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“The Last in the Food Chain”: Dignity of Polish Junior Academics and Doctoral Candidates in the Face of Performance Management

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The Future of University Education

Part of the book series: Palgrave Critical University Studies ((PCU))

Abstract

The main aim of this chapter is to explore the relation between performance management at Polish university and the dignity of junior academics as well as doctoral students. Dignity is a feature that allows a human to fully accomplish his humanity. It signifies the ability to sense one’s own worth, as well as respect both for oneself and for other people. On the one hand, following the reasoning of Immanuel Kant, dignity is a moral category that does not require any preconditions to be fulfilled: it belongs to every human by the very reason of being a human. On the other hand, dignity is not only an immanent feature of the human, but it also represents a potentiality that should be updated, that is perfected in action. There is a growing number of critics who claim that modern changes of the university, based on the market fundamentalism and performance management paradigm, undermine the academic dignity, culture, ethos and trust and weaken the cultural mission of the university. The current fashion to reform the public sector in Poland using the market and overeconomized model of New Public Management leads to implementing a performance-based imperative for managing academia and reinforces the negative results of the managerial revolution that began within the higher education institutions already in the mid-twentieth century. I focus on the following question: how instrumental, neoliberal reforms of the university affect the academic dignity, which is dependent on the autonomy, freedom, humanistic quality of management processes, discursive and deliberative communication, research and teaching courage, space for resistance and nonconformity? I present the first reflections concerning the in-depth interviews I made with Polish doctoral candidates and junior academics who decided to go away to Sweden. So far, there have been no research projects about performance management and dignity of academics at Polish universities, which means that we are dealing with a significant cognitive gap in the humanistic management discourse.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Junior academics are often challenged with a clause in their temporary contracts on the necessity of performing administrative tasks during the year – it is however vague and does not specify the exact hours and tasks but only defines the per cent share in relation to the teaching and research duties. This might provide for a large scope of exploitation.

  2. 2.

    An interesting thread that often occurred in the utterance of my female respondents was stressing by them that they did not see any chances for entering into a relationship with anyone from outside the institution. It could even be argued that the neoliberal performance system at universities affected the choices of partners in academic workers’ relationships.

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  1. Institute of Culture, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland

    Michał Zawadzki

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  1. Michał Zawadzki
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  1. Lincoln Business School, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, United Kingdom

    Michał Izak

  2. Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom

    Monika Kostera

  3. Institute of Culture, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland

    Michał Zawadzki

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Zawadzki, M. (2017). “The Last in the Food Chain”: Dignity of Polish Junior Academics and Doctoral Candidates in the Face of Performance Management. In: Izak, M., Kostera, M., Zawadzki, M. (eds) The Future of University Education. Palgrave Critical University Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46894-5_4

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