Coping with Managerialism and Instrumentalism in Academic Work: Acquiring Emotional Competence, Developing Creative Ideas, and Finding Meaning

This thesis explores how academics experience managerialism and instrumentalism in academia. The phenomenon is investigated from the self work perspective. The thesis contributes to the literature on academic work and academic life by offering the perspective of self work as a way of coping with the managerialism and instrumentalism in academia. Specifically, this thesis explains how managerialism and instrumentalism manifests itself in academia, in the form of ambiguous strategies of business schools, normative expectations of collectivity and value, and crisis of meaning in a profession. Further, I explore how academics experience these manifestations as certain types of tension: emotional misalignment with institutional ethos, between normative expectations of what ideas are useful and legitimate, as opposed to a personal take on what is meaningful and worth developing, and between different dimensions of meaning in academic activity; and, how academics cope with these tensions by engaging in different kinds of self work. I argue that academics as people in institutions, who exercise a broader human agency, can utilize and cope with the experiences of tensions from managerialism and instrumentalism, and exercise self work as purposeful and reflexive efforts to shape their own self (Lawrence & Philips 2019). Stemming from the idea that our scholarly positionality and resulting academic work emerge in the broader scope of our life, engaging in the purposeful endeavour of self work will enable us to build understandings of our identity, academia, and our contribution to shaping the field.