All the questions are mine; the responses come straight from their book. When I ran this by him, Davydd also wanted to add a few clarifications, which I’ll insert in italics. If anyone has further queries, please comment.

Defining Neo-Taylorism

What is Taylorism?

Taylorism comes from early generations of industrial goods manufacturing. Its application to universities, medicine, law and other areas where the product is not a material good began as an analogy and was infused with bureaucratic logic. Current neo-Taylorism is a radical break with Taylorism that converts services like teaching, medicine, and social services into fictitious commodities subject to “casino capitalist” control by apical authorities via accountability, and extraction of surplus for administrative salaries for the benefit of external businesses and governments. [91n1]

DG comments: Perhaps some clarification here is needed. Taylorism was invented after the industrial revolution; there were large manufacturing plants before but more in the form of collections of artisans. So the process is longer.

What is its objective?

In Taylorism, the essential idea is to create specialized jobs that optimize productive output. Each employee is only trained to perform one specific job. If a co-worker gets sick, the only option available is to call in a substitute worker to take over the job. Hopefully the management will have trained other employees to take on this specific job but this often is not the case. [117]

Why the “neo” in “neo-Taylorism”?

We use “neo” with the term “Taylorism” because F.W. Taylor would never have used the fictions of self-ownership and autonomy to describe the hierarchically imposed work systems he designed. He would have been unapologetic about advocating the unilateral authority of the “bosses” over the “workers.” [138]

What kind of organizational form does it yield?

Neo-Tayloristic systems involve significant redundancy of “parts” because they require large numbers of people, each one doing a single or relatively simple task. This is visible in the enormous and increasing administrative bloat in public universities. These redundant “parts” have to be coordinated and controlled from above because the redundant “parts” only have their own skills and specific areas to work in and are not allowed to interact with other parts of the system outside of their boxes. The result is a fragmented set of socio-technical activities, the imposition of machine metaphors on work behavior, high specification of tasks by breaking them into the smallest areas of expertise possible, the alienation of the labor force from work process improvement, and the distancing of decision makers from the empirical realities of the processes they are making decisions about. [134]

DG comments: The dynamics are not exactly that these systems “require” large numbers of people, but that they employ vast numbers in non-value producing roles. Davydd Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs also hits this topic directly: It is not that the system requires this economically, but that the system produces this wasteful and inhumane use of people.

Neo-Taylorism and the disciplines

Why is knowledge organized in “departments”?

From the 1750s onward, scholars became evermore concerned as the massive expansion of the print media made the project of integrating and verifying knowledge at first difficult and then impossible. Faced with the impossibility of any one person or a group of general scholars to manage this expanding intellectual resource, they eventually hit on the idea of dividing knowledge into fields and attempting to guarantee comprehensive understanding of each field by having each discipline manage and verify the knowledge within it. This taxonomy was intended to organize all knowledge and gave both a new structure and meaning to the “university”. This taxonomy resulted in the Tayloristic system we now find to be so counter-productive (Wellmon 2015). [90-91]

So are the scholarly disciplines a counterforce to neo-Taylorism? Or are they a product of it?

For us the central problems are that, over a number of generations, faculty have converted themselves into members of disciplines, departments, professional associations, into editors of disciplinary journals, reviewers of disciplinary grants, and so on. In Ellen Messer-Davidow’s term, they are now “disciplined” (Messer-Davidow 2002) to accept the boundaries of their academic discipline and department, to color inside the lines, and to fend off any and all attacks on their space, resources, and subject matter. The mandated noncooperation among academic departments gives deans and higher administrators all the power they need because they only have to manipulate university resources and make departments and disciplines compete for them and their power at the apex of the system is assured.
This is not to say that within the disciplines, faculty are particularly cooperative. When frontally attacked by others, they may rally together out of self-interest but, in our experience, within department competition for gaining higher merit raises, faster promotions, bigger offices, and more graduate assistants trumps the kind of supposed intellectual solidarity that is a consistent founding myth of most disciplines and departments. Many academics are one-person businesses building their own “brand” by means of a curriculum vitae, national and international standing, the ability to get external support, invitations to be on editorial boards, grant review boards, etc. [145-146]

Neo-Taylorism and the misdirected nature of critique

What kind of academic consciousness does this fragmented system yield?

Despite the ongoing dreamwork of many academics who try to view themselves as part of a self-regulating guild of colleagues in the same discipline and academic field, organizationally they are individualized meritocratic subjects managed from above when it comes to working conditions, salary, contracts, promotions and dismissal, benefits, and job expectations. Rather than analyzing themselves in this organizational context, they often blame the stupidity and authoritarianism of “administrators” for the many experiences they have that do not conform to their guild and craftwork idealization. They do not spend effort learning how things came to be as they currently are. [90]

What about for students?

Students too live in a hierarchically organized world in which bureaucratically imposed standards, rules, and learning conditions prevail. Students are encouraged see themselves as voluntaristic individual actors who select institutions to study and work in, choose courses of study, and choose courses and make life plans individually. They too are subjects of a neo-Tayloristic system. They compete against each other to get into universities. While at the university, they are boxed in by requirements and rules, allowed in or excluded from particular courses and curricula, have little influence over the content of the courses, and, except for unusual crises, have little impact on the management of universities. Now many of them are debtors in the world system of finance. [91]

And for staff?

The non-academic staff and administrators most closely fit and take for granted the neo-Tayloristic system. They work according to hierarchically organized job classifications and definitions, within a multiplicity of organizational units that report upward, and they generally must obey chains of command. Senior university administrators sit atop these multiple hierarchies. It might seem that they are therefore in control but those familiar with organizational analysis also know that these administrators are themselves subject to the system. They compete with and discipline each other and they report upward to boards of trustees, state educational authorities, higher education associations, and markets of various sorts. They also compete with similar administrators at other institutions for better jobs, reputations, and salaries (Tuchman 2009). They enforce national and state higher education policies while they are also driven by them. [91]

DG comments: We were wrong to say that staff take for granted the neo-Tayloristic system, since there are many staff who find the system irrational and inhumane.

Is it hypocritical for scholars to denounce administrators’ neoliberal behavior?

When such people speak of academic freedom, they often mean freedom to be an entrepreneur in whatever way they see it fit in their department, college, university, and national and international arenas. They feel entitled to speak their minds on most subjects and expect to be listened to but they only rarely rally in defense of colleagues whose rights to free speech have been abridged either within or beyond the university. Given this, we think it is disingenuous for radical individualist academic entrepreneurs to disparage academic administrators who are similarly entrepreneurial or students who are trying to make pragmatic educational and economic decisions on their own behalf. The moral high ground that many academics claim to occupy does not seem quite so high to us. [146]

How about for students to denounce faculty?

For students to complain about the self-serving and self-regarding behavior of faculty is common and occasionally the complaints are legitimate. But students, especially now that they are told to behave as customers, are capable of intensely self-regarding, competitive, and hostile behavior toward each other. They often show a startling lack of interest in the fates of anyone but themselves and their personal goals. [146]

And are the staff in a position to criticize?

Staff are locked in hierarchical competitions with each other and to keep their positions in the system secure. Solidarity and cooperation are rarely rewarded; more often they are punished. Administrators are under the gun from above, compete with each other, and often are intensely disliked and disrespected by those below them, hardly a joyful working life. [146]

Does neo-Taylorism discourage actors from understanding their own organizations?

No organization operates in a vacuum. Material constraints in the form of technology, resources, the larger political economy, and the plethora of ideologies that surround organizational structures and practices play an important role in daily operations. Analyzing organizational dynamics without understanding these contexts and the ways they are handled is a dead end.

These basic organizational dimensions are ignored by many faculty, students, staff, and administrators in their everyday practices and thinking. Because so many contemporary university actors understand themselves as solo meritocratic operators and individualist entrepreneurs, the lack of organizational self-understanding itself has become a central part of the problem we address. In the current situation, many organization members refuse to see themselves as forming part of a work organization (Schmid 2000).

We believe this to be one of the central consequences of neo-Taylorism and neoliberalism. The social production of meritocratic persons blinds these persons to the system they are a part of. Running a competitive race while wondering who set the course, whether the timers and referees are fair, if they are counting the right things, and whether the prizes for the winners are worth having is unlikely. The neo-Tayloristic model has penetrated university organizational structures and practices and sets the conditions for working life even though its hegemony is not entirely clear to the runners in the meritocratic races. We affirm, with Christopher Newfield (Newfield 2004), that Taylorism has been and remains almost unchallenged as the core organizational design for universities, so much so that many of the actors in the system cannot imagine an alternative way of organizing university life. [145-146]

DG comment: This is an overstatement now. Between the efforts to create a cooperative university in the UK, the proliferation of liberal arts colleges in Europe, and so on, there are alternatives. They are few, forlorn, and struggling but they do exist.

We are grateful for a review that invites a dialogue and we hope these topics will be discussed more broadly and from additional perspectives. Eli has been an important partner in this work ever since his undergraduate years and will continue to be long after we are gone.

Eli is right that the link between organizational analysis and education is the most innovative part of our argument and he asks why we don’t separate organizational from philosophical analysis.

If, as we propose, the mission of higher education is a form of Neue-Bildung, our argument is that it is utterly impossible to educate this way in institutions organized as NeoTaylorist vocational training schools. Trying to do that would be like asking why you don’t bend your elbow to a 240-degree angle simply because you want to. It is organizationally impossible to deliver an integrated, mentored, open, and active pedagogical experience and to pursue research driven by curiosity and wonder in institutions designed to create customers, products, and who measure success in rankings and money.

Eli remarks that this implies radical changes in the working and life conditions of existing faculty. We agree and he asks why they would collaborate? A. This is a good question. More than a few faculty, especially the “academic rock stars” that John Smyth refers to in his book, The Toxic University would oppose it. However, that is not an argument against the reform. It is a reality of the problem of reform.

Current faculty should wake up. The percentage of tenureable and tenured faculty is declining rapidly and occasionalized, contract employment on a fee-for-service basis is quickly becoming the future of academic work. A few academic rock stars at a few elite wealthy institutions may survive but the vast majority of the faculty either will oppose NeoTaylorism or will find themselves reduced to a throwaway working class existence sooner rather than later.

We think Eli is mistaken in linking our arguments to social democratic ideology. We are neo-pragmatists with an analytical view of the structure and dynamics that make for good organizations. At issue here is not some massive social program to give everyone an education. The issue is to create universities in which pragmatist modes of inquiry, participatory pedagogy, participatory research agendas, and participatory management work together to educate students in both skills and civic practices, liberate the greatest possible knowledge and energy in the faculty and staff, and reduce the coercive and exploitative power of senior academic administrators.

We don’t believe in social democracy but in the ability of participatory practices of knowledge development, application, and action to produce the best possible outcomes. The neoliberals and NeoTaylorists have had their turn and even the International Monetary Fund says neoliberalism is a failure. The trouble is that participatory practices will unseat the current powerholders and they will selfishly fight us in a struggle for their lives. Look at how the casino capitalists successfully fought off regulation after they wrecked the global economy in 2008.

Families, communities, businesses, schools, and political systems are the key contexts of civil life and all benefit from being organized in solitary, participatory, and fair ways. This is not social democracy. This is DEMOCRACY in action.

Eli rightly asks if team-based organizations are a sure recipe for human thriving? As he suggests, the answer is that they are not. Any form of organization can be debased and ruined. A team-based organization can be a free-for-all and a dystopia unless it is properly structured, properly supported, and vigilantly protected structurally and normatively by the stakeholders. Team-based organization are not a bunch of hippies holding hands in a circle with beatific smiles on their faces.

In our experience, well-designed and successful team-based organizations have clear rules and behavioral norms and missions that are agreed to by the participants. They base their decision making and actions on using and debating the best information available from those in the best position in the value production process to know what will and will not work. They are labor-intensive in the sense of being time-consuming dialogue arenas that seek to approximate “ideal speech situations” and that build discipline for organizational decisions on dialogue and debate. The compensation and power structure of such organizations need not be fully egalitarian but must be built on quite limited inequalities in compensation. Mondragón operates with a 1:6 differential between the general manager and the lowest paid member. Imagine if a university president were paid only 6 times the salary of a janitor. How would things be different? Such organizations exist and we have seen them in operation in Mondragón and elsewhere

From our perspective, participatory leadership is not an option to be entertained; it is a sine qua non for the operation of productive, solidary, and collaborative organization. The aim of participatory leadership is to liberate potential, support openness, create safety for innovation, and run interference for the organization in the larger environment. It is a requirement of effective participatory organizations. Ordering people to participate from an office remote from the sites of value production has been tried and it has given us the pathetic universities we now experience.

Eli cogently asks how to get people to participate in a future that is not pre-defined. We understand that most people are both insecure and not very daring under current conditions. We also acknowledge that the future is uncertain because it is up to the participants to design the future they are going to live and work in. However, the strength of such systems is precisely because the participants get to build it and have an equal say in how it is built and run that makes it a future they can imagine themselves living in. It is not up to us to tell them what that is like. They have the knowledge and experience to design it and awareness of the failures of the current system they want to overcome. This is also why such organizations are likely to differ from case to case because they will result from different situations, stakeholder experiences, and environmental conditions/challenges. Finally, we think we are very near the end stages of the collapse of public higher education. Before it collapses around them, will the stakeholders have the courage and good sense to risk a better alternative? Or will they stand on the deck as the Titanic sinks and not risk getting on a lifeboat?

Thanks to Eli for promoting this dialogue and we look forward to hearing more voices and views on these issues. This is precisely why we wrote the book in the first place.

Thank you for the review of our book. This is what we need for our own professional development. Our challenge is to be open and responsive for comments or judgement of the book but still stick to our major arguments/ideas underpinning the book’s major point. I am glad that you seem to appreciate the “simple “language we are using. Simple language is not the same as simple ideas. We have learned a lot from this German, Australian and Norwegian based researcher Philip Herbst.

It is unclear for me what you mean by using the concept “manifesto.” Too political and too little substance is what I fear. What we argue for in the book is a professional and substantive position which of course is a political-economic perspective.

Sound like a workshop mechanic. We have the ambition too, but only in combination with theoretical reflection. It is an integration of theory and practice what we are aiming at. The essential Action Research (A) argument — “learn from practice and feedback reflection to participants” — is the major message. This is the “long” argument in the book.

You expand on critical distance as an important issue. In AR it is important to identify own biases related to the field of research where one are working in. I like to identify this issue as controlling for biases. Keeping a critical distance has its counter-position in involvement in concrete research.

Neo Taylorism is basically a way to identify the now-dominant organizational models. Social democracy is first of all a joint labor: managers and public/political representatives join in the same activity. There are lots of books/reports in Norwegian on this issue. The perspectives differ quite a lot from your modeling of social democracy. Maybe your interest and experience from industry result in substituting social democracy with a capitalist model of organization.

The same argument can be used when it relates to social democratic vs capitalist ideology driven leaders. The literature in the field is a crazy mixture of research based text and, stories of leadership heroes. It is complex and laborious job to make sense of leadership. Participative leadership is our model.

The overreaching model for social organization is a model where participative democracy would be the engine that transform society through education for a democratic praxis. The long time perspective is that democracy in higher education would expand to all strata in society.

Maybe our ambition is unrealistic and far too big and complex. It might be too big and complex for engagement in one institution. Creating a democratic higher education would have to be a collective responsibility.

There is a great deal that one could say about this book, but I must say I am not in a position to write a standard book review, as I lack the least semblance of critical distance. Davydd Greenwood was my teacher in college, and his seminar on Anthropology of the University was my entrée into what would become my area of academic expertise. These days he’s a co-editor of Academography, and while I had no specific role in the production of the book, I’m still mentioned very kindly in the book’s acknowledgements. I always think it’s important, in a project like Academography, not to take this personal dimension for granted: academics’ personal relationships always play such a major role in shaping the development of academic fields.

Fortunately, as the book is essentially a long argument in favor of participatory processes, it seems only appropriate to respond to it with something more like a dialogue. So without further ado, here are some questions for Levin and Greenwood. (Those who want a general overview of the book may want to consult David Wheeler’s review in Times Higher Education.)

1. My favorite part of this book is its effort to combine organizational analysis with a reflection on the meaning of education. I think most scholars would be inclined to separate these two things — the “meaning of education” becoming a problem for philosophers or humanists, the “internal organization of universities” being more of an issue for applied social science. Why is it that you don’t separate organizational questions from philosophical questions?

2. “Neo-Taylorism” is your key term of opprobrium for the way that public universities are mostly managed. You criticize “neoliberal” management quite frequently, but clearly you consider neo-Taylorism to be the deeper and more fundamental phenomenon in contemporary higher education. As I understand it, neo-Taylorism is basically a mechanistic division of knowledge and teaching into tiny disciplinary boxes that are all separated from each other — seemingly the way that Taylorism divides up manufacturing work into tiny subtasks. But there’s a crackpot twist here: Whereas factory Taylorism helps to streamline manufacturing, academic neo-Taylorism in fact yields worthless products (antisocial social research, ivory tower humanities, fragmented and impractical undergraduate education, etc.).

So my question: Can you elaborate more on neo-Taylorism as a general term of critique? Clearly, many academics are very critical of neoliberal management, but many of them still basically accept the modern system of disciplines as it stands. What would you say to all the people whose very grounds of existence are at stake in your critique of the neo-Taylorist disciplinary system? I think it’s asking a lot for scholars to put in question not just the corporate management of their institutions but also their own authority, expertise and intellectual self-worth.

3. You are obviously, openly, both deeply committed social democrats. Of course in the contemporary United States — as the Bernie Sanders campaign showed — this has become an almost ludicrously “radical” position, as ridiculous as that might have seemed a few decades earlier. But I wonder: What would you say to those who argue that social democracy was always at best an unstable compromise formation between the interests of corporate management and the counterforces of labor organizing and civil society? And to the idea that social democracy at its best was good primarily for a privileged minority of “labor aristocrats,” generally white and male, in the global North? What could social democracy really look like in an era of globalized precarity? Contemporary Europe seems like a highly problematic model here, given its massive problems with Islamophobia, racism, and xenophobia. Maybe I should put it like this: Can there be a non-nationalist social democracy? And what sort of capitalist economy could possibly be compatible with it?

4. I fully appreciate the ironic function of your declaring, basically, “Look, you neoliberals claim to be remodeling higher education on business lines, but you don’t even understand how modern business works.” But I’ve been steeped for several years in the culture of the contemporary tech industry — San Francisco, Silicon Valley — and in spite of the pervasive sense of adventure, excitement and innovation, it remains a really problematic and awful model for workplace organization. I can’t tell you how many tech workers feel miserable in the team-based “open office” settings that have become standard, how frustrated they get with their group work processes (their task management software, their communications software, their state of permanent interruption), and how much the whole environment is steeped in sexism, racism, classism, and prejudice against anyone older than about 35. So I couldn’t help wondering: Don’t you idealize the post-Taylorist corporate workplace a bit?

5. A question about how style and audience. I had this worry in reading that many cultural anthropologists, and many critical theory/humanities people, might not read your book. Partly that’s because the language is so marvelously plainspoken that it probably doesn’t pass muster as elite academic discourse (no doubt you already expect this and take it as a compliment). Partly that’s because you always avoid detailed case studies and speak in a general register that I suspect is more familiar to organizational studies people — or to academic administrators? — than to ethnographers or historians or humanists. So my question would be: For whom are you writing? I know you hope to reach many constituencies in higher education, but which one is most immediate to you?

6. One of your most powerful insights is the notion that leadership is not necessarily identical to a “apical,” top-down managerial class. You also point out that many current “leaders” are not actually leading anyone anywhere, but are just exercising a sort of nihilistic governance-by-fiat, serving their own personal interests while failing to buffer universities from outside forces (like the whims of funding bodies).

You counterpose to this a theory of “participatory leadership” that would “enable every stakeholder to have “space” enough to realize their own potential in administration, research, teaching, and learning,” in which “everyone is expected to take part and to contribute knowledge and effort to creating a dynamic, flexible, and well-adapted organization” (139).

Again, what’s interesting about this is that you don’t just think participatory leadership would be better as an abstract goal, but also that it’s a way to make higher education actually serve the public in a coherent, deliberate way. In other words, participatory leadership isn’t just your organizational program, it is a political mechanism for trying to rebuild higher education with a common purpose that would be socially relevant. And you also hope that, if we actually had an institution where people were actually practicing participatory democracy, they might notice that it is a good model for other domains of social life as well… Can you expand on your views that leadership isn’t just hierarchical individualism?

7. Following up on that last question, it would seem logical for us, the readers, not to treat you as the sole “leaders” in a project of democratizing higher education, but instead to treat you as the facilitators of a broader collective project. Can you say more about how you see your own role in the world, given your theory of participatory institutional change?

On one hand, you do want to propose an alternative model of higher education, one based on “neo-Bildung” (a collaborative process of teaching, learning and research) and on your revised concepts of collective democracy and academic freedom. On the other hand, you hold that only a participatory process of reflection and action can truly enlist social actors in a new collective project, and we wouldn’t really know what that project would look like before the process takes place. Doesn’t this make your role as leaders or prophets rather ambiguous, since you are arguing that it would be desirable to undertake a process whose end result is unknown by definition?

Thanks for the stimulating book and the provocation to engage more deeply with organizational theory. For those of us not already in that world, I suspect that that may be one of the most unexpected components of your argument.