Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

In recent years journalists reported many cases of the failure of policy or mismanagement,
and the sometimes far-reaching consequences of these failures. Software
companies, financial institutions, housing associations, institutions for health care and
institutions for the care of elderly people and for the disabled, and institutions for
education have caught the eye of the public media because of their failures. It aroused
quite some societal and political dissatisfaction.
Sometimes things went wrong in such a way that failures became apparent when it
was too late to repair them. Resigning board members, judicial investigations or
imposed controls were the consequences. Nowadays a managerial nightmare must be
that waking up one reads in the newspaper about some severe mismanagement at
one’s institution. I assume that also a lot of my colleagues would have bad days for the
same reason.
Apparently a deterioration within organizations happens gradually (Commissie onderzoek
financiële problematiek Amarantis, 2012). Probably early warnings about things
going wrong were neglected. At the same time it always will be a question which
signals should or could have been taken seriously.
To my knowledge a derailment as the above has not been the case at the UAS. However,
derailment may wait in ambush because nobody knows nor is able to control what
is happening in an institution of about 15.000 students, with 1800 members of staff,
housed on eleven locations in three different cities. Even if there are early warnings,
they may easily get lost in the labyrinths of the institution. Moreover, with regard to
the amount of rules given by government and the necessary implementation of these
rules within existing institutional practices, it might be unavoidable that one day
derailments will happen (Ankersmit, 2008).
In the realm of early warnings and organizational deterioration I position this project.
It evolves out of my former projects, a connection which will be accounted for in the
concluding part of this thesis. At first the main subject of this project would become
‘organizational reflexivity’. Organizational reflexivity was to be about a willingness to
reflect upon and to discuss regularly within the UAS what we are doing. Keeping track
of the ambiguities and consequences of decisions in developing institutional policy
would be the subjects of reflection and discussion. After a discussion with the President
of the Board I simplified the subject of organizational reflexivity to ‘dissenting
voices’. How and why that happened, and what happened thereafter will be part of my
narrative.
Time for discourse
At the point of time I write this chapter almost one and a half year have gone since the
start of this project. The narrative is written between December 2012 and June 2014;
the analytical and reflexive orientations on this narrative are presented in their 5th
version. At first sight the most obvious explanation why this project took so long is
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