The Alteration of Higher Education: The Performativity of Standards

Abstract

Based on the previous chapters, this chapter suggests that the ‘peer-pressure ontology’ of the Bologna Process, including its material-affective infrastructure, is sustained by glossing over, and thus making invisible, the everyday organizational working life for professors and managers in higher education. The infrastructure of the policy ontology is decisive, because it determines what can and cannot become a visible part of the reform processes. The infrastructure turns the Open Method of Coordination into a type of self-referential system, since the follow-up mechanisms omit the everyday working lives. As part of the success story about the Bologna Process, these lives are being buried behind the explosion of big data visuals such as scorecards. However, the working life – the practices and translations performed by professors and managers – is precisely what seems to undermine the Bologna process from within. This chapter explores how the policy ambitions in the European and national political rhetoric fail to resonate with the practices of everyday working life in higher education institutions. The chapter offers examples of radical instances of the translation processes in which the new education standards seem to be bypassed entirely or transformed into mimetic camouflage strategies designed to change appearance, make something ‘look as if’; to make something blend into the surrounding environments. The translations of the new standards display the performative character of the standards; how they bend and transform when they are bundled up with work practices but also how they change that which they seek to govern and the surrounding social and professional worlds.