The purpose of this article is to deepen the understanding of academic bullying as a consequence of neoliberal reforms in a university. Academics in contemporary universities have been put under pressure by the dominance of neoliberal processes, such as profit maximization, aggressive competitiveness, individualism or self-interest, generating undignifying social behaviours, including bullying practices. The presented story takes us – a junior academic and his conceptual encounterer – through our remembered experiences and field notes around a set of workday events in one European university reformed through managerial solutions as the object of the study. To do that, we employ co-authored analytic autoethnography to learn how neoliberal solutions reinforce paternalistic relationships as significant in career development, how such solutions enable the bullying of young academics and how neoliberalism in academia prevents young academics from contesting bullying. We are particularly interested in the bystander phenomenon: a person who shies away from taking action against bullying and thus strengthens bullying practices.

This study applies an action research to investigate the possibility of unsettling management education and the entrepreneurial self from neoliberal logic. The reflection takes as its case an action research diploma seminar in a Polish management school based on collaboration among students, employers from public and nongovernmental sectors, and academic teachers in the preparation of master’s theses. The main goal of this article is to illustrate the struggles involved in resisting neoliberal demands, including the ethical reorientation of the entrepreneurial self, in the management classroom. We conclude with a discussion of the emancipatory value of our project and its limitations.

Moral dilemmas are ubiquitous aspects of organisational life. Tensions underlying many fundamental aspects of business, for example, between transparency and privacy, sustainability and growth, innovation and compliance, are not extraordinary occurrences. This paper aims to improve the understanding of moral dilemmas in organisations and how to develop pedagogical methods for coaching management students to resolve these challenges. We adopt a performative and action-based model of responsible management education. In exploring this performative approach to working with moral dilemmas, the project takes family business as a setting of special relevance for disclosing ethical tensions and the dilemmas emerging from those tensions. Family businesses are sites that intensify moral quandaries and disclose loyalties and values that highlight the need for responsible decision-making and action. The research will generate a series of outcomes ranging from classroom exercises to conceptual innovations for improving responsible management education about moral dilemmas.

Badania w działaniu. Książka dla kształcących się w naukach społecznych to cenna pozycja, w której opisano doświadczenia studentów piszących prace magisterskie na Wydziale Zarządzania i Komunikacji Społecznej Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego. Opracowanie w udany sposób ukazuje, jak poprzez wykorzystanie badań w  działaniu można inaczej zorganizować proces pisania pracy dyplomowej przez studenta. Monografia podejmuje próbę opisu zastosowania action research w  przygotowaniu pracy projektowej i utylitarnej, co pozwala zarówno na rozwijanie kompetencji badawczych studentów, jak i podnoszenie ich świadomości o otaczającej rzeczywistości organizacyjnej. Książka w zupełnie nowy sposób przedstawia formę przygotowywania pracy magisterskiej, której pisanie oparte jest na bieżącej współpracy nie tylko z promotorem, lecz także z przedsiębiorstwem, dla którego praca jest praktycznym, projektowym rozwiązaniem konkretnego problemu organizacyjnego. Co więcej, rozwiązanie problemu nie kończy procesu, ale jest elementem dłuższej i ustawicznej współpracy przy uczeniu się wszystkich stron tego procesu.

As researchers have observed, one of the side-effects of the neoliberal ethos in contemporary academia is humiliation in academic working life, related to undignifying social behaviours, including mobbing and bullying practices (Zawadzki, 2017; Twale, 2018). Neoliberal aims as publications in prestigious journals, grants or next academic degrees very often become the ends of themselves for academics, working as the “moral sleeping pills” (Bauman, 1991: 26), strengthening obedience towards neoliberal rules of academic excellence game. It creates an ultra-conformist monoculture and reduce the possibility to perceive the neoliberal ideology as a source of the observed and experienced unethical actions. In consequence, very often victims and witnesses of humiliation in academia perceive neoliberal changes as morally neutral, or adiaphorizing (Bauman, 1991), justifying the authority of managerial changes and seeing them as a solution to their harm (Stein, 2001). This might be understood as an example of what Stanley Milgram calls an “agentic shift” (Milgram, 1974/2005), where an individual “feels responsible to the authority directing him but feels no responsibility for the content of the actions that the authority prescribes” (ibid.: 147).

The aim of the paper is to reflect on the social context of humiliation as a consequence of neoliberal changes in academia within the use of Zygmunt Bauman’s ideas of adiaphorization and scientific management as a producer of the horrific (Jensen, 2010; 2011, 2014). The paper is based on empirical findings on Polish university, affected by nation-wide neoliberal reforms and currently undergoing local, management-led, organizational change.