'Making a Spectacle of Oneself in the Academy Using the H-Index: From Becoming an Artificial Person to Laughing at Absurdities' by Andrew C. Sparkes in (2021) 27(8-9) Qualitative Inquiry states
This article offers autoethnographic insights into the consequences of making a spectacle of oneself in the audit culture of the academy. Spectacle 1 explores my experiences of using the h-index as part of an annual salary review and how this made me feel like an artificial person. Spectacle 2 shows how, at a conference, I used laughter to expose some absurdities of the h-index and felt better for doing so. Stories that tell different truths about ourselves in combination with the corporeality of laughter, I suggest, can assist us to re-attune ourselves and resist the process of becoming artificial persons.
Sparkes comments
A great deal has changed since I first gained university employment in the mid-1980s, not all of it for the better. In recent years, various scholars have documented the deep affective somatic and spiritual crises that many academics are suffering from that threatens to overwhelm them as they are propelled toward burnout or something worse (Burrows, 2012; Gill, 2010; Moriarty, 2019; Pelias, 2004; Sparkes, 2007). The reasons why these various crises have come about since the early 1990s has been well documented and critiqued (Collini, 2017; Davies & Bansel, 2010; Davies et al., 2006; Smyth, 2017; Spooner, 2018; Spooner & McNinch, 2018; Tourish, 2019; Zawadzki & Jensen, 2020). This literature consistently places the blame for the deleterious changes in universities, and their subsequent impact on academic work and life, at the feet of the neoliberal project and the changes brought about by the processes of neoliberalization. One such process has been the development of an audit culture. This involves the quantification and evaluation of academic work along with an increasing dependence on these quantitative measures to define and assess academic productivity and efficiency as well as the reputation of individuals, disciplines and institutions.
According to Shore (2008), the term “audit culture” is of recent origin and was coined by sociologists and anthropologists to describe not so much a type of society, place, or people so much as a condition shaped by the use of “modern techniques and principles of financial audit, but in contexts far removed from the world of financial accountancy” (p. 279). For Schwandt (2015), however, the audit culture is not just about techniques but involves a “system of values and goals that becomes inscribed in social practices thereby influencing the self-understanding of a practice and its role in society” (p. 9).
In his detailed analysis of the rise of the audit culture in the academy, Spooner (2018) points out that while “productivity” pressures in academic settings are not new, what is new under the contemporary audit culture “is the sheer magnitude, depth, and ubiquity of audit culture’s implementation and pervasiveness” (p. 901). This has led to a situation in which academics are depersonalized, quantified, and constrained in their scholarship “via a suffocating array of metrics and technologies of governance” (p. 895). For Spooner, this situation has been made possible by the global confluence of market, managerialism, and measurement forces that are inextricably linked, interdependent, and mutually reinforcing in ways that lead to what he calls a “triple M” crisis that impacts in multiple ways on the daily lives of academics. In support of this, Bottrell and Manathunga (2019a) suggest that the production of an ever-expanding audit culture is fueled by managerial regimes that are obsessed with “academic performance, productivity and their measurement and surveillance through numerous forms of accountability” (p. 6).
Significantly, academics are now estimated to be one of the most surveilled groups in history and can be ranked on more than one hundred different scales and indices that measure their value (Erickson et al., 2020). Many, according to Tourish (2019) and Warren (2017), feel under constant surveillance and experience their working lives as a series of administrative moments involving facts and figures to be collected and submitted for various assessments and audits either pending, happening, or being autopsied. Faced with such increased scrutiny the figure of the “neurotic academic” described by Loveday (2018) has become emblematic of the contradictions facing the contemporary academy suffused as it is with anxiety. This anxiety, for many, is generated by their entanglement in what Burrows (2012) calls “metric assemblages” that have taken on a life of their own to become autonomous actors in the academy (e.g., the Research Excellence Framework in the UK). Such assemblages, according to Han (2020), are an essential feature under neoliberalism of the historical shift from ritual to “dataism”:
The human being now has to comply with data . . . Enormous volumes of data displace the human being from its central position as producer of knowledge, and the human being itself is reduced to a data set, a variable that can be calculated and manipulated . . . Transparency, the imperative of dataism, is the source of the compulsion to transform everything into data and information, that is, to make it visible. (Han, 2020, pp. 81–82)
Dataistic regimes of performativity are made possible by dramatic increases in the amount of highly portable but depersonalized raw data available to university managers. This leads to complex social environments and the people within them becoming “machine readable” and reduced to a score that then allows academics to be metrically positioned within a hierarchy of status according to apparently “objective” managerial determinations of individual success and value to institutional prestige. In this process, as Valero et al. (2019) argue, there is no need to ask key questions about the situational or contextual conditions such as history, experience, material resources, teaching loads, and access to resources which people have available for performing their measurable activities in the first place to gain their score. Yet, these scores can now be used to make important decisions about their lives and careers.
Of course, as Cheek (2018) acknowledges, accountability is a perfectly reasonable expectation of academics and universities in relation to their use of public monies. For her, however, it is the way that research products, research production, and demonstrating accountability are thought about that is the issue. This is particularly so when researchers become positioned “as data collectors, and research is reduced to data for meeting the criteria of these audit exercises” (p. 327). In support of this view, Tourish (2019) notes that we have now reached the stage where the systems designed to ensure accountability have overwhelmed what we are trying to do because we are always trying to feed the insatiable hunger of the beast of measurement. Feeding this beast is certainly wasteful of time, but this is just one of many negative effects brought about by the audit culture that include the withering away of collegial life along with the norms of academic community, such as, the will to critique and the promotion of critical thought (Collini, 2017; Davies, 2005; Lincoln, 2018; Smyth, 2017; Spooner, 2018; Westheimer, 2018).
Significantly, Tourish (2019) points out that “Auditing is not a neutral gaze trained on what we do. It transforms the subject of its inquiry” (p. 35) and materializes new ways of thinking, doing, and being in the academy. These new ways, as various scholars have suggested, transform people into auditable entities and produce specific sorts of worker subjects that require individual practitioners to organize themselves as a response to targets, indicators, and evaluations and to focus their energies on “what counts.” (Ball, 2003; Davies & Bansel, 2010; Shore & Wright, 2015; Smyth, 2017). In addition, as newly responsibilized, flexible, entrepreneurial, and competitive individuals operating within the research marketplace, they are also expected to set aside personal beliefs and commitments and live an existence of calculation as part of becoming what Gill (2018) calls a quantified self in the neoliberal academy.
In terms of transforming oneself into “what counts” within the audit culture, academics are increasingly incited to make spectacles of themselves. This incitement to make a spectacle of oneself is, according to Cheek and Persson (2020), driven by the neoliberal market-based principles that have permeated higher education and created new imperatives that include the need to be visible and tell various audiences about our research and ourselves to gain and retain a competitive edge over others. This imperative, as Cheek and Øby (2019) point out, is particularly strong in relation to almetrics that involve new forms of researcher and researcher-related metrics that make the digital, online self both visible and calculable. Not surprisingly, they note that entrepreneurs and experts along with tailor-made courses in research-related institutions have now emerged to guide and help academics make the “right” kind of spectacle of themselves online so as to be “relevant” in the research marketplace.
For some, making a spectacle of oneself in the academy provides an opportunity to be successful in the research marketplace while for others, even if successful, the psychosocial costs of doing so are high as it can lead to inner conflicts and feelings of inauthenticity and low self-worth (Gill, 2018; Moriarty, 2019; Ruth, 2008; Sparkes, 2007; Warren, 2017). This raises questions about how academics interpret and respond to this incitement to make a spectacle of themselves and how they feel emotionally about doing so in the process. Autoethnographic work that draws on personal experience to purposefully comment on and critique cultural practices, embrace vulnerability with a purpose, and create a reciprocal relationship with the audience in the hope of compelling a response would seem to be one way to address such questions (Adams & Herrmann, 2020; Holman Jones et al., 2013; Sparkes, 2020). This said, some consideration first needs to be given as to whether or not we need another autoethnography from inside the university and for what purpose.
