On the irrelevance of reflection.

I'm returning to the theme of reflection. As I argued in an earlier post and paper (the paper is here) reflection is not all that it is cracked up to be. However, a couple of pieces I have just come across have another interesting and related point; actually it is becoming less and less relevant to working practice, because it is in any case being squeezed out of many jobs, along with any scope for discretion.

As Crawford (2010) --discussed here-- has pointed out in relation to much manual work, the Taylorisation of labour has relocated decision-making and discretion in the trades and crafts from the individual or team of practitioners to the managerial system. Reflection is thereby rendered fairly irrelevant.

In the Guardian on Tuesday, Aditya Chakrabortty makes a similar point, in this case applying it even to managerial level jobs--particularly in supermarkets. The article sub-title includes "There's not much call for thinking these days". His source for the supermarket material is a press-release (we'll have to wait for the full study) from the ESRC Centre on Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (SKOPE) is based in Oxford and Cardiff Universities.

In rooting around their site, I came across a paper very relevant to my area of interest (teaching in post-compulsory education) Lloyd and Payne (2010). They say:

"The FE sector in England and Wales has been particularly affected by the implementation of NPM [New Public Management], with the emphasis on ‘market-testing’ and performativity. Researchers have drawn attention to the detrimental impact on lecturers’ work, including the loss of control and autonomy, and on teaching and learning itself [...]. FE lecturers in England, it is argued, have been positioned as ‘delivery agents’ of government programmes and priorities, weighed down with heavy workloads and onerous administrative demands, in a system that constricts the ‘space’ available for teacher-led innovation, creativity and improvement [...]." (p.5-6: references removed)

This of course accords well with Peter Hadfield's and my views (2009) expressed here

Lloyd and Payne go on to quote lecturers interviewed whose remarks (p.12) suggest strongly that the insistence on "reflection" has become yet another managerial stick with which to beat the staff. It has become more of an act of contrition than a professionally development process. And once it comes to be seen like this within any occupational group, it is time to ditch the idea; it's tainted and corrupted.

So has Taylorism won?

Hadfield P and Atherton J (2009) “Beyond compliance: accountability assessment and anxiety, and curricular structures to help students engage with troublesome knowledge” in C Rust (ed.) (2009) Improving Student Learning 16; Improving student learning through the curriculum Oxford; Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, pp 158-170


Lloyd C and Payne J (2010) "'We have got the freedom' A Study of Autonomy and Discretion among Vocational Teachers in Norway and the UK" SKOPE Research Paper No. 95 July 2010 [retrieved from http://www.skope.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/RP95.pdf accessed 5 Sept 2010]

On the liminal step...

An excellent reflection on the experience of stepping up from being a junior doctor to a "middle-grade" registrar, fully aware of the increasing responsibility and the change in sense of identity.

On not so much a job, more a way of life...

Friday—Good Friday—was a sort of second-class public holiday in the UK. (I leave aside the theological dimension.)

Nowadays I work part-time. Sorry. I get paid for working part-time. I was reminded of that yesterday by an email from my "line-manager"...

Digression! Times Higher Education this week has been themed on the interface* between academics and administrators, particularly this article.

However, she or he wrote:

I have checked with HR what happens about your hours and the public holidays. Apparently all public holidays have already been factored into your leave allowance. This means that if you normally work on a day that a public holiday falls then you have to take it off your annual leave allowance, but if you don't normally work that day then it does not affect your leave or hours. So, for example: If you are usually at work on Friday then that day has to come off your annual leave allowance. (My emphasis)

I don't have the kind of mind which wonders whether or not this is fair--and I am thankful that on the whole the system has played fair with me. So far.

No, my issue is rather different. When I worked "full-time" there was no real problem. (There could have been, of course. "Academic freedom" is an important area. But my current concern is much more trivial and domestic.)

Then, I was never not working. My wool-gathering while walking the dog ---was work. My boredom watching an over-hyped film ---was work. My attempts to re-create that Platonic souvlaki I had in Bristol of all places ---were work. My serendipitous encounter with an argument or quote in reading for pleasure in another discipline ---was work. You get the point.

• Remember, I work in "education", as opposed to, say, quantum physics, or the law of intellectual property, or archaeology. "Work" requires few specialised resources or equipment, at least in its early stages. And the boundaries of the discipline are notoriously fuzzy...
  

So, much to the annoyance of my wife, who reckons that the boundary was always drawn in favour of "work", I just did not draw the boundary. The same issue is explored here by an academic in the US wondering what compulsory unpaid leave amounts to.

So, again, what does working "0.4" mean, for an academic? Two days a week? Yes, notionally. And I still have default days of attendance at the university, but now that the classes schedules for those days are over, they make no sense...

In the final analysis, "0.4" means 0.6 not at work. And that is hard work. It means gardening (it is not accidental that the civil service calls suspension, "gardening leave") or decorating or anything which precludes thinking... (and much as I dislike both activities, they don't work in that respect). Can't do it. So blow the whole thing. The role of academic, even in a spurious "discipline" like education, is not something one can pick up and put down; it is (for better or for worse) an identity. I am reminded of a point I made in a previous post;

(I asked Mr Lyward what he had asked the student ... to do. "DO?" he replied. "I don't want him to do anything. I want him to be." He would have stood no chance as a "practice teacher" nowadays.)

So am I "at work" as I write this?

* "themed on the interface" I really do have to congratulate myself on coining a truly vacuous example of management-speak which may well become a classic, going forward!