Notes on this paper by Mollie Dollinger for a reading group tomorrow: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13562517.2020.1722631?scroll=top&needAccess=true
Projectification refers to the temporal organisation of work into discrete time-limited projects. This involves an atomisation of work so that projects can be compared in terms of their process and outcomes. Dollinger queries what is lost, overlooked or squeezed out by this drive towards standardisation and calcubility:
Yet, while universities that adopt projectification to support standardized practices and calculable results, what are they losing in the process? How much of the value of academic work is found in the unregulated nooks and crannies of our days and workloads? Before the sector uniformly adheres to a projectification perspective, what are the alternatives? After all, it is within universities where academic staff frequently espouse the importance of multiplicity, relativism, and subjectivism over a single truth to their students. However, these same basic epistemological principles are too infrequently applied when questioning the way in which we organize work and perceive time.
It’s not clear to me this is a solid epistemological basis upon which to oppose projectification or that any epistemological basis would be solid. This points to a broader ambiguity in the paper which reflects these epistemological starting points; Dollinger talks about projectification in terms of the conceptualization of time and space at work, as if this was simply a matter of how work is described which in turn shapes how it is undertaken. This lends itself to an academic folk politics in which ‘they’ (bad managers, imagined to be coming from outside) impose ‘their’ conceptualisation onto us, suggesting that all we need to do is recover ‘our’ conceptualisation and assert it with sufficient conviction. It’s a cultural politics of resistance which isn’t adequate to its own task and, when academics do it, often ends up mystifying its own assumptions and embeddedness in the system it effects a critical distance from*.
Crucially it struggles to account for how ‘we’ think and work in projectified terms in ways that cannot straightforwardly be explained as internalising external conceptualization. For example the pleasures of projectification, the sense of mastery which can come with the project form and the forms of cultural engagement facilitated by being able to flip between heterogenous projects. I like projects for these reasons, I don’t like managerialism and these are considered judgements which Dollinger’s approach does epistemological violence to in spite of its avowed ethos of recovering the lived experience of academics. In fact Dollinger does seem to accept elements of what I’m saying here:
It is also not unreasonable to assume that project-based work, where a degree of flexibility on how the work is conducted is afforded to the worker, is more acceptable than top-down hierarchies in the university setting. Previous research has found that the academic worker can be hostile to direct supervision (Anderson Citation2008; Ylijoki Citation2016). However, many of these presumed benefits may also been seen as negative consequences to those in academia, highlighting the often polarized viewpoints on how time and work should be constructed.
But I don’t think the conceptual framing can accommodate these as anything other than ad hoc insights. I’m not entirely hostile to the discursive approach, in the sense that I agree that “projectification encourages the definition and attainment of financial or otherwise desired targets, monitoring of the academic and professional workforce through senior advisors and managers, and adoption of auditing mechanisms”. In this sense I would argue the struggle could be, at least in part, over how projects are defined rather than seeing managerialism as intrinsic to the project form in a way that is inherently corrupting. I’d make a similar point to Kate Nash’s distinction between socialising and marketising bureaucracy in higher education.
There’s an ontology in a lot of critical university studies which I find totally unhelpful in its tendency to obviate nuances which are agentially significant. In the more detailed section of the paper there’s lots of statements like projectification “can encourage teachers to spend time thinking” which I couldn’t disagree with. But the space these tendencies leave open, the space of individual and collective agency at the level of practical reasoning in everyday working life, is exactly what I’m suggesting the overall conceptual framing is remarkably tone deaf to. These sit uneasily with parallel statements like “The indoctrination of the projectification timescape and way of working” suggesting that there’s no clear account of agency underpinning this. Does projectification ‘indoctrinate’ staff and students or does it simply ‘encourage’ them to think in certain ways. A lot hinges on the difference here.
Mark Carrigan 