Academicirregularities.wordpress.com Website Review

Crossing my Twitter timeline yesterday was a piece I might not have ordinarily encountered.  ‘From episodic to continuous change’.  by James Hutchinson of the University of Exeter sets out to reflect on “key foundations for supporting continuous improvement rather than on the detail of the process itself.”  It occurred to me that if universities are at all concerned with reputation management, pieces like this might  cause a few of the best academics, students and professional staff to press pause on their online applications. As I said on Twitter, this is one of the most vacuous examples of management discourse I have seen in a while. I say ‘in a while’ because I have been outside of universities for over two years now and so my exposure is more limited, but oh, how I’ve missed it.  to expose underlying power relations within universities as revealed by the discourse of management. The piece on change management made me itch to get out the red pen and annotate some familiar managerial themes. Let me offer a critical an*lysis of precisely why this piece is so alienating, and so damaging of an institution’s reputation before the majority of academics.  Frequently, in university managerial discourse, we see the employment of abstract nouns with shape-shifting definitions. Word of the week is nebulous, and that is exactly what we find here. Such words have been designated by Urcioli  (2000: 4) as Strategically Deployable Shifters (SDS). She defines SDSs as follows:  > expression in field A are engaged in a different pragmatic activity > from those using the formally identified term X in a referring > expression in field B. The salient interpretation of the term > depends on the relation of its user to its audience and so shifts SDSs, then, can mean one thing to one person and something else to another. In this piece we notice a lot of vague abstract terms: Change is always presented as something that must be managed and controlled by an elite cadre of consultants, or alternatively, by a