Louise Morley

Producing New Workers: Quality, equality and employability in higher education

This article addresses employability as a performance indicator in higher education. Questions are raised about the values behind seemingly neutral indicators of value, and whether the same employability attributes have similar economic and professional values for different social groups. A central argument is that employability is a socially decontextualised signifier in so far as it overlooks how social structures such as gender, race, social class and disability interact with labour market opportunities. The article also interrogates hegemonic assumptions behind the concept of key or core skills in higher education.

The rules of the game: women and the leaderist turn in higher education

This paper engages with Diana Leonards writing on how gender is constituted in the academy. It offers an international review of feminist knowledge on how gender and power interact with leadership in higher education. It interrogates the ‘leaderist turn’ or how leadership has developed into a popular descriptor and a dominant social and organisational technology in academia. It considers some of the explanatory frameworks that have been marshalled to analyse womens leadership aspirations and absences. In doing so, it attempts to unmask the ‘rules of the game’ that lurk beneath the surface rationality of academic meritocracy. It also poses questions about the relentless misrecognition of womens leadership capacities and suggests the need for an expanded lexicon of leadership with which to move into the university of the future.

Lost leaders: women in the global academy

Drawing on data gathered from British Council seminars in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Dubai on Absent Talent: Women in Research and Academic Leadership (2012–2013), this paper discusses academic womens experiences and explanations for womens under-representation as knowledge leaders and producers in the global academy. Participants from South and East Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Australasia and Europe shared experiences and identified desires for future action in the form of a Manifesto for Change. The paper combines empirical data on enablers, impediments and attractions with consideration of debates on womens exclusions and disqualifications from academic leadership and knowledge production. A key question is whether women are desiring, dismissing or being disqualified from senior leadership positions in the global academy.

Opportunity or exploitation? Women and quality assurance in higher education

Based on interviews with 18 UK women academics and managers on quality and power in higher education, this article interrogates the impact of quality assurance discourses and practices on women in higher education. Micro‐level analysis of the effects of audit and the evaluative state seem to suggest that hegemonic masculinities and gendered power relations are being reinforced by the emphasis on competition, targets, audit trails and performance (Morley, 2003a). Furthermore, pedagogic space for exploring social justice issues is closing with the emphasis on learning outcomes and student consumerism (Morley, 2003b). Yet women are also gaining new visibility as a consequence of the creation of a new cadre of quality managers. Quality assurance, as a regime of power, appears to offer both repressive and creative potential for women. This article will explore whether quality signs and practices are gendered and whether these represent opportunity or exploitation for women in the academy.

School effectiveness: new managerialism, quality and the Japanization of education

School effectiveness is a microtechnology of change. It is a relay device, which transfers macro policy into everyday processes and priorities in schools. It is part of the growing apparatus of performance evaluation. Change is brought about by a focus on the school as a site-based system to be managed. There has been corporate restructuring in response to the changing political economy of education. There are now new work regimes and radical changes in organizational cultures. Education, like other public services, is now characterized by a range of structural realignments, new relationships between purchasers and providers and new coalitions between management and politics. In this article, we will argue that the school effectiveness movement is an example of new managerialism in education. It is part of an ideological and technological process to industrialize educational productivity. That is to say, the emphasis on standards and standardization is evocative of production regimes drawn from industry. There is a belief that education, like other public services can be managed to ensure optimal outputs and zero defects in the educational product.

Change and Equity in Higher Education

Abstract In this article, I explore the dynamic relationship between political and organizational change in higher education. Change is interrogated in relation to policies and discourses of New Right reform, mass expansion, new managerialism, equity and post‐modernist theories of power, with questions raised about the interconnection of demographic changes, consumer entitlement and equality of opportunity. I consider the extent to which economic, intellectual and socio‐cultural changes intersect. Equity is examined in relation to the democratic rhetoric of enhanced access and connections are made between equality and quality by questioning the changing nature of the product being accessed by new student populations.

Subjected to review: engendering quality and power in higher education

Both feminism and quality assurance movements have attempted to deconstruct and reconstruct the academy. Both have called for more transparency in procedures, accountability from elite professional groups and the privileging of the student experience. Both are globalized systems calling for transformation. However, it is questionable as to whether these two forces for change can form strategic alliances, or whether indeed they are in oppositional relationship. As a dominant regime of power in the UK academy today, quality assurance both exposes the micropolitics of gendered power in organizations and creates its own structures and systems of power. Quality assurance is part of the modernization process of the public services. However, gender equity is not a performance indicator in UK quality audits. In this paper, I interrogate the gendered implications of quality assurance, with particular reference to the assessment of teaching and learning in the UK (the Quality Assurance Agencys Subject Review). Drawing on empirical data and conceptual critiques, I will argue that quality assurance, as a regime of power, is gendered in its conception and practice.

Sister-matic: gender mainstreaming in higher education

This article theorises findings from a research project investigating gender equity in Commonwealth higher education. The study interrogated enablers and impediments to gender equity in South Africa, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Uganda and Tanzania. The focus of inquiry was access, curriculum transformation and staff development. This article examines one aspect of the project, that is, how the principles of gender mainstreaming have been applied to curriculum transformation. This will be explored in the context of the implementation gap between macro international and national policies for gender equality and meso and micro level change. Policies for gender equality in general, and gender mainstreaming in particular, have been developed internationally, and variously interpreted at national and organisational levels. The comparative nature of the project should help to broaden debates on equity in the globalised knowledge economy.

All you need is love: feminist pedagogy for empowerment and emotional labour in the academy

This paper critically examines the concept of empowerment and considers the contradictory role of feminist teachers and authority in dominant institutions of knowledge production. Questions are raised about the emotional labour required to sustain feminist pedagogy for empowerment in the academy. Issues of student resistance, group dynamics, difference and diversity in women‐only groups are interrogated using the theoretical frameworks of critical and feminist pedagogy and postmodernism. The paper draws illustratively on interviews with feminist academics who were asked how they applied feminism to their pedagogy/ teaching methodologies, and students who identified as feminists were asked for their views on styles of classroom interaction.

Sounds, silences and contradictions: Gender equity in British commonwealth higher education*

Many women globally are still asking the same questions about participation and more poignantly why, having decided to join the procession, they are still at the back of the parade. The devaluing of women has become a normalised social relation in the academy. The academy forms part of a matrix of gender relations, with gender inequality omnipresent in the wider civil society. For example, 66 per cent of the world’s illiterates are women. On average, women’s salaries are 25 per cent lower than those of men, and politically and globally women represent only 10 per cent of parliamentarians. The political economy of higher education is changing. Despite potent advocacy and inquiry combined more recently with progressive legislation in many national locations, there is horizontal and vertical segregation in the academy globally. While there have been some equity gains in higher education*/particularly in relation to women’s access as students*/universal patriarchal power appears hard to denaturalise. Mapping the terrain has been one strategy for change. Research conducted by the Association of Commonwealth Universities indicates that women are seriously underrepresented in senior positions in higher education institutions (HEIs). Women’s under-representation in senior and decision-making roles is not merely symbolic. It is a form of status injury. It represents both cultural misrecognition and material and intellectual oppression. Gender equity is not just about quantitative change. A key question is whether there is an ideal morphology of the gender-equitable university and a collective dimension to gender equity globally. We need to consider what is to be equalised when we call for equality. What are the aspects of gender inequality that universally disturb and discomfort? In this article I aim to examine the nature of writing on gendered change in higher education institutions in the British Commonwealth of Nations and attempt to analyse some of the issues that have emerged from scholarship and practice relating to Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 20, No. 46, March 2005