If learners are required to better their consecutive learning, their engagement and their motivation, they must be informed about the procedures that lead to certain grades of their individual oral and written performance. First of all, they have to understand that grading does not only depend on their respective teacher, but that he or she has to follow the often-detailed requirements of the school authorities. Furthermore, they have to be informed about the reasons why the grading of written performance is considered as more important by the authorities

Learning models are an important starting point for assessment and feedback. A basic three-step model from surface knowledge to cross-linked concepts helps learners understand how they can improve and deepen their learning. Taxonomies that go into more detail of the cognitive processes are a useful tool for teachers when preparing a lesson (e.g. Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives). But when it comes to summative and formative feedback in all its varieties the SOLO-Taxonomy is a much better choice.

This chapter is a brief overview of the respective research. Even though there is a gerat number of publications that deal in some form with feedback in the language classroom, most of these reports are about higher education and possible assessment and feedback destined to college or university students. In general, these publications are research-oriented. Above all, when the subject is language education, writing reports and seminar papers is in the foreground; only very view authors take the language classroom into account. And even then, the focus is not on second-/foreign-language learning. Therefore the overview is limited to the well-known analyses of Kluger and De Nisi in comparison to the findings of Green. On this basis, the practice-oriented models of Wiliam and Hattie and their teams are introduced and described in some detail. Even though they refer to second-/foreign-language teaching and learning to some extent, their findings are limited, because the focus is only on formative feedback.

If feedback among colleagues should contribute to better teaching and learning, there have to be reciprocal agreements about what aspects should be observed and evaluated and in what way. Whereas well-known scientists left out collegial feedback, Andreas Helmke, a German educationalist, dedicates part of his academic career to this subject. He furnishes a great variety of observation sheets and evaluation programs, also in English, that can be adapted for collegial feedback in the foreign-language classroom. In order to come closer to face-to face feedback discussions among colleagues, valuable suggestions of researchers and practitioners should be taken into account.

Summative and formative electronic assessment can be used in the foreign-language classroom to provide appropriate feedback to learners. However, this presupposes that the learners (and the teacher) are sufficiently informed about the use of digital media and have already tried and used them. Therefore, at the beginning of this chapter there is a brief update of digitization. Mostly, electronic assessment and feedback is used for summative determination of the achieved learning level; the higher education sector predominates. In school-based instruction, electronic assessment and feedback occur less frequently. However, these feedback practices have increased dramatically in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in the United States, but also in European countries. Electronic assessment can be used for more than just summative feedback.

In-lesson feedback has gained momentum and can take a variety of forms, so teachers and learners have to be adequately trained. The relevant terminology is explained on the basis of pratice-oriented lesson examples. Furthermore, the importance of grading/marking is underscored. To avoid possible negative outcomes of grading, many different features of feedback are introduced, above all those that promote not only the learning of the students but should influence also the teaching measures.

The implementation of a feedback culture in second-/foreign-language classrooms depends on the teacher, who should not be overwhelmed with requirements that he or she can in no way correspond to. The four essential characteristics that teachers should bear in mind are validity, reliability, authenticity, and practicality, but no classroom situation corresponds to real-life situations. The way to a new approach to learner performance is not the abolition of grades, but complementing them with formative feedback procedures.

What is true for assessment and feedback between teachers and learners, has to be taken into account for peer feedback as well: The learners cannot sufficiently benefit from the various forms of peer feedback without appropriate preparation and guided practice. It is for the teacher – involving the learners as much as possible – to explain which feedback procedures are the most efficient and what has to be observed with regard to the timing and other important features when learners give feedback to their peers. In many cases, peer feedback is considered particularly beneficial and successful, but as with all instructional practices, it requires a differentiated view.As teachers are not directly involved when learners talk to each other in tandems or small groups, it is interesting to know what scientific research reveals about formative and even summative feedback between peers. Mark Gan, a doctoral student of Hattie, presents in his thesis a version of Hattie’s feedback model adapted to the use among peers. In the following, the Jigsaw puzzle is presented, which is useful in numerous other teaching and learning contexts, but lends itself to peer feedback, because it is clearly structured, Furthermore, it can create opportunities for reciprocal learner feedback.

Introduction

A few years ago, I became a female leader in academia. It was not my intention to become a leader, but I realised that it was something that came with the job of being an associate professor heading towards full professorship, who was determined to influence faculty policies and practices. As time passed I learned about the relentless pursuit of individual orientation in different situations related to leadership in neoliberal rationalism, where academics become human capital consisting of ungendered productive units. I understood that the power effects of neoliberalism through the affect of anxiety is a particular governing strategy of subjectivation, and that it directs academic leaders direct towards an economic logic, where the self of academics and their work is shaped as insufficient (see also Brunila and Valero, 2017). When the amount of my leadership duties grew, the complexity of issues that I had to deal with in academia led to me critically exploring leadership by analysing and politicising my experiences through affective academic encounters.

Because of my theoretical and methodological aspirations in the field of critical studies in education and concerns about power and social justice, my aim was to give up my authorial right to stand outside of power relations as well as my desire for authenticity. I chose to focus on my experiences as an academic leader at the centre. I believed that this would help me to discover the fault lines in leadership discourses as well as to find new discursive practices and subject positions to be able to continue as an educationalist and critical scholar and politically active academic while utilising my leadership position for more collective purposes and for challenging the contemporary neoliberal order.

One of the reasons I wrote this chapter was the pervasiveness of the neoliberal order, where it was sometimes hard, or nearly impossible, to find room for political imaginary outside of the market and a market metrics, which are colonialising all spheres of academic life. It was also a surprise to me that while there has been a mass of critical literature related to the effects of changes in academia, little critical analysis was available about how academics are themselves deeply, affectively and ethically entangled with these changes (see also Chapter 5, this book).

Introduction

During the academic year 2020–21, the Greek right-wing party New Democracy (henceforth, ND) put forward a series of political decisions as part of an extended, aggressive (post)liberal reform platform (Mylonas, 2021), with ideas about the marketisation of education and efforts to make Greek education more ‘effective’. Previous attempts had been made to introduce similar (post)liberal reforms in higher education, especially in 2005–11, as a result of the so-called ‘Bologna Process’ (2005), with the target set by the European Council in 2000 (the ‘Lisbon Strategy’) to make the EU the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world. We saw it in 2011, the year the Greek Parliament voted in favour of the Framework Act for Higher Education. The Act introduced ‘changes to [the] management, to the structure of degrees and courses, to funding, and accreditation and quality control’ (Traianou, 2013) of universities, signifying that the high degree of autonomy traditionally enjoyed by Greek universities was now radically changed.

Nowadays, we see this economic authoritarianism expanding with measures in place to marginalise any criticism, preventing the lower strata of society from accessing higher education, and creating a police force within universities as part of implementing reforms for modernising Greek education. These changes were inaugurated with the removal of sociology (Malagaris, 2020) from the prerequisite subjects list in the humanities cluster of the Panhellenic Entry Exams to Higher Education. Moreover, ND introduced, among other things, radical changes to the higher education admission system with stricter admission standards as well as further time restrictions for the completion of studies (Tzanaki, 2021). As a result, for the first time in academic history, in 2021 more than 40,000 candidates (40,229) were excluded – due to stricter admission standards – from the country’s universities (Andritsaki, 2021). Not surprisingly, however, there has been a systematic effort to legitimise such measures by mobilising a powerful rhetoric of the devaluation of the public university as ‘unproductive’ and as a ‘topos of anomie’, well within the official political discourse of ND.

Introduction: conceptualising the connections between affect, capitalism, and academia

Around the globe, we see university sectors in crisis, involving restructures of academic labour and much affective turmoil. In this book on ‘affective capitalism in academia’, our chapter takes on the tasks of clarifying the connections between the concepts affect, capitalism and academia, and situating their dynamics in an historic crisis context. We see complex linkages, calling for careful conceptual scaffolding across chapter sections.

To begin, we draw on Marx to outline two key logics of capitalism. First is that institutions, in the fields of market competition, exploit use-values of productive ‘commodities’, especially labour, to create exchange-value that accumulates profit-as-capital to invest in further production. Second is a structural necessity to value labour unequally, to accord ‘high’ worth to the labour of relatively few, compared to many whose labours are significantly exploited to build profit.

Marx applied these logics to fields where institutions compete to accumulate capital in economic form, but universities, in national sectors, do not compete for economic capital. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s extension of Marxian logics to further ‘forms of capital’, we conceive universities as competing for prestige – symbolic capital – that accumulates power to confer ‘legitimate’ credentials. Yet sustaining symbolic reputation requires basis in a more substantive form: cultural capital in scholarly modes. University fields thus reward prestigious scholarly production as ‘high value’ (while academics who mostly teach gain lesser reward), which attracts academics who embody dispositions – or habitus – for scholarly labours. Marxifying Bourdieu’s habitus concept, we argue that dispositions embody a tension between use and exchange purposes, which academics struggle to balance in their labours.

We then diagnose the Australian university sector as a field of accelerating workforce restructures that throw academic dispositions out of balance and into the affective turmoils of what Bourdieu calls hysteresis. Drawing on qualitative data from how Australian education-research academics’ experience field restructures, we analyse how university senior-level governors, in steering these restructures, diminish substantive research and, with it, the field’s historically hard-won relative autonomy.

Introduction

It has been proposed that academics have a responsibility to remind people of their histories (Bullough, 2020), and in starting this chapter with reference to my own educational experiences, I am reminded of Daniel Nehring and Kristiina Brunila’s suggestion: ‘how, in order to make sense of the patterns of domination, contestation and resistance that emerge from the contemporary unmaking and remaking of the university, it is necessary to make sense of the everyday forms of practice and modes of subjectivation that characterise contemporary academic labour’ (see Chapter 1 this book).

When I first started working in universities, there were face-to face lectures delivered in large auditoriums, academics had their own offices in which to conduct PhD supervision, hot desking was not yet a concept, and neither was booking a private room if a student dropped by in distress requiring assistance. There was no such thing as Zoom or QR codes to access campus facilities, and workload was equally divided between teaching, research and service in a 40/ 40/ 20 model. Jill Blackmore (2001: 353) has noted how

Blackmore goes on to say ‘Perhaps the next “phase” will be for university courses for the masses to be written by instructional designers, accredited by a shrinking core of university-based academics, tendered to private providers for online delivery, out-sourced to local tutors in global locations, with clearly stated competencies assessment’ (Blackmore, 2001: 359).

C. Wright Mills’ exhortation to critically make use of ‘the personal uneasiness of individuals [that] is focused upon explicit troubles’ (1970: 11–12) stimulated the impetus for the writing of this chapter from my own experience of angst as Blackmore’s polemic proposal is increasingly seen in practice.

Introduction

Storytelling is important in organisations. For Hannah Arendt, storytelling captures the process by which we reconfigure our inner thoughts, emotions and opinions for public appearance. Through storytelling, we express who we are as opposed to what we are (Arendt, 1998). At a deeper level, storytelling confirms that we are agents who matter in the communities in which we work. This agency is enacted simply when we reconfigure a series of events into a story and insert ourselves into history (Young-Bruehl, 1977). Through this process, we become grounded in a continued history. Second, we weave together a durable reality from an otherwise multiple, ambiguous and continuously changing and chaotic world. Furthermore, through sharing stories it becomes possible to create a common horizon from multiple worldviews.

In academia, storytelling is important for professional identities, the continuation of academic values and virtues as well as for creating academic communities (Jackson, 2013). We create stories through, for example, reading, writing and thinking, and through engaging in dialogue and communication. Through storytelling we inscribe ourselves in the history of a particular research field, and participate in renegotiating and changing its traditions so that it can meet the challenges of the present. The university is in this way an important space of appearance where we can legitimately share our stories – including stories of knowledge. Classes, seminars, conferences, publications and all the informal meetings and channels established among academics are collective spaces where we have different possibilities of participating and sharing our stories. Our professional identities rely on the affordances that the university offers. For example, the simple fact of having an institutional affiliation and having access to resources are important conditions for the stories we can create. For Arendt and for Walter Benjamin (1999), stories belong to and move among the people, in this case researchers, teachers, students and administrative staff.

But there is a dark side of storytelling, an appropriation of the dearest of human possessions for purposes that may sometimes even go against its very same role, function and existence. Such dark storytelling is clearly expressed in the corporate academic capitalism of today and appears in different variations associated with strategic storytelling.

Reconsidering academic capitalism

Universities today leave nothing to chance when it comes to their public presentation. Their websites, among other marketing and advertising material, speak to this preoccupation, as they are one of the primary means by which universities communicate a desirable image to the wider world. The results of these marketing efforts are carefully curated ensembles of web pages, of individual academics, departments, faculties, administrative departments and universities as a whole, that document great academic accomplishments, distinguished scholarly reputations, innovative degree programmes, outstanding facilities, and so forth. Notably, these websites go to great lengths to portray the texture of feeling involved in studying or working at a given university. So, for example, University X plays up its location in a student city:

In turn, marketing its ‘student experience’, University Y highlights both a friendly and scholarly environment and the strength of its services and facilities:

Through such marketing materials, universities demonstrate a keen attentiveness to the emotional and affective dimensions of academic labour, as it concerns prospective students or future employees, for example.

Introduction

Having friends at work, or friendly colleagues, may seem like a condition for a good working environment. It may contribute to a supportive atmosphere and a sense of wellbeing for the individual (see Bach Pedersen and Lewis, 2012). In certain types of work, friendship is not only supportive in an emotional sense but could also be strategic, particularly in work where the boundaries between the private self and the professional are blurred. Such boundary blurring often arises in academia, where the difference between friends, friendly colleagues and networks is not clear, if it exists at all.

For many academics, their research networks and friendships are intertwined. Participating in conferences may be a way to sustain or widen a research network, as can socialising with colleagues who also are friends. Furthermore, academic labour is not confined to the actual workplace, such as a specific department or university, but flows into international connections and networks. Such networking can be experienced as a way of cultivating friendly as well as interesting and useful relationships – as part of academic and creative freedom – and may add value to the academic’s professional work. But this networking could also be regarded as a means to strategically accumulate social capital outside the actual workplace. In this mode, networking can be perceived as a combination of economic and moral imperatives, as an instrumental performance or working skill that could be measured and quantified as capital.

Friendship in academic work seems to span different value spheres, from the realm of emotional bonding and collegial exchange to an economised or even marketised realm of quantifying network performance and social capital (see the notion of ‘quantified academia’ by Juhana Venäläinen in Chapter 10, this book). Relationships can be emotional as well as instrumental, and moral obligations intertwine with a calculable ‘what’s in it for me?’ In this complex and boundary-less work environment, the value and character of work relationships are seldom openly defined or articulated. Instead, boundaries between different types of relationships are negotiated in situated social interactions, such as in the way we expect a colleague to reciprocate a favour to indicate friendship or the way we negotiate work hours with a head of department and hence enact our professional roles.

At the start of the 2013 film American Dreams in China (Chan, 2013), we meet an ambitious youth named Cheng, and watch as he fails to obtain a visa to attend graduate school in the US. Cheng is a fictional version of Yu Minhong, founder of China’s largest private educational company, New Oriental. We see Cheng wandering the streets of Beijing, his dreams crushed, reading Dale Carnegie’s seminal works of self-help psychology. In the film, as in reality, the frustrated student transforms into an educational entrepreneur. Cheng founds a chain of English schools in which teachers address packed auditoriums with the enthusiastic performances of self-help gurus. These teachers model a passionate, confident style of self-presentation, a performance that might help some of their students gain admission to universities in the US. We see Cheng, now comfortably seated in his executive office, advising a student that ‘Confidence is the most basic requirement of American Culture’ (Chan, 2013).

Social theorists have described self-assurance and internal motivation as key characteristics of the entrepreneurial (Bröckling, 2016) or enterprising self (Rose, 1999). This neoliberal figure takes risks, invests in themself, and builds a personal brand. In this chapter, I suggest that the ability to perform this kind of subject is valuable less as an entrepreneurial asset than as a form of cultural capital. By examining how students from China learn to perform for US universities, we can reveal how affects of confidence and passion are not only embedded in neoliberal ideologies of self-making, but are also written into cultural scripts for performing one’s identity. The ability to put on this performance has become a global currency, and, for many students worldwide, it is a precondition for receiving an elite education.

Studying how Chinese students learn to sell themselves to foreign universities can also illuminate forms of affective work that academics perform on a daily basis. In classrooms on and offline, at conferences and in grant applications, academics are performers.

Introduction: writing about academic capitalism

This book may be read in several ways. It may be read as an expression of its authors’ affectively charged, visceral encounters with academic capitalism. At this level, each of its chapters speaks for itself, and it seems remiss to impose an overarching interpretation. Moreover, this book might be read as a contribution to academic debates in sociology, in education, in cultural studies, and in related fields, on affect, on academic capitalism and on the conceptual relationship between the two. We already mapped this conceptual territory a little in Chapter 1, and indicated where we see this book’s innovative contributions in intellectual terms. This opens up space, on these final pages, for a brief reflection on the politics of writing about academic capitalism. In other words, here we are concerned with the question of what this book might mean, written against the backdrop of academic capitalism’s hegemony and released into an already oversaturated market for academic books.

Put differently once more, this seems to be a good time to sketch a sociological analysis of critical and reflexive scholarly writing on academic capitalism. The texts on the preceding pages have been written, converted into a book, marketed, circulated, sold, bought and read within the institutional system of global academic capitalism. Therefore, their meaning, as well as the extent to which they are capable of carrying meaning at all, can be usefully analysed in reference to this institutional system. In the following, we sketch some trains of thought that may lead to such an analysis.

The question therefore is: what’s the point in us writing and you reading this book? Academic capitalism has, under various labels, been a topic of analysis, debate and critique across the social sciences and humanities for decades, from the beginnings of neoliberal governments’ efforts to inflict creative destruction on higher education systems around the world (Edwards, 1989; Slaughter and Leslie, 1997; Hao and Zabielskis, 2020). While the debate continues, the marketisation and commodification of higher education has continued unabated (Hu and Krishna, 2009; Holmwood, 2017).

Introduction

This chapter aims to explore the affective dynamics of contemporary academic capitalism that academia has gone through in neoliberal and market-oriented times. After the introduction – more than 25 years ago – of the term ‘academic capitalism’ by Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie (1997), it is now widely used to understand the global reach of changes connected to processes of alliances between university, industry and government in higher education and research policies (Etzkowitz, 2016; Holmwood, 2016). We follow the definition of academic capitalism as a knowledge/learning regime (Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004) that shapes academics’ conduct while baring the roots of collective and democratic forms of participation.

In particular, along the lines of Chapter 1 in this book, we are interested in exploring the ambiguities and ambivalence of academic capitalism that affects the psychic reality of academia, seducing those who work in it. For example, the expression ‘in the mood of data’ (Staunæs and Brøgger, 2020) expresses with great effect how data have become infrastructural to academic moods. Academic performance data, such as scorecards, barometers, graphs and other materialising media, have become part of academia and of us living in academia. They are designed to affect and direct behaviour through forms of exposure, comparison and self-monitoring that are deeply entangled with a vulnerable affective economy. We intend to contribute to the critical literature that denounces the inequalities of academic labour and contrasts the voice of neoliberalism sustaining the political rationality of the market and market forms of relations (Jessop, 2008; Giroux, 2011; Bozeman and Boardman, 2016; Bottrell and Manathunga, 2019).

In this chapter, we interpret the neoliberal, corporate academia as the icon of an affective economy in which affect takes the place of money. Within such a context, academic practices of management through affect produce intensities rather than identities.

The theoretical framework of the chapter is delineated through the concept of affective economy, and is grounded in the literature on affective capitalism. Avoiding a definition of ‘what affect is’, it follows instead the traces of ‘what affect does’.