Accessing Academic Citizenship: Excellence or Micropolitical Practices?

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the concept of ‘academic excellence’, analysing its repercussions for academic citizenship. It challenges assumptions about the universal and objective nature of excellence and highlights the importance of informal power relations in the definition of ‘excellence’ as a meritocratic metric. Based on data from three empirical studies, the chapter identifies four micropolitical practices in relation to ‘academic excellence’, including: procedural subversion and selective gender blindness; gendered devaluation and stereotypes; relational practices involving sponsorship by individual power holders and, finally, inbreeding favouring ‘insiders’. Micropolitical practices reflect the operation of informal power and arise in a context where constructions of excellence are neither as universal nor as objective as they are depicted. Finally it recognises that academic citizens are not de-gendered automatons that exist outside informal power, but agents with identities and interests who engage in everyday practices with consequences for access to academic citizenship.