Managing equity work in the performative university

Issues facing gender-equity workers in 6 Australian universities embroiled in restructuring, 1995-1998, are examined, analyzing the new discursive landscape they had to negotiate as generated by federal education policies geared toward corporatizing higher education via managerialization & marketization. Analysis is based on 100+ interviews with women who had already achieved leadership positions, aspirants to formal leadership positions, & informal nonaspirant leaders. In using leadership as a lens through which to view the complex processes of educational work transformation, three themes emerged across all education sectors: (1) an increased emphasis on outcomes & image & efficiency as the bottom line, ie, performativity; (2) the importance of the cultural as much as structural facets of restructuring for explaining why women had not progressed into leadership at the rate anticipated following 1980s gender-equity legislation; & (3) dissonance between the values of education & social justice as voiced by the women & the practices expected of them in the performative educational institution premised around individual competitiveness & instrumentalism. The impact of federal Labor government restructuring of higher education is examined in terms of conservative ideologies driving the policies & the differential effects on institutions. The concomitant reconstruction of the academic amid what is viewed as a neoconservative backlash politics has impacted values in a manner that has profound implications for those women positioned in the academy as feminist activists, gender-equity workers, & change agents. The effect of related structural & cultural backlash is also touched on, along with a shift in the discourse from equal opportunity to diversity within key sites of equity practice, effectively thinning the presence & effectiveness of equity interventions. For these equity workers, the key strategy became the integration of equity into the corporate framework. Qualitative changes in 1990s gender-equity work are scrutinized, & the need for new strategies in light of the radically shifted playing field is seen as necessary. J. Zendejas