Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

address to when things go not as beneficial as planned or agreed to. On the other
hand we are the ones who receive the extra allowances if things turn out unexpectedly
well. On their turn managers translate the responsibilities, the addressing and the
rewards to their members of staff and teams.
The choreography of the managers themselves is not written by themselves. As such
the managers constitute and reconstitute managerial practices - functionalize social
objects according to Mead (1923) - which are brought into Higher Education connected
to developments around budgetary autonomy, accountability and governability as
mentioned before. These practices are derived from commercial organizations, aiming
at producing an entrepreneurial spirit within the institutions. NPM is used as the label
for these managerial practices.
In the USA NPM spread its wings during the Reagan Administration (1981-1989) and in
due course was exported to the European continent. From the 1980s it overflowed the
public sector in the Netherlands (Karsten, 2008). The hard sell of NPM fits in a long
tradition of transferring tools and techniques which are developed within management
consultancies from North American origins to commercial and non-profit organizations
(Hellema and Marsman, 1997; McKenna, 2006). Selling their tools and techniques
is the way of earning money for management consultancy firms. Tools and
techniques for which, by the way, is a lack of scientific evidence (Stacey, 2010); hey are
merely part of consultancy rhetoric (Sonnaville, 2005). Which, again by the way, makes
it remarkable why management traditions developed within enduring institutions as
universities - for instance in the Netherlands the University Leiden exists since 1575,
and the University Groningen exists since 1614 – are not brought to commercial organizations
(McKenna, 2006).
The introduction of a NPM-way of thinking brought performativity as an imposed cult
value into play. As if performativity is some ideal which should override other values
and motives. In due course I came to understand that a plotline in my narratives is
about performativity. In the next I will elaborate on how performativity or NPM is
defined and criticized with regard to education. I will use these criticisms to reflect
upon what happened with regard to the subject of performativity in my narratives.
On performativity: apparently an attempt of learnification of education
To call to mind I staged Lyotard (1979) as the one who sensed the rise of performativity
in an early stage. Presumably he was standing in a long tradition of French criticisms
on an American way of life (Zeldin, 1977). He pointed to the dominating calculating
approach where efficiency rules and of which individualized responsibilities are dominant
features. For me it is obvious that with NPM performativity is at stake.
In line with Scott (1998) one can see that performativity is fundamentally based on the
idea that social reality can be planned. To translate that to organizational life, performativity
is to be recognised if “… the most powerful organization practioners think of
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