Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

connected with an engineering professional culture in which is assumed that equivocality
is to be excluded.
My greatest deception was that I could not get all the members of staff in a development-oriented
mode regarding educational philosophy or technology. I stumbled upon
their firmly anchored educational and organizational default assumptions. Only a
minority of the colleagues in some departments were in for educational or organizational
innovation despite the fact that there was a lot of space to develop their own
ideas. Partially colleagues explained their own unwillingness with the generally felt
disqualification of the educational jobs in the Netherlands. Partially they were only
focused on their traditional expertise and did not want to be bothered by other developments.
And they experienced a high workload.
I relived one of my first experiences in Higher Education namely that professional
autonomy had prolapsed into extreme subjectivity. Some colleagues of this faculty
saw me as a representative of the board who had to shake up things and to cut their
budgets. Also as someone who had no qualification on their field of expertise and
therefore no authority to solve their problems. Was I a prototype of a manager who
had lost contact with the educational job at hand? On the other hand questions arose
about the way they were able to sustain their strong convictions and how some of
them were able to give me a feeling of being excluded.
Tensions with the board turned up when I wanted to introduce a new policy of the
UAS in an adapted way for my faculty. Being held responsible for my faculty I wanted
to change things with my colleagues in a way which was feasible. Of course, I was
stimulated by my experiences in the former faculty in which good cooperation and
taking time delivered strong results. In the eyes of the board I was a bit elusive, not to
fix to exact results and sometimes they doubted my loyalty.
3.5 Defaults-genesis part IV: director strategic programme
In the middle of 2007 I decided not to aim for a new appointment as dean/managing
director of this faculty. Irrespective of my disappointments, I was fed up with all the
planning and control thinking in which plans had become very important. In my experience
facades were created instead of talking about things which really matter.
Moreover, I got tired with the amount of changes; a colleague-dean of mine even
spoke of innovation-terror. I also wanted to get away from a job with quite some
ritualistic duties.
I felt that I was not the same person as before. In my own and in the experience of my
colleagues I had become a Scrooge McDuck. Mainly busy with money, results and
evaluations instead of stimulating a rich working environment and managing people.
The felt ambivalence about being a manager which accompanied me at the start of
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