Management and Organisation Research Community Seminar – Professor Greg J Bamber, Professor Martyna Sliwa (Durham University Business School) and Professor Iain Munro (NUBS) acting as discussants

Title: Neoliberal Universities and Academic Capitalism: Job Insecurity and Stress in Liberal Market Economies

Date: 9 July 2024

Time: 15:30- 17:00

Location: NUBS.2.04

If you would like to attend, please register using the following link:

Neoliberal Universities and Academic Capitalism: Job Insecurity and Stress in Liberal Market Economies

Speaker:  Professor Greg J Bamber 

We are also pleased to have Professor Martyna Sliwa (Durham University Business School) and Professor Iain Munro (NUBS) acting as discussants

Prof. Greg J Bamber is @ Monash Business School, and Research Theme Lead: Future of Work, Monash Data Futures Institute, Monash University, Australia. He is a Visiting Professor, Newcastle University. His research covers several sectors including aviation, hospitals and universities, and includes a focus on implications of new technologies. He has more than two hundred academic publications including: “Human resource management in the age of generative artificial intelligence: Perspectives and research directions on ChatGPT,” Human Resource Management Journal, and International & Comparative Employment Relations: Global Crises & Institutional Responses, 7th edition, SAGE. He collaborates with colleagues, international organizations, private- and public-sector enterprises, governments, and the International Labour Organization. He has served on many editorial boards, as an arbitrator, and as a director on non-profit boards. He has also served as president of several academies including the International Federation of Scholarly Associations of Management. For more details, see his Monash profile or LinkedIn: gregjbamber.

Abstract:

Higher education (HE) has been transformed; it has been neoliberalised, and adopted forms of “academic capitalism” in such Liberal Market Economies as Australia, Canada, USA and UK. This includes HE organisations adopting practices from New Public Management and the private sector, for example, commercialisation, economisation, financialisaton and marketisation of universities in the form of competition for grants and students’ fees. An aim is to maximise their reputations and surpluses, relying on “soft income” from fees, especially from international students, with a reliance on contingent academics, with managerialism, low trust, and insecure work. What are the implications for academia and academics? This study analyses employment precarity, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. We contribute to the literature on academic capitalism, which hitherto has been published mainly in HE domains. Drawing on two unique cross-national sources of survey data, we compare academics’ experiences with job insecurity and related stress in Australian and Canadian universities. Although these two countries are similar to the UK as liberal market economies, Australian and British HE have become neoliberalised and adopted academic capitalism to an even greater extent than Canadian HE. Our findings show that academics in Australia faced more negative outcomes than those in Canada. Changes in HE have reduced the prevalence of decent work in universities, and this in turn has increased subjective stress. Australian universities’ bigger reliance on volatile sources of “soft income”, played a key role in explaining the variations. When explaining cross-national differences, we also consider the role of institutions and areas for future research.