Cultivating Courage, Cowardice, or Complacency? An Identity-Based Perspective on Faculty Resistance to Managerialism

The vast majority of colleges and universities in the United States are beset by existential challenges in the form of falling enrollments, rising costs, pressure to keep tuition affordable, and politicians who question the very value of higher education. Well-meaning administrators have tended to confront these challenges with various forms of managerialism: metrics-driven and short-term interventions that seek to maintain the viability of institutions (for now). Recently, several authors in the Academy of Management Learning and Education (AMLE) have, in various ways, called for faculty to assume personal risk in confronting these managerialist interventions, with no discernible impact. In this disciplined provocation, we provide a theoretical explanation for why faculty—in particular, business management faculty—have failed to rise to the challenge: Typical U.S. business faculty members do not hold an identity that allows them to see the challenges facing higher education as their challenges. Moreover, business faculty have tended to be architects and proponents of the managerialism we claim to reject. Before responding to the threats of managerialism, then, business management faculty must first adopt a different set of identities that would enable and ignite the courageous action we need.