GEORGE PETELIN

Can We trust Our Ground Control?

Ground control to Major Tom:
Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong.
Can you hear me Major Tom?
Can you hear me Major Tom?

David Bowie 1969, Space Oddity

It must have been terrifying for scholars of the Frankfurt School during the rise of the Third Reich to witness also the rapid improvement in technologies of mass manipulation. Yet their recognition even then, in the early days of broadcast radio, of the dangers of a rise of a “totally administered society” seems to have taught academics nothing. Today, universities are undergoing transformations that have certain disquieting parallels to those of the 1930s. Once again there is the emergence of processes that are totalising and an alliance of these processes with systems of technological control. These systems and processes evolve so rapidly that neither full awareness nor questioning of their implications has time to take place.

My response to this situation incorporates three kinds of analysis:

1. An examination and survey of responses to new managerialism or what has come to be termed the rise of an audit culture in universities;
2. an examination of the role and implementation of computer networks and allied technology in the university; and
3. a “phenomenological” reflection on the effects of these phenomena on lived experience in the university, drawing on the work of Heidegger and that of the Critical Theorists.

The new form of management that replaced the term “Personnel Liaison” with “Human Resource Management” (HRM) purports to be a neutral technology – simply a way of making work more efficient. Similarly, computer networks, software and digital technology are in themselves just tools. How then can any argument in criticism of them evade the pitfall of technological determinism? And what lessons concerning this can be learnt from the past?

NEW MANAGERIALISM

The earliest description of humans as “resources” probably dates from Aristotle. “The servant is a kind of instrument,” writes Aristotle in Politics, Book 1, Ch. 4. Slaves, to the Greeks, were those unable to make responsible decisions – thus they were considered to be “property with souls” and “living tools.” From the outset, the status of the Human Resource is deprived of individual liberty. This is in total contrast to academic professionalism that has traditionally been defined in terms of liberty to make responsible decisions.

Although Magali Larson1 argues that professions as we know them are relatively new – a phenomenon of the industrial age – it is also true, as Neil Hamilton expresses it, that

… traditions of academic freedom and shared governance are rooted in the intellectual system that grew out of the Western tradition, particularly the Enlightenment’s conviction that reason, if left free, could discover useful knowledge. This intellectual system is liberal in the sense that it favours individual freedom, open-mindedness, and the use of reason to foster human progress. 2

In short, the defining qualities of collegiality and critical inquiry are what distinguishes universities from other institutions.

Although, as I will argue, there persist certain affinities with the traditions of slave supervision and its subsequent industrial variant, Taylorism, Human Resource Management attempts to dissociate itself from these.3 And, indeed, there was a brief window of liberal rhetoric in management just before HRM’s development. Many of us can remember, about the mid- 1970s, the period of employee consultation, the humanistic psychology of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, committee decision-making, and confidential peer consultation that served to introduce the regimes that have now evolved out of them. Management historians explain it in terms of a shift in role for administrators from “employee advocacy” to membership on the “management team.” Beginning somewhat benignly in 1981 within the new MBA course at Harvard Business School, HRM preached consultation of stakeholders and a special place for the human component of corporate resources. Other variants however soon came into vogue. The Michigan Business School, for example, advocated that employees, like any other resource, should be obtained as cheaply as possible, used sparingly and developed and exploited as much as possible.4 Despite this, HRM continues to argue that it is somehow different from the “scientific management” of FW Taylor.

Taylor’s “scientific management” was similarly initially supported by liberationist rhetoric,6 but became bitterly opposed by organised labour because of the “autocratic” ways in which it was actually being applied.6 Although Taylor denied the advocacy of spying on employees, methods he invented, such as the stopwatch concealed inside a book, suggest forms of informationgathering that anticipate the covert and obligatory surveillance methods of today.7

Taylor, just as new managerialism does now, argued that management practices must privilege “the consumers, who buy the product … and who ultimately pay both the wages of the workmen and the profits of the employers.” 8 Because the consumer’s satisfaction is judged on immediate rather than long-term feedback processes, this argument obviously rests on the assumption that the consumers know best what is good for them. In universities, where the customers are considered to be undergraduate students, this assumption is highly debatable.9

The first wave of the “new” forms of managerialism to hit Australian universities, in the 1990s during the Dawkins reforms, saw the emergence of Total Quality Management. TQM viewed education in terms of “competency measures” and a pedagogy based on fragmented sequences of skill-operations and behavioural objectives. The TQM system sat uncomfortably with the ideals of creativity and research because it insisted on the possibility, indeed necessity, of specifying outcomes in advance and reducing the learning process to a simplistic quantifiable lockstep process.10 The imposition of quantitative description upon something that is often a qualitative, intuitive, process threatened to devalue creative disciplines and was unable to reconcile their unique historical traditions and methods. In management circles, however, TQM has in recent years come under attack from another fad called Business Process Reengineering (BPR), for quite different reasons: “TQM is insufficient and inappropriate to cope with the current competitive global business environment because it preserves established structures instead of being ‘process-oriented’.”11

BPR is, of course, at the bottom of the current rhetoric against “silo mentalities” in universities. These “silos,” in the case of universities, are none other than the traditional disciplines through which peer-maintenance of standards of rigour have traditionally been exercised. Their removal results not in the desirable goal of inter-disciplinarity, but in managerial trans-disciplinarity based on universal criteria of productivity rather than on rigour. Process-orientation in this context means subordinating the social mission of a discipline to the service of a managementdecreed commercial outcome. The emergence of process-oriented (i.e., commerce-oriented) edifices within universities such as the “Creative Industries” movement is the outcome.12

Objections to managerialism within academia abound. In my own survey of the literature, although I found the unquestioned assumption of managerialism’s efficacy in management policy documents and in how-to manuals, this was outweighed by an avalanche of highly critical analysis in academic publications.13 At best, some of these papers concede that some sort of accountability to a public outside the profession is desirable,14 but that a balance of this against the drawbacks of accounting processes is difficult to determine. These papers range from prestigious philosophical overviews such as the Reith Lectures15 to empirical case studies dealing with specific industries.16

The incursion of managerialism is arguably in opposition to the older tradition of professionalism. Richard Thompson, writing about managerialism’s erosion of professionalism in medicine, and contrasting professional priorities with those of profit-driven corporations, points out that

... some ethical themes are common to all professions. Chief among these is trustworthiness.


What if unprofessional behavior became the norm? Think about it. If we could not confidently entrust our money, our health, our education and our view of religious and ethical values to professionals, what would society be like?17

In education, Alexiadou observes, trust in professionalism is “totally displaced by performativity.”18 Several symptoms of this culture of mistrust have emerged. The shift from confidential use of student evaluation of courses and teaching for personal improvement to gathering data for external accountability has resulted in a debasement of fundamental human relations, between academics and their students and among academics themselves.Questions through which students are surveyed become either generic, without specific relevance to the circumstance being evaluated and slanted towards managerial values because they are prescribed by management, or token additions chosen by the academic employee to elicit the best performance profile. Sensing how general mood affects the statistical response of a class, the academic chooses the most favourable time within the semester – never just after a tough exam – preferably just after a minor assessment that can be marked very generously. Throughout the semester the buoyant mood must be sustained by never challenging a student’s opinion and taking personal interest in adolescent social activities with all the sincerity of a McDonalds’ “have-a-nice-day” greeting. Social relations come to mimic the premises of commercial exchange that underpin managerialism: solicited testimonials and orchestrated nominations for awards become a social currency. Such performance measures are presented as beyond dispute but are far from universally accepted. For instance, Louise Morley reports that a “French professor laughed out loud when she heard that student completion rates were performance indicators in Britain. She reminded me that the opposite is the case in France – the fewer students left on the course, the higher its status.”19

The relations of collegiality traditional among academics, the respect for each other’s expertise and commitment to the common purpose, equally deteriorate into mistrust and disingenuousness at best, and, as Margaret Thornton, Professor in Law and Legal Studies at La Trobe University argues, downright bullying at worst.20As Morley finds, the accountability process “can also be seen as a form of capillary power in which professions are seduced into policing themselves.21 The process of bullying is assisted by the remoteness and impersonality of technological ways of accounting. The staff committee evaluates an online report and passes its judgements online.22 This “audit culture” has arguably created a new class: the cult of the “expert” technocrat.23 At the same time, the powers of middle management have dwindled. Former professionals find themselves as executors of top-down decrees and function increasingly as disciplinary apparatchiks over their former colleagues. The use of cliché-spouting motivational speakers and bonding rituals at trust-building retreats is of course management’s “solution” to the problem, but does nothing to alleviate this. The entire relation between employer and professional has shifted to one of mutual distrust and deception. The audit culture is permeated by a doctrine of original sin that tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Michel de Certeau observed, in highly regulated environments employees develop the tactics of resistance that he terms la peruque.24

The most puzzling question is how the processes and claims of accountability are tolerated by a university hierarchy who in the main are themselves trained in rigorous sciences. Two inadequately substantiated assumptions underpin the audit culture. First is the assumption that the means of measuring academic accountability are valid and reliable, and second is the assumption that these accounting processes actually improve the operation of universities or, if they do, do so cost-effectively.

Numerous cries from academia attest that both these assumptions are deeply flawed.25 Louise Morley, for example, points out:

Receiving research funding is another indicator of worth. Yet, in 1996 Sir Harry Kroto won a Nobel prize for exactly the same research in chemistry that was refused funding by the engineering and physical science research council. The indicators of audit are unreliable and unstable and yet are invested with considerable symbolic and material power.26

What is disturbing is that the constructs of the audit culture become their own measure of success. As Morley points out, “The ‘good researcher’ is discursively produced 27 via performance indicators linked to audit.”28 In support of this, she cites ample research that, in Britain, academics would tailor submissions to the perceived preferences of the panel that would be judging their work and concentrate their research attention in areas likely to carry weight in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). One recent report shows a UK university classifying undergraduate courses as research in order to achieve certain cost advantages, and no doubt to elevate RAE statistics29.

The measurement of managerial performance indicators ignores the effect of this measurement on the very thing that it purports to improve and, as universities become more obsessed with making sure nothing slips past their audit, the performance statistics appear to improve. What has, however, improved is merely the gathering and manufacture of quantifiable information rather than the quality of the actual outcome. As Sir Michael Ateah, president of the Royal Society, expresses it:

I, and I,suspect many university colleagues, are deeply uneasy about the present situation, not because we are irresponsible, but because we have little confidence in the foundations on which the great accountancy edifice has been built. As a mathematician I know that the validity of a conclusion rests not only on the accuracy of the argument but also on the truth of the initial premise … All of us have had to fill in forms asking us to identify how much of our time … has been spent on teaching and how much on research. For many of us this is a meaningless and impossible task … How does one divide, count, or weigh a thought? In desperation we end up by filling in some notional figures.30

The concern that, for all its pain and expense, managerialism does not deliver what it promises is not unique to academia. Other sectors, particularly those describable in managerial terms as “service industries,” report similar misgivings. In many of these it remains an open question whether the new managerialism has resulted in more efficient and cost-effective services.

Ron Walton, writing about social work, reports:

Extra costs arise from the enlarged managerial workforce and the cost of contracted-out services is rising inexorably in response to the raised standards. Social services departments are facing the same kinds of problem as health services where the cost of agency nursing staff forms a substantial part of their deficits. Management in personal social services in the past emphasized human relationship issues such as supervision, care of staff, and more cooperative styles of leadership. Under the new managerialism, a set of new tasks and skills has developed which has little to do with these former concerns: drafting specifications and contracts for commissioned services; overseeing and monitoring contracts; providing a wide range of additional information for audit, inspection and central government; drafting proposals for targeted allocations from central government for diverse projects and services and managing budgets. In the 1970s and 1980s, the picture presented would have been described as bureaucracy. Far from scything away the traditional bureaucracy of local authorities, the new managerialism has introduced its own style of bureaucratic administration, ever more inventive in complicating social service systems and putting them at risk of sclerotic seizure. It is ironic that the new managerialism, riding on the mantra of efficiency and low cost, may yet prove more expensive under the weight of extended inspection, audit and rising costs of independent provision.31

Similar accounts pertain to health and police services: Vickers and Kouzmin, for example, report that “while the costs of policing, courts and prisons continued to soar, there [is] no evidence of improved effectiveness in reducing crime.”32

While Australian and British academic administration embraces the managerialism juggernaut, serious doubts are beginning to appear at managerialism’s very origins. Roger Thompson, writing in The Harvard Business School Alumni Bulletin, for example, draws attention to the spate of corporate scandals such as the downfall of Enron to ask whether there is something systemically wrong with managerialism.33 Quoting Rakesh Khurana, he writes: “The universitybased business school of today is a troubled institution, one that has become unmoored from its original purpose and whose contemporary state is in many ways antithetical to the goals of professional education itself.”34 This critique, writes Thompson, emerges out of “agency theory” taught within business schools, which found “that managers, as a matter of economic principle, could not be trusted.” “With the demise of managerialism,” he asks, “do business schools retain any genuine academic or societal mission?” Ironically, although this kind of soul-searching emerges within the academia of management, the management of academia continues to suffer a time lag.

So here is the nub of the matter: managerialism can be criticised because, far from being a neutral technology, it constitutes an ideology – a system internally haemorrhaging under the weight of its contradictions, ironies, and sheer hypocrisies – a faith, a belief system more akin to “creation science” or to a cult such as scientology than to a science. An insight into the mindset of managerialism is afforded by the case of Albert Speer, Hitler’s infamous architect. The only Nazi leader to accept a share in collective responsibility for war crimes, his defence at Nuremberg pleaded two mitigations: one, the implausible claim that he was unaware of the gas chambers; the other, that he was just a technocrat doing his job. As today, technology played a big part in maintaining control. Declaring himself a neutral technocrat without interest in ideology, he describes how the Nazi regime simply provided opportunities for him to practice his craft on a huge scale. Modern technology, however, Speer admits in hindsight, was the key element that “distinguished our tyranny from all historical precedents.”35 In addition to being an architect, Speer was undoubtedly a proto-managerialist. As minister for armaments from 1942, he nationalised German war production to eliminate its “worst inefficiencies.” He defends himself by demonstrating that he improved conditions for slave labour, but contradicts this being interpreted as an ethical decision by adding that this was to enable them to work more efficiently.

NEW TECHNOLOGY

The technology in the hands of managerialists that contributes to my concern for the present is information technology. However, I want to concentrate on one aspect of this technology, software. And I want to make a distinction between the claims that can be made for information technology as a whole and the use of this technology through the filter of a corporate intranet and “enterprise” software.36

But first, I want to emphasise again that technology alone does not guarantee a social effect: it is the combination of ideology and technology that is worrying. And second, to draw attention to the fact that a combination of technologies can have an effect greater than the sum of their individual contributions. Drawing from the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson write that

we are witnessing a convergence of what were once discrete surveillance systems to the point that we can now speak of an emerging ‘surveillant assemblage’. This assemblage operates by abstracting human bodies from their territorial settings and separating them into a series of discrete flows. These flows are then reassembled into distinct ‘data doubles’ which can be scrutinized and targeted for intervention. In the process, we are witnessing a rhizomatic leveling of the hierarchy of surveillance, such that groups which were previously exempt from routine surveillance are now increasingly being monitored.37

The growing requirement, for example, for academics to use a university portal and only university-authorised “enterprise” software not only facilitates corporate management rather than individual professionalism, but encroaches onto the private life of academics. Enterprise software such as Lotus Notes and Outlook Exchange possesses extra surveillance and centralised time-management capacities. In addition, the software stores your data on a server to be administered remotely rather than on your own computer.

Even some management writers warn that this can be counterproductive. For example, Paul Strassmann, sometime Director of Information for the US Defense Department, and Chief Information Officer of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, believes local computing is here to stay. He warns against companies dedicating their resources principally to internal coordination and control and advises a compromise: “An organisation must find politically and emotionally acceptable answers to the aspirations of individuals for independence, privacy, and self directed experimentation.”38

For academics, whose research and day-to-day activities are hardly distinguishable, centralised corporate control means that private and working life are under the equal scrutiny of the “corporation.” Our faith in an always ethical dimension to this scrutiny should be somewhat shaken by the 2007 case of a college secretary in Wales having to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights over e-mail and phone snooping.39 What is additionally worrying is that, provided an employer warns that they may monitor your computer use, they have every right to do so.40 Such warnings are possibly now standard at universities but this does not change the fact that in practical terms they legislate over private lives and, like the Roman Emperor Caligula’s laws which were posted at the top of a tall column, are not always easy to find nor to be mindful of.

The capacities of centralised software for surveillance are matched by their capacities for censorship, which further compromise academic freedom and professional trust. During the course of researching for this paper, for instance, I was on several occasions confronted with a web page telling me that “accessing this web site may contravene the University Code of Conduct” and directing me to the university’s IT policy document. That policy document lists numerous obligations and the consequences of their breach for the user of the technology, but none at all regarding the university’s choice of IT architecture, the responsibilities of its management to academics, or what is expected of its contracted software manufacturers.

The continued wisdom and integrity of “ground control” is deemed to be outside the sphere of interest of those whose lives depend on it. And even if the wisdom and integrity of our masters were beyond reproach, why are university academics trusted with less information of the outside world of the web than the mainstream population? The consequences for research in the humanities and social sciences are patent: researchers exposed only to a pre-filtered reality are unlikely to confront social “facts” in the manner championed by Durkheim. One wonders, if IT managers rather than academic disciplines make these filtering decisions, how long will it be before we see, say, a ban on exposure to nudity for anatomy and life-drawing classes, or restrictions placed on electronic resources critical of managerialism?

At the same time, we are not protected from commercial exploitation and privacy intrusion. The same technology deposits unwanted messages, software “updates” and, virtually daily, add-ons such as MSN messenger and widgets. Applications such as Itunes and Real Player clamour to penetrate your vigilance in order to install themselves by attachment to “essential” updates for other programs. Symantec’s Norton Antivirus software, although made obsolete by other software, comes pre-installed, almost impossible to remove, and requests exorbitant payments after your initial 30 days’ use (unless it has already deceived the university into extending its site licence). Even the trend in fundamental operating systems such as Microsoft Windows Vista is to restrict individual liberties.

Vista, under the pretext of enhancing security, requires all programs to be processed through its registry and attached to installation on one set of hardware, despite the fact that hardware often becomes obsolete before software. Transferring software from personal home computer to work computer and back is becoming increasingly problematic. This means that while posing as the purchase of a discrete commodity, each software acquisition is a binding contract entirely in the vendor’s interest. As Giles Deleuze describes it, “the societies of control operate with machines … whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses.”41 Unfortunately, the terms “malware” and “piracy” can be ascribed as much to the products and actions of corporations as of terrorist hackers. Software companies are of course also corporations with naked self-interest that has nothing to do with the pursuit of truth nor even with the goals of a university as a corporation. Their every new profit-making strategy seems to result in less individual liberty, rather than more. If universities aspire to be like them, woe betide us.

The integrity of particularly the larger software corporations is extremely questionable. In 1991, Lotus Development Corporation attempted to manufacture and sell Lotus Marketplace: Households, a CD-ROM containing detailed marketing information about 120 million individuals sourced from their partner, credit bureau Equifax.42 Google, as another example, has no qualms in assisting the Chinese government in its quest for political censorship.43 Regardless of Google Desktop’s promise to respect the privacy of their cataloguing the entire data of your hard drive and the record of all your websearches, the capacity to scrutinise all of these exists. In the USA, since the Patriot Act of 200144 and after the soon-to-be-passed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments of 2008,45 and even more so in countries without a Bill of Rights such as Australia46, this potential is ever present. Moreover, this technology’s long historical involvement with totalitarian control is a matter of record. IBM’s flourishing business in pre-war and wartime Germany, as Edwin Black documents in IBM and the Holocaust, had an essential role in providing punchcard processing of Jewish names for arrest and execution.47

In universities, like the managerialism it has grown to serve, computer technology often falls short of its promises. Assisting the growth of software and hardware monopolies and restricting freedom of choice for academics, the educational sector is lured by discounts for bulk contracts to, in effect, beta-test unfinished programs. Low IT budgets ensure substandard IT networks. And, more particularly, inadequately documented, inadequately transparently structured, inadequately ethically questioned, and inadequately clearly communicated IT networks result. Part of the reason is that technology itself still has the reputation of being the realm of slaves. Managers high in the hierarchy get secretarial help to operate their technology. The tale of the vice-chancellor who vainly shook his mouse at the Powerpoint screen during a presentation is probably not so apocryphal. Universities install what promises to be an efficient reporting system without ever becoming aware of the frustrations and time costs to those who have to report through it.

OLD PROBLEMS

Whether our technology is actually efficient or not is debatable. As Martin Heidegger observed in a paper first presented in 1949,

everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to pay homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.48

What Heidegger considered to be the essence of technology was not its “neutral” potential utility, but what he called its enframing. “Technology is a human activity,” writes Heidegger:

The two definitions of technology belong together. For to posit ends and procure and utilize the means to them is a human activity. The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to what technology is. The whole complex of these contrivances is technology.49 Technology thus exists only in its use; in Heidegger’s terms it is ‘revealed,’ emerges out of mere potentiality, only through application. Certainly, both management and computer information technologies could historically have emerged out of their potentialities in countless other ways, but the fact is that they now exist in profoundly ideological forms. While enframing is in Heidegger’s words also a ‘destining,’ our essential liberty as human beings he argues consists in being free to refuse this destining. The great danger of technology, according to Heidegger, is to not recognise enframing for what it is – to abrogate our freedom to ‘listen but not obey’. In other words, we must constantly question technology as it ‘comes into presence.’

The Frankfurt School of critical theory during the 1930s, practised, more or less like the first section of the present essay, what they called “immanent criticism” – drawing attention to contradictions by juxtaposing aspects of contemporary society against its own ideals. In the 1940s Adorno and Horkheimer turned to more general questions. Their classic publication The Dialectic of Enlightenment asks “why humanity, instead of entering into a truly human condition, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism.”50 Although basing their stance on what to me seems a somewhat unwarranted conflation of all positive science and technology, the answer they propose invokes the clash between “instrumental” reason and critical reason that describes the contradictions of new managerialism perfectly. Instrumental reason emerges when the processes of efficiency are no longer a means to an end, but an end in themselves. This is perhaps why it does not seem to matter to managerialism that neither its procedures nor its technology are actually terribly functional.

And Heidegger, unwittingly, has another lesson for us. As we know, although not impeachable for any direct crimes against humanity,Heidegger was as compromised by Fascism as Speer. When in 1933 his mentor, and founder of Phenomenology Edmund Husserl, was denied the use of the Freiburg Library as a result of National Socialist anti-Jewish legislation, it was Heidegger, as a Nazi party member and newly appointed Führer (rector) of the university, who reportedly informed Husserl that he was discharged. And, in 1941, fearing repercussions, he removed the dedication to Husserl from his 1941 publication of Being and Time.51 Fully equipped to recognise a technology of control as it “came into presence,” he chose to succumb to it.

Heidegger was probably just typical of the new academic managerial class. Dazzled by the false promises of authority, although he surely intellectually recognised the threat of totalitarianism, Heidegger sold his professional soul for career advancement.52 As Thornton observes, what is lost in the transformation of universities are “collegiality, academic freedom, work satisfaction, and, not least of all…the courage that was once considered an essential attribute in a worthy academic.”53

  1. Magali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise of Professionalism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), 17.
  2. Neil W Hamilton, Academic Ethics: Problems and Materials on Professional Conduct and Shared Governance (Westport CT: Praeger, 2002).
  3. The New Managerialism (HRM Guide: International Human Resources [cited 13/6 2008]); available from http://www.hrmguide.net/hrm/chap1/ch1-links3.htm. Last accessed on 30 October 2008.
  4. Ibid. (cited).
  5. “… the time is coming when all great things will be done by that type of cooperation in which each man performs the function for which he is best suited, each man preserves his own individuality and is supreme in his particular function, and each man at the same time loses none of his originality and proper personal initiative, and yet is controlled by and must work harmoniously with many other men.” Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Row, 1911), 7.
  6. “Sees Great Danger in New Efficiency,” New York Times, Sunday 27 February, 1916.
  7. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 153.
  8. Ibid., 6.
  9. It leads me to wonder why university administrations shouldn’t be seen to be primarily in the service of academics – facilitating their research and pedagogy as responsible professionals in the way a lawyer’s chambers or medical clinic serves its professionals.
  10. I critiqued TQM in some detail at the time in George Petelin, “Quality: A Higher Level of Mediocrity,” Australian Journal of Communication, 19:2 (1992). The main thrust of my argument was that TQM threatened innovation, creativity and the arts.
  11. “Modern Technology‘s Problems and Promises,” http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/5599/ philosophy/problems-technology.html. Last accessed on 30 October, 2008.
  12. Creative Industries is virtually a synonym for what the critical theorists pejoratively termed the Culture Industry. See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Mass Communication and Society, eds James Curran, Michael Gurevitch and Janet Wollacott (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 349-83. In my view, it generates an enormous amount of rhetoric about process (justified ironically through claims of élitism against the traditional arts) and very little product, precisely because of its severance from the ideals of traditional creative disciplines.
  13. A particularly good example of this is Simon Frith’s “Checking the Books: What are Universities For?” Critical Quarterly, 43:1 (2001).
  14. Michael W Apple, “Education, Markets, and an Audit Culture,” Critical Quarterly, 47:1–2 (2005).
  15. Onora O’Neil, “BBC/OU Open2.net – Reith 2002: A Question of Trust,” http://www.open2.net/ reith2002/index.html. Last accessed on 30 October, 2008.
  16. See, for example, Bill Doolin, “Power and Resistance in the Implementation of a Medical Management Information System,” Info Systems J, 14 (2004); also Margaret H Vickers and Alexander Kouzmin, “New Managerialism and Australian Police Organizations: A Cautionary Research Note,” International Journal of Public Sector Management, 14:1 ( 2001), and Ron Walton, “Social Work as a Social Institution,” British Journal of Social Work, 35:5 (2005).
  17. Richard E Thompson, “Assault on the Professional Ethic: Will Professionalism Survive? (Ethical Aspects),” Physician Executive, 33:5 (2007).
  18. N Alexiadou, “Management Identities in Transition: A Case Study from Further Education,” The Sociological Review, 49:3 (2001), 429.
  19. Louise Morley, “The Micropolitics of Quality,” Critical Quarterly, 47:1-2, 85.
  20. Margaret Thornton, “Corrosive Leadership (or Bullying by Another Name): A Corollary of the Corporatised Academy?,” Australian Journal of Labour Law, 17:2 ( 2004).
  21. Morley, “The Micropolitics of Quality,” 88.
  22. It is frightening to consider this process in the light of psychology experiments in which more than half of a group ordered to anonymously punish a victim would do so until they reached the most potent shock available on the generator; see Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
  23. Ivan Szelenyi and Bill Martin, “The Three Waves of New Class Theories,” Theory and Society, 17:5, Special Issue on Breaking Boundaries: Social Theory and the Sixties (September 1988).
  24. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
  25. See particularly S Rees, “The Fraud and the Fiction,” in The Human Costs of Managerialism: Advocating the Recovery of Humanity, eds S Rees and G Rodley (Sydney: Pluto Press Australia, 1995)
  26. Morley, “The Micropolitics of Quality,” 84.
  27. My italics.
  28. Morley, “The Micropolitics of Quality,” 84.
  29. “Academic staff at Gloucestershire…will be expected to involve undergraduates in their own research, and their success could affect promotion prospects. The university’s estate will be adapted to reflect a reduced need for lecture theatres.” Reported in “Times Higher Education – No lectures for reclassified ‘researchers,’” http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=400131&sectioncode =26. Last accessed on 30 October, 2008.
  30. Michael Atiyah, “Address of the President, Sir Michael Atiyah, O.M., Given at the Anniversary Meeting on 30 November 1993,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 48:1 (1993). This is particularly ironic since the Royal Society is the very birthplace of British empiricism.
  31. Walton, “Social Work as a Social Institution,” 12.
  32. Vickers and Kouzmin, “New Managerialism and Australian Police Organizations,” 15.
  33. Roger Thomspon, “How Business Schools Lost Their Way,” Harvard Business School Alumni Bulletin, December 2007; available from http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/bulletin/2007/december/ businesschools.htm. Last accessed on 15 June, 2008).
  34. Rakesh Khurana, Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession (New York: Princeton University Press, 2007).
  35. “Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Volume 22,” 31 August 1946, http://www.bjornetjenesten.dk/ teksterdk/Nurnbergprocessen/31-8-46.htm. Last accessed on 30 October, 2008.
  36. Much has been written about whether the Internet is akin to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon; for example, Mark Winokur, “The Ambiguous Panopticon: Foucault and the Codes of Cyberspace,” http://www. ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=371. Last accessed on 30 October, 2008. However, these discussions do not take into account the experience of the web through the filter of a corporate portal.
  37. Kevin D Haggerty and Richard V Ericson, “The Surveillant Assemblage,” British Journal of Sociology, 51:4 (2000).
  38. Paul A Strassmann, The Politics of Information Management: Policy Guidelines (New Canaan, CT: The Information Economics Press, 1995).
  39. “College secretary wins spying damages against employer | 18 Apr 2007 | ComputerWeekly.com,” http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2007/04/18/223266/college-secretary-wins-spyingdamages- against-employer.htm. Last accessed on 30 October, 2008.
  40. The “NSW Office of Industrial Relations, Workplace Surveillance Act,” http://www.industrialrelations. nsw.gov.au/rights/employer/workplace+surveillance+act.html (last accessed on 30 October, 2008) for example, rules that it “does not prevent or significantly restrict employers from conducting email and internet surveillance. All the Act requires is that notice of such surveillance is given.” At the time of writing, there is even less protection for employees in the legislation of other states of Australia.
  41. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October, 59 (1992), 3-7 (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press).
  42. Ellen M Kirsh, David W Phillips and Donna E McIntyre, “Recommendations for the Evolution of Cyberlaw,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 2:2 (1996).
  43. “BBC NEWS | Technology | Google censors itself for China,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ technology/4645596.stm. Last accessed on 30 October, 2008.
  44. “‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001,’” http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html. Last accessed on 30 October, 2008.
  45. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, “S. 2248: FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (GovTrack.us),” http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s110-2248. (Last accessed on 30 October, 2008.) Amongst other things, this Act effectively allows US agencies unquestioned access to data belonging to subjects of “foreign powers,” i.e. anyone outside the US using American software.
  46. At the time of writing, although there have emerged some state and territory legislations concerning human rights (the first of these was passed in the ACT only as late as 2004!), Australia seems to be the last developed country not to have a national Bill of Rights. New Zealand has had a Bill of Rights since 1990.
  47. Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust (Penguin, 2001), http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/. Last accessed on 30 October, 2008.
  48. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 311–312.
  49. Ibid.
  50. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1972), xi.
  51. Víctor Farías, Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).
  52. I do not wish to suggest by this that the present university regimes are a return to fascism or are currently capable of condoning equivalent violence, but simply to note how the unhealthy trend towards justifying total administration with irrational “instrumental” reasons contradicts the essential mission of universities – however worthy or unworthy the ultimate goal.
  53. Malcolm Saunders, “The Madness and Malady of Managerialism,” Quadrant Magazine 50:3 (2006).

Dr George Petelin is Senior Lecturer in Art Theory and Coordinator of Postgraduate Studies at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. His primary research interests are visual art criticism and art as research.