Excellence?: gendered micropolitics in an Irish and Spanish university context

Abstract

[EN] Excellence is widely used in managerialist higher education institutions as a legitimating discourse for evaluative decisions in recruitment and promotion processes. It is depicted as unaffected by the social characteristics of those involved in making the evaluations, by their relationships with each other, or by the wider context, although this has been questioned (cf. van den Brink and Benschop 2012; Nielsen 2016; O’Connor and O’Hagan 2016). Using a feminist institutionalist perspective, and drawing on data from 86 interviews with men and women (43 each from a managerial Irish university and a collegial Spanish one) informal power as reflected in micropolitics emerged as important in the evaluative processes in both contexts. Men were more aware of the existence and impact of micropolitics. All but the Spanish men saw this use of informal power as negatively affecting women. It is suggested that such patterns implicitly undermine the “rationalised myth” (Nielsen 2016, 390) of excellence. It also suggests that internal forms of governance make little difference as regards the use of informal power in such contexts. Thus, the potential of a feminist institutionalist perspective in contributing to an understanding of higher educational institutions (HEIs) is illustrated.