By Dr Vik Loveday
Having trouble coping and feeling ‘unsettled’? Finding it hard to keep up with the demands of your job during a global pandemic? Is the anxiety of looming job losses keeping you awake at night? Many of us working in UK universities will be familiar with the narrative that rank-and-file staff are ‘fearful’ of change, but that our anxieties are our own problem – ideally to be over-come via an engagement with staff ‘wellbeing’ programmes and workshops on developing resilience.
In the neoliberalising higher education sector, fear of change is constructed as a personal deficit to be vanquished. As I have explored in my research on casualised academic work in universities, staff anxieties have long been framed as a problem of the individual rather than the product of structural conditions: staff are incited by employers to take personal responsibility for their own anxieties even when stress is exacerbated by toxic work environments, employment uncertainty, endless metrics and league tables, and increasing competition between ‘providers’ for students and funding. Yet while anxiety is a symptom of this wider context, I have also argued that it has become an intrinsic part of a dysfunctional HE sector: a ‘stick’ that drives competition by exploiting our vulnerabilities. We are told we should be working harder, bringing in more money, getting better evaluations, publishing more – we are never quite ‘excellent’ enough; meanwhile, we must negotiate risks, take personal responsibility for failure, and develop greater resilience. The ‘neurotic academic’ (myself included) is governed through anxiety, not in spite of it.
At my own institution – which is in the process of a controversial restructure – an intriguing document intended for university managers has been accidentally shared via a link sent to 125 staff who have been told they are at risk of redundancy. After being alerted to the error, content from Managing Resistance to Change: Change Management 101 was shared over Twitter by our local UCU branch, and was met with a mixture of consternation, contempt and horror (and just a touch of wry amusement at the depiction of the left and right hemispheres of the brain featuring labels such as ‘emotion’, ‘negativity’, and ‘building barriers’).
Change Management 101 presents resistance as ‘happen[ing] at an individual level’; a claim that neatly side-steps the collective resistance inherent in a number of high-profile local and national disputes over the past few years, including sustained periods of industrial action. ‘Vocal resistors’ are framed as trouble-makers who ‘spread negative opinion around change’ and ‘blow change out of proportion’. I am surely one of these vocal resistors myself as I ‘repeat [the] same issues over and over again’ – perhaps because nobody in charge seems to listen to internal academic experts, when paying for external consultancy services to assess ‘value for money’ appears to be the favoured approach.
The content of Change Management 101 is hardly a surprise to those of us who both work in and research universities – particularly given the thinly veiled rhetoric that is routinely deployed to warn staff that they are endangering their institutions and failing their students whenever they express concerns about their working conditions, or the governance of universities. Resistance to change, then, is positioned as an individual ‘threat response’, rather than the result of legitimate context-dependent concerns, such as the redundancies we are now seeing at Goldsmiths. Focusing on ‘converting dissenters’ becomes a glib way of shifting the focus from our working conditions (and students’ learning conditions) to the shortcomings of the individual resistor who has failed to develop the resilience to cope with change and is driven by fear – the type of depoliticisation so eloquently described by Mark Fisher in his analysis of the ‘privatisation of stress’.
Most recently, I have written about the significance of manager academics’ crisis narratives in a sector perceived as being ‘under attack’: universities are hugely constrained by the wider political context in which they are operating and fears for the future of the sector are not unfounded; yet cost-saving measures imposed by Senior Management Teams (SMTs) in the pursuit of accountability and to assuage their own ‘survival anxiety’ have had the effect of poisoning relationships with staff and students. Part of the issue seems to be that responsibility for institutional survival has been concentrated amongst small teams of managers, but the survival of our universities might best be ensured through the dispersal of responsibility and a re-appraisal of governance structures.
Change Management 101 makes explicit how individual staff are responsibilised by managers for adapting to change and overcoming fear, even as staff are being notified that their jobs are at risk. Yet the document also highlights the dangers for the whole sector when those SMTs taking responsibility for institutional survival see staff as a ‘cost’, rather than an asset. As Change Management 101 states, ‘change is hard!’ Nonetheless, I’d like to finish here by encouraging SMTs to reflect on how they might change their own approach and mindset to management: recognise the value of your staff; take heed of our collective expertise; democratise decision-making processes; and understand that higher education should be a ‘public good’ rather than a private enterprise.
All views are my own (but likely shared by others).
Dr Vik Loveday is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths.
Cover image copyright: Amman Wahab Nizamani 2016
