Abstract
The purpose of this article is to deepen the understanding of academic bullying as a consequence of neoliberal reforms in a university. Academics in contemporary universities have been put under pressure by the dominance of neoliberal processes, such as profit maximization, aggressive competitiveness, individualism or self-interest, generating undignifying social behaviours, including bullying practices. The presented story takes us – a junior academic and his conceptual encounterer – through our remembered experiences and field notes around a set of workday events in one European university reformed through managerial solutions as the object of the study. To do that, we employ co-authored analytic autoethnography to learn how neoliberal solutions reinforce paternalistic relationships as significant in career development, how such solutions enable the bullying of young academics and how neoliberalism in academia prevents young academics from contesting bullying. We are particularly interested in the bystander phenomenon: a person who shies away from taking action against bullying and thus strengthens bullying practices.
Highlights
Contemporary laissez–faire economic liberalism and the rise of the market society have pressured universities to adopt different management-led reforms
We describe the relevance of our study by relating it to existing research on bullying in academia
Autoethnography enables first-person narratives, self-observation and self-reflection on the author’s experiences, and autoethnography has its own tradition in the field of ethnographic research, it is a relatively new approach to organization studies (Boyle and Parry, 2007; Doloriert and Sambrook, 2012; Hermann, 2017; Parry and Boyle, 2009)
Summary
Contemporary laissez–faire economic liberalism and the rise of the market society have pressured universities to adopt different management-led reforms. Academics and universities ‘are conceived of as market actors whose objectives are to maximize their capital value, and whose values rest on enterprise and Neoliberal reforms in academia increase the burden on academics to constantly prove their value and to produce instant outputs (Shore and Wright, 2015). This pressure is primarily forced upon academics through the parameterization and quantitative evaluation of academic work, such as algorithmic assessments, based on publications in top-ranked journals (Craig et al, 2014). Neoliberalism gives rise to various precarious forms of employment and increased pressure from unregulated competition for resources (Strathern, 2000)
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