‘Upon the gears and upon the wheels’: Terror convergence and total administration in the neoliberal university

University governance is becoming increasingly autocratic as marketization intensifies. Far from the classical ideal of a professional collegium run according to academic norms, today’s universities feature corporate cultures and senior leadership teams disconnected from both staff and students, and intolerant of dissenting views. This is not a completely new phenomenon. In 1960s America, senior leaders developed a technocratic and managerialist model of the university, in keeping with theories around the ‘convergence’ of socio-economic systems towards a pluralist ‘industrial society’. This administrative-managerial vision was opposed by radical students, triggering punitive responses that reflected how universities’ control measures were at the time mostly aimed at students. Today, their primary target is academics. Informed by Critical Theory and based on an autoethnographic account of a university restructuring programme, we argue that the direction of convergence in universities has not been towards liberal, pluralist, democracy but towards neo-Stalinist organizing principles. Performance measurements – ‘targets and terror’ – are powerful mechanisms for the expansion of managerial power or, in Marcuse’s words, ‘total administration’. Total administration in the contemporary university damages teaching, learning, workplace democracy and freedom of speech on campus, suggesting that the critique of university autocracy by 1960s students and scholars remains highly relevant.

Organizational change and work stress, attitudes, and cognitive load utilization: a natural experiment in a university restructuring

PurposeThe authors present a quantitative analysis of the effect that organizational change has on work stress, work attitudes and perceptions, and cognitive utilization in a task.Design/methodology/approachFirst, the authors study the role organizational change has on work stress, attitudes and perceptions, including the role of attitudes toward change. The authors do so by examining differences across employees who are and are not undergoing change, as well as across two change phases. Second, the authors take advantage of the ongoing organizational change to study how people's anxiety about such change affects their cognitive utilization. They use an innovative approach to measure attention disengagement in a cognitive utilization task – a proxy for task-related performance – through a letter detection exercise. Third, the authors examine the role of work stress and change-related anxiety on attention disengagement among employees undergoing change. For this test, they use two organizational change-related texts to function as an anxiety-inducing and a calming-inducing prime.FindingsOrganization change is associated with higher work stress, lower job satisfaction and perceptions of institutional effectiveness and support. Further, organizational change-related anxiety adversely affects cognitive utilization, showing that employees undergoing change have higher attention disengagement relative to those not experiencing change. Among employees undergoing change, those receiving an anxiety-inducing prime show better cognitive utilization (lower attention disengagement) than those receiving the calming-inducing prime.Originality/valueThe rare merger of two public universities provides a natural experiment and a source of exogenous variation to examine the effects of radical organizational change on employees' attitudes, perceptions and task performance.