The Regime of Excellence and the Erosion of Ethos in Critical Management Studies
| Author | Nick Butler,Sverre Spoelstra |
| Published date | 01 July 2014 |
| Date | 01 July 2014 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8551.12053 |
The Regime of Excellence and the Erosion
of Ethos in Critical Management Studies
Nick Butler and Sverre Spoelstra
Department of Business Administration, Lund University, PO Box 7080, SE-220 07, Lund, Sweden
Corresponding author email: nick.butler@fek.lu.se
The regime of excellence – manifested in journal rankings and research assessments –
is coming to increasing prominence in the contemporary university. Critical scholars
have responded to the encroaching ideology of excellence in various ways: while some
seek to defend such measures of academic performance on the grounds that they
provide accountability and transparency in place of elitism and privilege, others have
criticized their impact on scholarship. The present paper contributes to the debate by
exploring the relationship between the regime of excellence and critical management
studies (CMS). Drawing on extensive interviews with CMS professors, we show how
the regime of excellence is eroding the ethos of critical scholars. As a result, decisions
about what to research and where to publish are increasingly being made according to
the diktats of research assessments, journal rankings and managing editors of premier
outlets. This suggests that CMS researchers may find themselves inadvertently aiding
and abetting the rise of managerialism in the university sector, which raises troubling
questions about the future of critical scholarship in the business school.
Introduction
The idea of ‘excellence’ is increasingly coming to
serve as the organizing principle of the contempo-
rary university (Readings, 1996; Rolfe, 2013).
Deriving from the private sector in the 1980s
(Peters and Waterman, 1982) and closely linked to
the development of New Public Management
(Deem, Hillyard and Reed 2007), excellence
involves imposing structures of corporate admin-
istration on institutions of higher education in the
name of efficiency and competition, replacing
more collegial forms of university governance
(Lucas, 2006; McNay, 1995). Part of this shift
involves measuring and assessing academic
research according to external indicators such as
journal rankings and citation indices. Here, the
content and quality of a piece of work is less
important for the purposes of evaluation than its
performance according to purely quantitative cri-
teria, such as the rating of the publication outlet in
which it appears or the number and frequency of
citations it attracts. Such metrics provide univer-
sity administrators with the means to regulate and
control academic labour, especially in relation
to national research audits such as the 2008
Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and the
2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) in
the UK (Hussain, 2011). While journal rankings
are not formally tied to such audits, they are often
used by deans and heads of school as a proxy
for quality (Özbilgin, 2009). Academic staff may
therefore find that the work they publish in lower
tier outlets (e.g. 1- and 2-star journals) will not be
submitted by their department to the research
assessment panel because it is assumed to fall
automatically outside the remit of excellence (e.g.
3- and 4-star journals), irrespective of its intrinsic
merit. Taken together, such trends indicate that
the regime of excellence – understood as the con-
fluence of national and institutional forces that
determine the ‘rules of play’ for individual
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British Journal of Management, Vol. 25, 538–550 (2014)
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8551.12053
© 2014 British Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4
2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
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