Masculinities and homosociality in Academia
Background:
In this WP, we inquire into how masculinities in the Swedish university sector are produced and re-produced in a discursive context of an emerging enterprise culture - the new form of managerialist, individualised, performance-based workplace culture that have emerged in many universities across the globe in the wake of neoliberalism and New Public Management (Ekman et al, 2018). In contrast to earlier patriarchal and nepotistic cultures, gender equality and diversity perspectives are now often promoted and integrated in managerial agendas – implying that many men with senior academic and/or managerial posts are not only expected to work with such issues, but also to embrace them as natural parts of modern, professional, transparent and effective academic leadership. The transparent and objective ‘hard facts’ emerging from research assessment exercises, bibliometrics, merit valuation procedures, recruitments and promotion regulations etc. supposedly cuts through personalities, charisma, reputations and homosocial relations – implying that the leeway of senior male academics to have their way without being questioned or challenged is not as significant as before.
At the same time, there is a significant stream of literature criticising such workplace cultures and leadership practices for still discriminating against women and other minorities – but in new and subtler ways than traditional nepotism and favoritism (cf. Helgesson Svedberg & Sjögren 2019). In this project, we ask how this happens and how it is related to emergent forms of masculinity and homosociality. We therefore focus our attention on the consequences for men in Academia – on the new masculinities emerging as part of the enterprise culture – but also on the consequences for Academia of influential men adopting these new masculinities.
Harley (2003) suggests that masculine dominance in Academia is reconstructed and sustained by use of new arguments, through new managerialist values and behaviors – and that the traditional structural subordination of women live on in new ways and through new practices. It happens through invisibilisation of women's relational responsibilities outside work and the expectations to bring these responsibilities also into the workplace, through over-subjecting women to detailed performance criteria and workplace regulations, through normalizing mens’ career patterns and thereby downplaying women’s merits (Van den Brink & Benschop 2012), through organizing important academic events in a way that promotes homosociality whilst allowing for sexism and harassment against women (Biggs et al, 2018). As noted by Armato (2013) this tend to happen through masculinities characterized by ‘enlightened sexism’, i.e. men who openly support gender equality and feminism in academic workplaces and accrue status and privileges as a result of this, while enabling many existing discriminatory and sexist cultural practices to continue. Harley (2003) notes that apparently contradictory academic masculinism’s seem to blend well together; aggressive, competitive and self-promoting behaviors in combination with a patriarchal superiority exercised through references to reason, objectivity, merit, and factuality. Trying to understand how this is sustained over time, Pruit et al. (2021) suggest that toxic masculinities in academic settings operate through a form of indirect violence, one that prevents ‘others’ in the workplace to voice their concerns, implying that alternative stories and perspectives remain untellable or untold.
In this study we want to probe into these new masculinities – emerging in academic workplace cultures characterized by managerialism, entrepreneurialism, performance-based governance and careerism. These are masculinities that tend to embrace and promote all sorts of organizational policies and values – such as gender equality and diversity – because it is the modern, smart, decisive, coaching and transparent thing to do, but also because it is a way to retain power and leeway. Men aiming at successful careers in such contexts will be expected to adjust to these cultural expectations, in order not to become mobilized out of homosocial communities and rendered unfit for academic leadership roles. At the same time, traditional structural subordination of women may well live on and the reconstruction of inequalities, may well happen in new arenas and in new ways.
Given the general aim of the study - to analyse how emergent academic masculinities and homosocial cultures are produced and re-produced at senior levels in Swedish Academia – the following empirical questions are of interest to explore in the project:
What are the main concerns and experiences of male academic leaders and managers in their daily work? What main messages and perspectives do they articulate, how are organizational goals and agendas at different levels experienced?
What different discursive resources are invoked, how are emergent notions of enterprise combined with extant traditional professional academic norms? What ideals are constructed and how?
What are the consequences for men in terms of what various masculine subject positions that are made available, possible, invisible or impossible?
The empirical material consists of interviews with lecturers at social science departments at Swedish universities and a netnographic study of discussion forums where academics discuss current issues in the Swedish university sector.
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