Collaborations

Anthropology in a Neoliberal Age

Emma Heffernan, Fiona Murphy, Jonathan Skinner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000181968
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Collaborations responds to the growing pressure on the humanities and social sciences to justify their impact and utility after cuts in public spending, and the introduction of neoliberal values into academia. Arguing 'in defense of' anthropology, the editors demonstrate the continued importance of the discipline and reveal how it contributes towards solving major problems in contemporary society. They also illustrate how anthropology can not only survive but thrive under these conditions. Moreover, Collaborations shows that collaboration with other disciplines is the key to anthropology's long-term sustainability and survival, and explores the challenges that interdisciplinary work presents.

The book is divided into two parts: Anthropology and Academia, and Anthropology in Practice. The first part features examples from anthropologists working in academic settings which range from the life, behavioural and social sciences to the humanities, arts and business. The second part highlights detailed ethnographic contributions on topics such as peace negotiations, asylum seekers, prostitution and autism. Collaborations is an important read for students, scholars and professional and applied anthropologists as it explores how anthropology can remain relevant in the contemporary world and how to prevent it from becoming an increasingly isolated and marginalized discipline.

Part One
Anthropology and Academia

1
Symbiotic or Parasitic? Universities, Academic Capitalism and the Global Knowledge Economy

Cris Shore

Introduction: University reform – an economic or ecological project?

This chapter originated from a panel at the 2015 Association of Social Anthropologists’ conference in Exeter, whose organizing theme was anthropology and the idea of ‘symbiosis’. During the conference, many speakers talked enthusiastically about ecology and symbiosis as a framework for advancing a more environmentally engaged anthropology that recognizes the challenges of the Anthropocene and takes seriously multiple ontologies and multispecies ethnography. Influenced in large part by the work of Anna Tsing (2009, 2011) and other environmental anthropologists, symbiosis was referred to repeatedly in terms of ‘landscapes’, ‘ecosystems’, ‘synthesis’ and ‘multi-species mutualism’. Overall, it seemed, the language of ecology and sustainability was a discourse to be welcomed and embraced as something that could lead to fertile and productive exchanges (or ‘methodological mutualisms’) between anthropology and the natural sciences.

The conference title of ‘symbiotic anthropologies’ made me think about my own research on the neoliberal restructuring of higher education and the New Public Management reforms that have swept through universities over the past two decades. Here too there is much talk about the need for universities to develop closer ‘symbiotic’ relations with industry, nurture ‘innovation ecosystems’ and a ‘culture of entrepreneurialism’ and become more financially ‘sustainable’. This ecological turn in both the framing of university governance and anthropological theory also remined me of earlier feminist analyses of the politics of language and the power of metaphor. Some three decades ago Emily Martin wrote an article in the influential feminist journal Signs about the way biology textbooks reproduce stereotypical male/female roles (the ‘passive female egg versus the active male sperm’ and so forth). One of her key arguments concerned the seductive power of science, and the often invisible work that scientific metaphors perform when describing (and thereby creating) social reality. The challenge, she concluded, ‘is to wake up those sleeping metaphors’ by becoming aware of their implications so that we ‘rob them of their power to naturalize our social conventions about gender’ (Martin 1991: 501). Similar arguments could equally be applied to those metaphors that frame policy thinking about higher education reform and university futures. As several conference speakers argued, borrowing concepts across disciplines opens up interesting new possibilities for academic research and thinking. But this process can also have negative effects, particularly when used instrumentally for managerial purposes.

Taking up Emily Martin’s challenge, I want to explore the assumptions behind these blended ecological metaphors, the way they are used by university managers and policy makers, and the implications of this discursive framing for the future of the public university. As I hope to show, biological idioms and organic analogies have acquired a new saliency as mobilizing metaphors in the discourse and practices of university reform. For some authors, this ecological turn offers a way to rethink the university in more holistic and non-instrumental ways that integrate academic teaching, learning and research with closer ties to communities and society (Wright 2016). However, this relational understanding of the university as a networked, socially embedded institution that is intimately connected with its wider habitat is a very different model to that envisaged in current higher education policy reforms.

By analysing the discourse of contemporary university management, I also want to bring together a number of my own research interests over the past two decades, particularly the way that universities, like many other public and private sector organizations, are being transformed by new regimes of audit and accountability (Strathern 2000; Shore and Wright 2000) and the growing emphasis on demonstrating ‘impact’, ‘relevance’ and ‘external stakeholder’ engagement – or what is sometimes suggestively termed the university’s ‘third mission’ (Etzkowitz 2008; Shore and McLauchlan 2012). The University of Auckland, where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork for fourteen years, is a good case in point. Here too there is frequent discussion among the university’s senior management team and government ministers about the need to make higher education more responsive to industry and employers. Successive governments of all political persuasions have advanced the idea that universities should become ‘engines for economic growth’ that will drive New Zealand forward in the competitive knowledge economy. These market metaphors typically frame management narratives on the purpose of the university and its future. However, the strategy for achieving this vision of a high-value knowledge economy is increasingly seen as one in which universities become networked into a new ecology involving applied science, industry, finance capital, government and other key stakeholders.

This chapter is therefore a contribution to an ‘anthropology of universities’ and, more specifically, the transformation of the public university as an institution in an age characterized by the increasing neoliberalization of the world’s economies and societies. I start from the premise that universities are good sites for ‘studying up’ and for engaging in the more reflexive kind of ‘public anthropology’ (Borofsky 2019) or ‘anthropology at home’. Given that universities are the primary sites where anthropology as a discipline is reproduced, it seems pertinent to consider how the changing conditions of academic existence are influencing disciplinary knowledge and practice. In this sense, universities also provide exemplary locations for exploring the effects of globalization, neoliberalization and New Public Management on key institutions of Western societies, the institutional logics, rationalities of governance and new forms of contractualized relationships that these processes are helping to introduce into the workplace, and the new kinds of subjects that these processes are creating.

How, therefore, are universities being networked into this new economy (or ‘ecology’) of knowledge production and what are the implications of these reforms for the future of the public university as an institution? Some of these questions have been explored elsewhere (see Shore and Wright 2017). In addressing these questions, I also want to reflect on what anthropology can bring to the study of higher education reform and the connections between universities and society. First, however, let me introduce my argument with two brief ethnographic vignettes which provide some empirical evidence and context for the analysis that follows.

Celebrating entrepreneurship at the University of Auckland

It is Thursday night and the lecture theatre – one of the largest in the Business School – is packed. Over five hundred people, including students, academics and university managers, are eagerly awaiting the start of this Grand Prize Giving and the announcement of the NZ$100,000 ‘Spark Challenge’ award. There is an excited buzz of conversation as the Masters of Ceremony James Penn and Spark CEO Alina Varoy walk to the rostrum to welcome the speakers and introduce the evening’s events. Varoy explains that Spark’s mission is to ‘develop a spirit of enterprise and a culture of innovation at the University of Auckland’. Indeed, the programme had already created over 100 start-up ventures, raised NZ$180 million and was ‘stimulating a wave of individual transformations’ by bringing together graduates with ‘entrepreneurial mindsets’, scientists and engineers interested in learning the pathways to commercialization, and high-profile corporate, government and ‘social good pioneers’.

Following this welcome, the MCs introduced the evening’s keynote speaker, Alexei Dunayev, the young and charismatic CEO and co-founder of the award-winning (‘Top Tech Startup New Zealand’ 2013, and ‘Best Startup Silicon Valley’ 2014) company called ‘Transcribe Me’. Dunayev was a confident and inspirational speaker who recounted the story of how he had taken his company from a fledgling start-up to a successful global venture. Casually dressed and pacing energetically up and down the auditorium with microphone in hand, his talk was full of words of wisdom and advice to the aspiring young entrepreneurs in the auditorium, with memorable one-liners like ‘entrepreneurship is a discipline, a mindset, and a direction to make something that hasn’t existed before’. These ideas were supposedly epitomized in the work of the thirteen shortlisted finalists for the Spark Prize, whose innovations included ‘TeamSelecta’, a sports management technology for managers who want an easier way to select teams by rating players from the sidelines; ‘Autonomous Aerial Asset Monitoring’, a ‘real time asset management system’ that uses unmanned aerial vehicles to automate certain farming tasks; ‘UVsense’, a UV sensor and wearable app that helps people determine how much time they should spend in the sun to attain sufficient vitamin D without risking sunburn; and ‘Avatar Anonymous’, a business technology that uses ‘innovative virtual reality techniques to deliver accessible, affordable and sustainable behaviour change modules for global markets’ in commercializable areas of health management, including ‘weight loss, smoking cessation or physical activity’ (UoA 2013).

As I sat reflecting on the evening, what struck me most about this ‘Cultivating Entrepreneurship’ ceremony was its evangelical, almost cult-like character. The atmosphere in the lecture theatre recalled a charismatic church sermon or a Billy Graham crusade. Like many evangelical meetings, the Spark Prize ceremony combines prophets and proselytism with messages that are future-orientated and full of promises and warnings. As the Dean of the Business School told reporters at the Spark Awards the following year, ‘MIT has identified the University of Auckland and the innovation ecosystem built around it as one of the top half dozen in the world’, but to ‘carry New Zealand forward’ it was also necessary to ‘grow technology-based innovation in its traditional industries’ (Whittred 2014).

Two years later it looked like the university’s strategy to forge ‘entrepreneurial mindsets’ had borne fruit. This was excitedly captured on the university’s news website under the headline ‘Most innovative university in Australia’. As the UniNews reporter excitedly proclaimed: ‘The University of Auckland has been ranked as the most innovative university in New Zealand and Australia in the inaugural Reuters Top 75: Asia’s Most Innovative Universities rankings. In the newly-launched rankings, the University of Auckland was placed 27th, ahead of the leading Australian universities. No other New Zealand university was ranked in the top 75. The ranking is a further endorsement of the University’s ongoing investment and recognition of innovation and entrepreneurship excellence … Through UniServices, its commercialization company, the University already has a high level of connectivity between its researchers and businesses, both nationally and internationally … We are committed to fostering this entrepreneurial culture within the University, driving the growth of new high-value business, and strengthening our traditional industries through innovation’ (UniNews 2016).

The idea of cultivating an ‘entrepreneurial culture’ and ‘innovation system’ within universities has paralleled other major changes in the political economy of the higher education system, following the raft of neoliberal-inspired reforms of the past two decades. These reforms began during the 1980s with the withdrawal of state support for universities and were largely pioneered in the UK by Thatcher’s Conservative government but continued under the Blair Labour administration. Behind this public disinvestment in universities lay a new and altogether more individualistic understanding of higher education. A university degree was no longer seen as a public good, as education for citizenship and personal growth, or as a necessary national measure for raising human capital and creating a more educated and skilled workforce. Rather, it was now treated as a personal and private investment in one’s individual career. In the UK, this vision was firmly entrenched in the Brown Report of 2010. Perversely titled Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education (another illustration of the appropriation of ecological terms), Brown argued that individual students, not the state, should bear the costs of university education. As a result, university fees were increased from some £3,000 to £9,000, while state funding fell from £3.5 billion to just under £700 million: effectively an 80 per cent cut, and 100 per cent in areas such as the arts, humanities and social sciences – areas that government viewed as having no economic utility (Vernon 2010).

This had a number of effects on the political economy of higher education, as students and their parents have been forced to pay for education through the kinds of debt-financing arrangements that most governments now regard as far too risky and dangerous for themselves. While the level of national debt is considered so ruinous that it requires emergency austerity measures, students in England and Wales are being actively encouraged to take out loans based upon imagined future incomes, gambling that the loan will eventually pay off by enhancing their future job prospects and earning power. This so-called ‘graduate premium’ was typically used to frame loans as a more ‘progressive’ way to fund higher education. However, these loans have effectively become a form of sub-prime mortgage for education. They are also guaranteed by the state. As a result, and somewhat perversely, higher education in England and Wales was reorganized around the same kinds of financial speculation that produced the financial crash of 2008 (Vernon 2010). Yet universities did not follow the expected market logic and differentiate their fees according to demand; instead they all charged the maximum fees allowable. Ten years later, the former minister for higher education David Willets (now Lord Willets) admitted his government had got its calculations wrong. ‘We expected competition on the price of tuition fees and that was a mistake.’ As he explained to a BBC reporter, this was ‘because students weren’t paying up-front; they weren’t understanding the basics of the system’ (Jeffreys 2019). Because the amount they paid back was dependent on their earnings, these loans were not really perceived as loans. In fact, many students considered it unlikely they would ever earn enough to meet the threshold for repayment. Replacing student grants with loans also appealed to government ministers because, thanks to creative accounting, these loans were not included on the government’s budget sheet, although this has now been called into question.

While Britain has been at the forefront of experiments in the neoliberal restructuring of higher education, these trends are far from unique to the UK. In Australasia, Europe and across the Americas, students and academics have been protesting against similar processes: rising fees; growing levels of student debt; the massive expansion of university management and administrati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword: Jonathan Skinner
• Introduction: Emma Heffernan, Fiona Murphy and Jonathan Skinner
• Part 1 Anthropology and Academia
• Part 2 Anthropology in/of Practice
• Index