Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

As such, from the onset these modernistic paradoxes are leading to desperate personal
struggles against an overwhelming influential world (Mandelbaum, 1971) or – nowadays
- feelings of huge discomfort with oneself (Verhaeghe, 2012).
Reflections on this foolishness are different. In our variegated world quite some insecurities
and differences will have to be dealt with. For some the inevitable price to pay
for rapid growing economic welfare is cultural alienation, with McDonaldization as an
ambiguous symbol for what is happening (Ritzer, 2011). For some living in a flattened
world implicates a world in which worldwide competition and collaboration are
standard and will be more and more imperative in the future (Friedman, 2006). From a
more critical perspective we have to deal with living in a risk-society. Three industrial
revolutions (Pieterson et al., 1987) have left their marks with unforeseen and often
unseen side effects, leading to worries about health, nature and existing social bonds
and political ideals (Beck, 1986). From a historical or philosophical point of view modernity
is coming to an end (Lyotard, 1979; Toulmin, 1990) through which the practical
and the local will be made heard again. Whatever the perspective: social reality is
perceived as shifted or shifting from stable to transient.
McDonaldization of Higher Education
The performance agreements of the UAS’s can be seen as an expression of the continuing
McDonaldization of Higher Education through which the wish for efficiency,
calculability, predictability and control of standardized organizational processes and
outputs becomes paramount (Ritzer, 2011), amidst a world which is experienced as
insecure, haphazard and emergent. The State Secretary sets a modernistic, paradoxical
target in which control and pluralism are to be connected: in a transient reality creative
solutions are needed but to be fulfilled on a very specific basis. A paradox which
also can be recognized in the appropriation of the performance agreements in the
UAS.
Every UAS has to deal with this paradox. However, in starting these kinds of processes
one has to consider that in our part of the foolish world “... a monomania for toughminded,
cold-blooded competitive correctness has bred the spiritual sensuousness out
of most of our human enterprise. That leaves us with a reality of synthetic personas
and pasteboard passions, an epidemic of barren careers and a wasteland of workplaces
devoid of flavor.” (Mackenzie, 1998: 128). The managers of the UAS who are confronted
with the performance agreements, are held to deal with them and start acting
as if they are able to plan the realization of them. I assume that most of them are
aware of the fact – underlined by our institutional research - that there are no causal
relations between targets and undertaken actions. Also it is known that changing the
behaviour of professionals is very tricky and touchy to undertake (Wanrooy, 2007;
Weggeman, 2007). Nevertheless, against better judgement and earlier intentions the
board started discussions about how to plan and implement the agreements, this time
starting with the development of strategy maps and with the intention of doing it the
5. Drafting performance agreements: gestures of a contemporary jester | 141