Corrosive Leadership (Or Bullying by Another Name): A Corollary of the Corporatised Academy?

...While the bullying phenomenon does not lend itself to ‘robust conclusions with regard to causality’, I have postulated that the reason why the incidence of bullying in universities is becoming more pronounced may be correlated with the move to corporatisation. The perception on the part of managers that they are the new elite whose role is to increase productivity and maximise limited resources through constant surveillance and auditing has contributed to the normalisation of a corrosive form of leadership.

Di Martino suggests that we tackle the causes, rather than the effects of violence at work by developing a preventive, systemic and targeted approach. This is all very well in theory, but it would require rolling back the corporatist phenomenon and reinstating principles of collegiality to allow a range of voices to be heard. I am sceptical about such a rollback, at least in the short term. Not only is it apparent that governments are expecting universities themselves to assume greater responsibility for their operating costs, the new managerialism has created a class of powerful players with a substantial investment in its retention.

Thus, while initiatives, such as the development of codes of practice by occupational health and safety bodies and unions, are contributing to the emergence of a new public discourse, such codes are incapable of addressing the factors that have contributed to the political economy of the corporatist university. Educative and prophylactic measures are highly desirable, but they can go only so far in an unstable and uncertain climate, where students are customers and academics are productive units, whose value is assessed primarily in terms of the competitive dollars they generate. Powerful line managers, whose role it is to exhort greater productivity from these unruly units, have made themselves indispensable in the transformation of universities as producers and facilitators of the new economy. Hence, the corporatised university, with its over-zealous managerialism, competition for resources and eviscerated notion of academic freedom, is likely to represent an ongoing source of grievance about workplace aggression.

A formal avenue of redress will have to be devised to placate this dissonance. However, rather than relying on a traditional model of linear causality, which focuses on linking ‘victim’ and wrongdoer, a new remedial model would be better off addressing the political environment that has engendered the harm. A single-minded focus on psychopathic managers absolves corporations, including universities, from responsibility for the fear, the insecurity and the relentless pressure to be evermore productive that the market message induces.

From: Corrosive Leadership (Or Bullying by Another Name): A Corollary of the Corporatised Academy? By Margaret Thornton, La Trobe University, Australia.