Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

focussing at the outcome and speculating about the consequences of this document, I
try to understand and to reflect upon what happened in preparing the document.
I see that in four months shifts evolved in the conclusions and recommendations due
to interactions among the members of the coordination team, and partly due to
interactions with the institutional researcher and members of the executive board.
Some shifts may have a great impact, but most of all for me the shifts clarify what
seemed to be important to worry about. The shifts, which came about selecting and
ignoring subjects, also clarify how issues are sorted before they are discussed with the
members of the board and finally are circulated to others. Moreover, the shifts point to
the different interests of the people involved and how these interests become real in
the conclusions and recommendations. The shifts express the micro-political process
the coordination team passed through.
One shift occurred from brand values to core values. This shift implicates that the
values became interpreted as a normative frame which is or should be part of the
identity of our employees. Brand values are only instrumental features of marketing.
This shift is a reconfirmation of earlier discussions in which we decided to speak of
core values, although this was never formally decided neither by the coordination
team nor the board. This transfer was presented as evident and the presentation of
the value scan presented an opportunity to formalize this transfer by the way. I discussed
it with Inez Reker and later on with Cees Corte and from that moment we
started using core values as concept. Marc Claassen and Henk Rademakers agreed to
that. By doing this we explicitly reconnected the results of the evaluation to the
premise of the selected branding-model because this model proclaims that self-examination
is the cornerstone of branding (Eck et al., 2008). Values should be an expression
of what you do and who you are instead of who you want (to suggest) to be. The
broad self-examination with which this programme had started in 2009, had underlined
this premise.
Consequential is a shift from Inez Reker’s interpretation of a neutral appreciation of
the core values by the employees, towards our interpretation in which is stated that
employees underscore the core values. It is a shift in which a transition is made from a
high level of indifference of employees towards acknowledgement. The discussion on
this took place between especially Inez Reker and Cees Corte. For Cees Corte it was
clear that the category neutral meant that the employees were familiar with the core
values. Cees Corte realized that the limit values of our core values, which we had
defined for what we did not want to be (e.g. informing or pedantic instead of inspiring)
should not have been measured in a Likert-scale as if they were the under and upper
side of the core values. Marc Claassen, Henk Rademakers and I agreed to that, so
unilaterally we put aside a great deal of the conclusions of Inez Reker. I supposed that
for Cees Corte this methodological correction was also a matter of getting acknowledged
that the branding programme had real impact. In a later conversation he
convinced me that his real concern was about the flaw in the research design. In the
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