the affective postures related to ‘disembodied analysis’,
‘personal confessions’ and ‘dualistic dialogues’ (p. 37). At first, I tried to do a disembodied analysis of how the regime of neoliberalism con-stitutes subjectivity as a site of struggles. With this criticism, I ended up being trapped in a self-inflicted cul-de-sac. To resolve this, I tried to be more engaged and ended up in bemoaning strategic profiling as oppressive and unsettling (see also Pullen et al., 2017). It astonishes me that despite adopting a post-structural approach, I was profoundly trapped by the language of humanism (St. Pierre, 1997) – or rather, by the humanised criticism (Ashcraft, 2017). I was trapped by it not only due to the disruptive events prior to the merger but also due to the dif-ference between ‘my sense of self and the possibilities for its expression and validation’ (Hemmings, 2012: 154).
What was needed to move towards dualistic dialogue, was a critical reflection of the technologies of the self through which I produced myself as an ethical subject. My criticism is thus not to be taken as a critique towards individuals or towards the well-established and tradi-tional ways of perceiving HE as hubs for autonomous and free-thinking subjects. The criticism is also not to be taken as pamphlet for managerial change-talk, although it can be interpreted as such. The parrhesia here is a certain type of critical relation to my organisation and especially to myself. It strives to ‘opening spaces in which it is possible to be other-wise’ (Ball, 2016) through practicing ‘subjectivity as a kind of tactical wandering that includes possibilities foregone in our self-enclosure’
(Kuntz & Presnall 2012: 735). It also places subjectivity into the course of events and interrupts the reproduction of institutionalised practices (Weiskopf and Willmott, 2013).