I do not like though what it takes to work within the managerial culture. I have advocated over the years at different times for better work and study conditions for staff, and for students. Sometimes, I do not advocate when I know that I should. I have spoken about social justice issues at staff meetings and at other meetings at the university. I have been told to watch myself, as the university has used the staff code of conduct to discipline those staff they want to silence or get rid of. I was shocked when I read the updated code of conduct at how it requires total loyalty to the university as a corporation and also at the discipline measures that can be invoked. Other staff tell me to be careful not to push too hard or applications for small grants to research may not be approved by those higher up. I see some of those that do not take the corporate line being marginalised, and some leave. Some other staff have left to take up jobs in other universities in the hope that workloads
Chapter 5 Page 183 of 332 will be better, or to secure a more senior position, or in the hope of a better work and family fit. At times, I feel like I am in an episode of the satirical comedy television
show on ABC television, ‘Utopia’ (A6.1, April, 2015).
The transition described from junior to senior academic describes how hard, perhaps impossible, it is to not be partly or fully socialised into the ‘panopticon’ of university ways,
particularly by the ‘academic rewards systems’ (O’Meara, 2011, p.179) and RU (PRU4) Staff
Code of Conduct policy that can reward, discipline and punish. As a junior academic, the informant realises her greater vulnerability to being disciplined as compared to more senior staff. There have been recent incidences reported in Australia where staff conduct and performance appraisal polices have been identified as means by which the academic freedom and ability to complain about increased workloads has been reduced, and managed (Trounson, 2012; Bessant, 2014; Joseph, 2016; Timms, 2016). Workload stress similar to that described by the informant is documented in Australian studies (Winefield, Boyd, & Saebel, 2008; Bexley, et al., 2011a).
The narratives of the informant in this chapter reveal a disjuncture experienced between what work the academic loves (teaching, research, writing and community
service), the activities counted in official texts referred to in Narrative 17, as ‘the WAM’ as
work, and the actual work carried out by the academic. The actual work not sufficiently counted in workload includes various forms of administration (entering grade results onto
data sheets, doing one’s own human resources processing, filling out forms, keeping up with
technology etc.). There is also the caring work of seeing students, responding to crises, caring for other staff. This is maintained by working on weekends and in the evenings, and managing the senses of inadequacy and frustration for not being able to set aside time to write in the same way as a senior academic, and not being able to maintain good teaching practices. The academic finds herself feeling like she lives in a satirical comedy (Utopia, Sitch, Cilauro, & Gleisner, 2014) about bureaucrats and corporate rhetoric. The informant is
in ‘a kind of nightmare fusion of the worst elements of state bureaucracy and market logic’
Chapter 5 Page 184 of 332 The data provides examples of the presence of a managerialist approach to
university governance with a line management structure. Each level of management is responsible to those further up the structure, and not to those below. The administrative
‘academic managerial class’ (Aspromourgos, 2012) is typical of most Australian universities
and exercises power as a class distinct and separate from most working academics. The change in the power structure of the university is documented by Judith Bessant (2014, p.
231), ‘Over those decades, academics had been stripped of the intellectual authority they
once seemed to enjoy…managers rather than academics now make judgments about academic practices and speak on behalf of the university’. The senior managerial group at universities are led by Vice Chancellors whose enormous growth in annual salaries averaging $873, 571 each in 2015, with nine vice-chancellors reported to have earned more than $1 million dollars (Hare, 2016). Increases in the salaries and power of vice-chancellors has grown as a result of the marketisation of higher education and reflects the top-down managerialist model. Bessant (2014, p.233) goes on to provide documentation of how
‘redundancy provisions were used to punish and silence’. Drawing on the work of Sunstein
(2006), Bessant (2014, p.254) describes how self-silencing occurs, ‘a belief that one’s
reputation will suffer, that ‘we’ will be punished or not rewarded for speaking, is what
engenders self-silencing’.
Narratives and policies analysed in this section have documented how junior lecturers are more vulnerable than senior academic and administrative managers to the disciplinary measures activated by policies such as workload formulas and the staff codes of
conduct. The existence and nature of ‘mutually antagonistic self-interest’ (Prins et al., 2015,
p.1354) was documented between managers and more junior workers in the university. The status and privileges of managers, imbued with relations of anxious competition and
insecurity (Bessant, 2014) were found to rely causally on the material deprivations and subordination of more junior workers, such as the self-exploitation of the informant.
CONCLUSION
Building on Chapter 3, the data and analysis in this chapter demonstrated how the ‘good
social work lecturer’ is primarily measured by degree of contribution to achieving the RU
Chapter 5 Page 185 of 332 producing high rates of publications in perceived ‘A’ class journals; securing high levels of
research income generation; complying with the RU (PRU4) Staff Code of Conduct requiring
prioritisation of patriotic loyalty to the university mission and corporate brand over
academic freedom; passing, to the highest level possible, all quality assurance measures and accreditations including, particularly important for social work, AASW re-accreditations; not causing problems for line managers; and, more so for junior academics, self-exploiting to achieve high ratings in student evaluations of teaching performance and delivery of units. In
addition, the ‘good social work lecturer’ is committed to the ‘professional project’ of social
work as outlined in the AASW (2014b) Strategic Plan and supports use of AASW resources to
seek registration, occupational closure and higher professional status.
The lecturer informant’s narratives expressed contradictory responses to these
dominant constructions of the ideological code of the ‘good social work academic’. On the one hand, the informant worked to perform and evidence some of the metrics and qualities
defined by the RU and the AASW as excellence and professionalism. This confirms Smith’s
(1993, p.50) observations that ideological codes can exert a ‘significant political effect by
importing representational order even into the texts of those who are overtly opposed to
the representations they generate’. However, the informant was not unaware of the nature
of this compliance, hoping she could appropriate its rewards and protections to enable her to quietly implement her own ‘strategic plan’ to create microcosms of what she perceived as a pedagogy of social work education about social justice for social justice, and, when able, to more publicly advocate for policy and practice reforms in line with this vision of social justice.
The narratives in this, and the previous chapter, describe how membership of groups subordinated due to racialised, gendered and classed relations can be a source of
oppression and discrimination, but also sources of strength, accountability and motivation.
The student informant’s narrative described the strength she drew from her commitment to
others, primarily based on the South Sudanese ethnic communal ontology, including obligation. The lecturer informant described motivation derived from her sense of obligation to others who are not recognised within the dominant white, middle-classed masculine habitus, and those who, like herself, are ‘second chance’ students.
Chapter 5 Page 186 of 332
In Chapters 4 and 5, I have shown how the ability to activate the ‘the good social
work student’ and the ‘good social work lecturer’ is socially organised in terms of certain
types of academic work, social work study, and people being celebrated or experiencing a
good ‘fit’, and others being downplayed or ignored. In the next chapter (Chapter 6), I
present data comprising narratives and texts to explicate and analyse the work of a social work professor.
Chapter 6 Page 187 of 332
CHAPTER SIX: THE ‘GOOD SOCIAL WORK PROFESSOR’
INTRODUCTION
The ideological codes of the ‘good social work lecturer’ and the ‘good social work professor’ are related and framed within the broader codes of the ‘good academic’ and the ‘good social worker’. In the previous chapter (Chapter 5), analysis based on narratives and texts indicated that being a female, lower status junior lecturer without a PhD, with caring
responsibilities and caring work, restricted the capacity to be a ‘good social work lecturer’. I
demonstrate in this chapter, how the ‘good social work professor’, like the ‘good social work
lecturer’, is required to contribute to the goals of ‘excellence [that provides] a clear return
on …investment’ as set out in the RU (PRU1, p.4) Strategic Plan and of ‘promoting and
regulating the social work profession’ as identified in the mission of the AASW (2014b, p.1)
in their Strategic Plan.
In this chapter, I draw on data collected between 2011 and 2016 including informant narratives, and a brief resume provided by the informant, and texts to outline and examine the work of being a senior, white, male, working-class background professor of social work. Drawing on this examination, and previous analysis chapters, I continue to demonstrate how social and historical processes, including meta-ideologies of neoliberal colonialist patriarchy, and institutional and organisational discourses produce the related ideological
codes of the ‘good social work lecturer’ and the ‘good social work professor’. Despite being
presented as impartial, I show how these ideological codes serve as racialised, gendered and classed organisers, including some experiences and groups of people, and excluding others.
This chapter commences with a brief outline of Australian secondary education in the 1950s and 1960s. This provides historical context for the subsequent informant narratives that explain how being a white-Euro male born in the late 40s, from a working-
class background has shaped the informant’s experiences of education and being a
professor. Next, is a discussion of class and classism that continues exploration of this core analytic focus of this study. Building on analysis from previous chapters, the connection of
Chapter 6 Page 188 of 332 empathy to experiences of privilege and oppression is then discussed. This is followed by a discussion of the presence and impact of the entrepreneurial approach of RU on the informant. The disciplinary impact of quality assurance regimes is then analysed. The
chapter is concluded with an examination of how the professor occupies a ‘contradictory
class location’ (Prins et al., 2015).
AUSTRALIAN SECONDARY EDUCATION IN THE 1950S AND 1960S
Secondary schooling was not universal in Australia before the 1960s, and it was only in the 1980s that everyone had, at least the theoretical, opportunity to complete Year 12
(Campbell & Proctor, 2014). Between 1951 and 1975 secondary schooling would become universal and more usual at least until the age of 15 or 16, but it was still only a minority who completed the final years of secondary school. In 1963, when the informant left his secondary education at age 14, this was common, especially for those positioned as non-
elite or ‘disadvantaged’ through intersections of race, class, gender and dis/ability. The
practices and regulations enforcing separate schooling for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people began to be dismantled. There was a wide variation in the schooling experience of Indigenous children (Campbell & Proctor, 2014).
As discussed in the Prelude, Richard Smith is a white-Euro Australian man, born in
inner Sydney in the late 1940’s, who grew up in a working-class family. Richard’s father was
a semi-skilled wood machinist who worked in timber yards and his mother was a housewife. When Richard turned 14, he left school to work with his father in the timber yard. In the first excerpt below (Narrative 20), Richard describes his decision to return to school.