Neoliberalism in the North American University Toward Integrating Divisions in Agent Orientation Via a Follettian Differentiated Relational Ontology
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Published:
Sep 26, 2019
Keywords:
Neoliberalism, Ontology, Mary Parker Follett, Academic Capitalism, Public Universities
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Abstract
This paper uses observations from empirical articles and personal experiences of the authors to explore issues associated with the rise of neoliberalism and academic capitalism in the contemporary public university. It frames these issues as stemming from conflicting ontologies between academicians who adhere to the differentiated individual ontology and university administrators who favor the undifferentiated individual ontology. To overcome the disconnect, a differentiated relational ontology that adheres to principles of Mary Parker Follett and Alfred North Whitehead is proposed. The driving force behind this ontology can be highlighted through a communicated crisis, and a specific application of Follett’s differentiated relational ontology is Ensemble Learning Theory (ELT). A potential limitation of this study is generalizability, because the focus is centered on North American public universities and anecdotes are used to characterize a broader educational problem. This evolution is pertinent to academicians and administrators because the ontological impasse experienced in North American public universities threatens their existence as institutions, and has a broader and potentially negative impact on the quality of educational focus and output.
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M. Pelly, R. D., & Boje, D. (2019). Neoliberalism in the North American University: Toward Integrating Divisions in Agent Orientation Via a Follettian Differentiated Relational Ontology. Communication & Language at Work, 6(2), 28–41. https://doi.org/10.7146/claw.v6i2.116132
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becoming-entrepreneur. Society and Business Review, 8(3), 205-224.
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funding affects universities. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 31(4), 504-522.
Jacob, M. (2003). ‘Rethinking science and commodifying knowledge’, Policy Futures in
Education 1(1), 125–142.
Jessop, B. (2017). Varieties of academic capitalism and entrepreneurial universities. Higher
Education, 73(6), 853-870.
Johannisson, B., & Olaison, L. (2007). The moment of truth—Reconstructing
entrepreneurship and social capital in the eye of the storm. Review of social economy, 65(1), 55-78.
Karran, T., Beiter, K., & Appiagyei-Atua, K. (2017). Measuring academic freedom in Europe: a criterion referenced approach. Policy Reviews in Higher Education, 1(2), 209-239.
Knights, D., Noble, F., Willmott, H. & Vurdubakis, T. (1999) Constituting the CSR: Consumption, Productionand the Labour Process in Call Centres, 17th International Labour Process Conference, University
of London, London.
Lueg, K. (2018). Organizational changes towards a European academic field. A case study of frictions in the
narratives of Europeanization at a German university from an institutional perspective. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 31(4), 484-503.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2002). The communist manifesto. Penguin.
Monin, N., & Bathurst, R. (2008). Mary Follett on the leadership of ‘Everyman’. Ephemera-theory & politics in organization, 8(4), 447-46.
Moravcsik, J. M. E. (1992). Plato and Platonism: Plato's Conception of Appearance and
Reality in Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics, and Its Modern Echoes.
Newfield, C. (2008). Unmaking the public university: The forty-year assault on the middle
class. Harvard University Press.
Newson, J. A. (2004). Disrupting the ‘student as consumer’model: The new emancipatory project.
International Relations, 18(2), 227-239.
Noble, D. F. (2012). Digital diploma mills: The automation of higher education. Aakar
Books.
O’Connor, Ellen S. (2000). Integrating Follett: History, philosophy and management. Journal of Management History, Vol. 6 (4), p. 67-190.
O'Connor, J. A. (2003). From welfare rights to welfare fights: Neo-liberalism and the retrenchment of social provision.
Olssen, M., and M. Peters. (2005). Neoliberalism, higher education and the knowledge economy: From the free market to knowledge capitalism. Journal of Education Policy 20, no. 3, p. 13–45.
O'Hara, D. T. (2018). On the De-Professionalization of a Profession. Journal of Modern Literature,
41(4), 183-186.
Pelly, R. D. M. (2016a). A bureaucrat’s journey from technocrat to entrepreneur through the
creation of adhocracies. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 28(7-8), 487-513.
Pelly, R. D. M. (2016b). The story of captain baby face and the coffee maker: An
entrepreneurial narrative perspective on corruption. Journal of Management Inquiry.
Pelly, R. D. M. (2017). Entrepreneurial Opportunity-A Perspective from the Theory of
Forms. American Journal of Management, 17(5), 87-102.
Plato. (2012). Republic. Project Gutenberg.
Polyani, K. (1944). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origin of Our Times. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Rhoades, G., & Slaughter, S. (1997). Academic capitalism, managed professionals, and supply-side
higher education. Social Text, (51), 9-38.
Sappey, J. (2005). The commodification of higher education: flexible delivery
and its implications for the academic labour process. In Reworking Work-AIRAANZ 19th Conference, eds M. Baird, R. Cooper & M. Westcott, The Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand, Sydney, pp. 495Á502.
Saunders, D. B. (2010). Neoliberal ideology and public higher education in the United States. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 8(1), 41-77.
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Slaughter, S., & Leslie, L. L. (1997). Academic capitalism: Politics, policies, and the entrepreneurial university. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2715 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218-4319.
Slaughter, S., Slaughter, S. A., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy:
Markets, state, and higher education. JHU Press.
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Smyth, J. (1995). Academic Work: The Changing Labour Process in Higher Education.
Open University Press,
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Stout, M., & Staton, C. M. (2011). The ontology of process philosophy in Follett's administrative theory. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 33(2), 268-292.
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Edinburgh University Press.
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challenge: Learning beyond the limits. Routledge.
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Weick, K. E. (1993). The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster. Administrative science quarterly, 628-652.
Weiss, R. M. (1983). Weber on bureaucracy: management consultant or political theorist?. Academy of
management review, 8(2), 242-248.
Whitehead, A. N. (1928). Universities and their function. Bulletin of the American
Association of University Professors (1915-1955), 14(6), 448-450.
Whitehead, A. N. (1959). The aims of education. Daedalus, 88(1), 192-205.
Whitehead, A. N. (2010). Process and reality. Simon and Schuster.
Whyte, W. H. (2013). The organization man. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Worley, C. G., Zardet, V., Bonnet, M., & Savall, A. (2015). Becoming Agile: How the SEAM Approach to Management Builds Adaptability. John Wiley & Sons.
37(4), 409-423.
Amaral, A., Jones, G. A., & Karseth, B. (2002). Governing higher education: Comparing
national perspectives. In Governing higher education: National perspectives on institutional governance (pp. 279-298). Springer Netherlands.
Aronowitz, S. (2000). The knowledge factory: Dismantling the corporate university and creating true higher learning. Beacon Press.
Bagelman, J., & Bagelman, C. (2016). ZINES: Crafting Change and Repurposing the Neoliberal University. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 15(2).
Boje, D. M. (2014). Storytelling organizational practices: Managing in the quantum age. Routledge.
Bok, D. (2009). Universities in the marketplace: The commercialization of higher
education. Princeton University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1998). Acts of resistance: Against the tyranny of the market (p. 2). New York: New Press.
Brunila, K., & Valero, P. (2018). Anxiety and the making of research (ing) subjects in neoliberal academia.
Subjectivity, 11(1), 74-89.
Bullard, D. B. (2007). Academic capitalism in the social sciences: Faculty responses to the
entrepreneurial university.
Canaan & Wesley Shumar (Eds.) (2008) Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University, NY/London: Routledge.
Collins, J. L., Williams, B., & di Leonardo, M. (2008). New landscapes of inequality:
Neoliberalism and the erosion of democracy in America.
Duménil, G., & Lévy, D. (2005). The neoliberal (counter-) revolution. Neoliberalism: A critical reader, 9-19.
Engwall, L. (2004). The Americanization of Nordic management education. Journal of Management Inquiry,
13(2), 109-117.
Etzkowitz, H., Webster, A., & Healey, P. (Eds.). (1998). Capitalizing knowledge: New
intersections of industry and academia. Suny Press.
Follett, M. P. (1918). The New State: Group organization the solution of popular government. University Park, PN: Penn State Press.
Follett, M. P. (1919). Community is a process. The Philosophical Review, 28(6), 576-588.
Follett, M. P. (1995). Constructive conflict (chapter). Pp. 121-140 in P. Graham (ed.), Mary Parker Follett, prophet of management: A celebration of writings form the 1920s. Washington DC: Beard Books.
Follett, M. P. (1924). Creative experience. Рипол Классик. on line at http://ww.pqm-online.com/assets/files/lib/books/follett.pdf
Follett, M. P. (1926). The giving of orders. Scientific foundations of business administration, 156-162.
Follett, M. P. (1941). Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of mary Parker Follett, edited by Metcalf, H. C., & Urwick, L. F. NY/London: Harper and Brothers.
Follett, M.P. (1949/1987). Freedom and Co-ordination. Lectures in Business Organization. Edited, with an Introduction by L. Urwick. NY/London: Garland Publishing.
Follett, M. P. (1970). The teacher-student relation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 15(2),
137-148.
Geuna, A. (1998). The internationalisation of European universities: a return to medieval
roots. Minerva, 36(3), 253-270.
Giroux, H. A. (2005). The terror of neoliberalism: Rethinking the significance of cultural politics. College Literature, 1-19.
Glenn, Gwendolyn. (2016). Colleges Increasingly Replacing Full Time Faculty with Adjuncts. http://wfae.org/post/colleges-increasingly-replacing-full-time-faculty-adjuncts.
Grint, K. (2005). Problems, problems, problems: the social construction of ‘leadership’.
Human Relations, 58, p. 467-1494.
Hackworth, D. H., & England, E. (2003). Steel My Soldiers' Hearts: The Hopeless to Hardcore Transformation
of US Army, 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry, Vietnam. Simon and Schuster.
Hartman, A. (2017). Culture Wars and the Humanities in the Age of Neoliberalism. Raritan, 36(4),
128-140.
Harvey, D. (2007). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, USA.
Häyrinen-Alestalo, M., & Peltola, U. (2006). The problem of a market-oriented
university. Higher Education, 52(2), 251-281.
Hjorth, D. (2005). Organizational entrepreneurship: With de Certeau on creating heterotopias (or spaces for
play). Journal of management inquiry, 14(4), 386-398.
Hjorth, D. (2013). Absolutely fabulous! Fabulation and organisation-creation in processes of
becoming-entrepreneur. Society and Business Review, 8(3), 205-224.
Hoenig, B. (2018). Structures, mechanisms and consequences of Europeanization in research: how European
funding affects universities. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 31(4), 504-522.
Jacob, M. (2003). ‘Rethinking science and commodifying knowledge’, Policy Futures in
Education 1(1), 125–142.
Jessop, B. (2017). Varieties of academic capitalism and entrepreneurial universities. Higher
Education, 73(6), 853-870.
Johannisson, B., & Olaison, L. (2007). The moment of truth—Reconstructing
entrepreneurship and social capital in the eye of the storm. Review of social economy, 65(1), 55-78.
Karran, T., Beiter, K., & Appiagyei-Atua, K. (2017). Measuring academic freedom in Europe: a criterion referenced approach. Policy Reviews in Higher Education, 1(2), 209-239.
Knights, D., Noble, F., Willmott, H. & Vurdubakis, T. (1999) Constituting the CSR: Consumption, Productionand the Labour Process in Call Centres, 17th International Labour Process Conference, University
of London, London.
Lueg, K. (2018). Organizational changes towards a European academic field. A case study of frictions in the
narratives of Europeanization at a German university from an institutional perspective. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 31(4), 484-503.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2002). The communist manifesto. Penguin.
Monin, N., & Bathurst, R. (2008). Mary Follett on the leadership of ‘Everyman’. Ephemera-theory & politics in organization, 8(4), 447-46.
Moravcsik, J. M. E. (1992). Plato and Platonism: Plato's Conception of Appearance and
Reality in Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics, and Its Modern Echoes.
Newfield, C. (2008). Unmaking the public university: The forty-year assault on the middle
class. Harvard University Press.
Newson, J. A. (2004). Disrupting the ‘student as consumer’model: The new emancipatory project.
International Relations, 18(2), 227-239.
Noble, D. F. (2012). Digital diploma mills: The automation of higher education. Aakar
Books.
O’Connor, Ellen S. (2000). Integrating Follett: History, philosophy and management. Journal of Management History, Vol. 6 (4), p. 67-190.
O'Connor, J. A. (2003). From welfare rights to welfare fights: Neo-liberalism and the retrenchment of social provision.
Olssen, M., and M. Peters. (2005). Neoliberalism, higher education and the knowledge economy: From the free market to knowledge capitalism. Journal of Education Policy 20, no. 3, p. 13–45.
O'Hara, D. T. (2018). On the De-Professionalization of a Profession. Journal of Modern Literature,
41(4), 183-186.
Pelly, R. D. M. (2016a). A bureaucrat’s journey from technocrat to entrepreneur through the
creation of adhocracies. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 28(7-8), 487-513.
Pelly, R. D. M. (2016b). The story of captain baby face and the coffee maker: An
entrepreneurial narrative perspective on corruption. Journal of Management Inquiry.
Pelly, R. D. M. (2017). Entrepreneurial Opportunity-A Perspective from the Theory of
Forms. American Journal of Management, 17(5), 87-102.
Plato. (2012). Republic. Project Gutenberg.
Polyani, K. (1944). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origin of Our Times. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Rhoades, G., & Slaughter, S. (1997). Academic capitalism, managed professionals, and supply-side
higher education. Social Text, (51), 9-38.
Sappey, J. (2005). The commodification of higher education: flexible delivery
and its implications for the academic labour process. In Reworking Work-AIRAANZ 19th Conference, eds M. Baird, R. Cooper & M. Westcott, The Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand, Sydney, pp. 495Á502.
Saunders, D. B. (2010). Neoliberal ideology and public higher education in the United States. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 8(1), 41-77.
Shumar, Wesley. (2008). Space, place and the American university. Structure and agency in the neoliberal university. Pp. 67-83 in Joyce E. Canaan & Wesley Shumar (Eds.) Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University, NY/London: Routledge.
Slaughter, S., & Leslie, L. L. (1997). Academic capitalism: Politics, policies, and the entrepreneurial university. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2715 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218-4319.
Slaughter, S., Slaughter, S. A., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy:
Markets, state, and higher education. JHU Press.
Slater, R. (2003). Jack Welch and the GE Way. Tata McGraw-Hill Education.
Smyth, J. (1995). Academic Work: The Changing Labour Process in Higher Education.
Open University Press,
Stout, M. (2012). Competing ontologies: A primer for public administration. Public Administration Review, 72(3), 388-398.
Stout, M., & Staton, C. M. (2011). The ontology of process philosophy in Follett's administrative theory. Administrative Theory & Praxis, 33(2), 268-292.
Touraine, A. (1992). Critique de la modernité. Fayard.
Turner, R. S. (2008). Neo-liberal ideology: history, concepts and policies: history, concepts and policies.
Edinburgh University Press.
Usher, R., Johnston, R., & Bryant, I. (2004). Adult education and the postmodern
challenge: Learning beyond the limits. Routledge.
Weber, M. (1909/2009). The theory of social and economic organization. Simon and Schuster. In German 1909.
Weick, K. E. (1993). The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster. Administrative science quarterly, 628-652.
Weiss, R. M. (1983). Weber on bureaucracy: management consultant or political theorist?. Academy of
management review, 8(2), 242-248.
Whitehead, A. N. (1928). Universities and their function. Bulletin of the American
Association of University Professors (1915-1955), 14(6), 448-450.
Whitehead, A. N. (1959). The aims of education. Daedalus, 88(1), 192-205.
Whitehead, A. N. (2010). Process and reality. Simon and Schuster.
Whyte, W. H. (2013). The organization man. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Worley, C. G., Zardet, V., Bonnet, M., & Savall, A. (2015). Becoming Agile: How the SEAM Approach to Management Builds Adaptability. John Wiley & Sons.