The toolkit of domination: organizational violence in liminal change contexts

This article maps how neoliberal reforms in higher education incubate organizational violence during periods of change. The analysis draws on unstructured interviews from a Romanian public university and close reading of policy and managerial discourse. Conceptually, we theorize liminal governance as a rule-suspending condition produced during reform periods, where ambiguity, procedural flux, and managerial discretion converge to enable both symbolic and insensitive forms of violence in order to manage resistance to change. These reforms thus offer a critical vantage point from which to observe how violence is embedded in managerial language, governance techniques, and everyday interactions. Stylistically, we employ thick description: informants, public figures and, at times, even cited authors appear as characters in a narrative that builds a horizon of meaning, linking macro-level shifts to their local articulation.