Behind Voluntary Redundancy in Universities: The Stories Behind the Story (original) (raw)

2020, The Australian Universities' review

This study brings forward possible and likely truths that lie behind tenured academics' decisions to take voluntary redundancies despite their jobs involving edifying, rewarding and 'passion' work. In other words, the legality of the severance agreement stresses a voluntary motivation, a choice; but the actuality behind the decision points to a range of histories, of backstories. This researcher asked 12 mid-career academics why they really took redundancy packages. Their stories reveal a raft of themes now commonplace in the literature of the 'ruined university'. This paper aims to develop the theory that what appears at an institutional level to be voluntary is in fact as far from a choice as imaginable. It is risky to speak of 'truths' when my methodology is that of an interpretivist narrative enquiry into individuals' decisions to leave tenured positions via 'voluntary' redundancy. I will speak more explicitly about the epistemological and ethical components shortly. My reference to 'truths' needs contextualisation. It comes from my reflections on the methodological anti-positivism and resolute interpretivism of the anti-capitalist sociologist, Max Weber (1864-1920). I was drawn, particularly, to his 1915 description (in The Methodology of Social Sciences, trans. 1949, p.176) of 'the skeletal structure of causal attributions and truths' (das feste Skelett der kausale Zurechnung). Such 'attributions' , he maintained, lie behind the 'facade' of narrative history and their presence differentiates a work of knowing from a fiction. This led me to wonder how these fabrications, based on the superficial story (the facade), become the official stories. In other wordsand it is not possible to paraphrase without calling Foucault to mindofficial history is fabricated by the legalistic stories of the powerful. This historical process Behind voluntary redundancy in universities The stories behind the story Martin Andrew Otago Polytechnic At a time when universities internationally participate in continual processes of restructuring, repositioning and reprioritising, calls for 'voluntary' redundancy among teaching and learning staff become frequent events. Australian and New Zealand academics, whose stories inform this study, have, particularly, been made subject to severance, voluntary or otherwise, at a time when the modernised university has become the managed, neoliberalised university and, over time, the 'ruined' or 'toxic' university. This study is a narrative enquiry aiming to capture, represent and examine the stories of mid-and late-career higher education teaching professionals during this unsettling period of disturbance and flux. In the light of studies on 'voluntary' redundancy and scholarship critiquing the mechanisms of power and repression of the corporatised university, this researcher asked 12 mid-career academics why they really took redundancy packages with a view to exposing the experienced truth behind the official institutional story that academic professionals 'chose' voluntary redundancy packages.