Drawing on affect theory and research on academic capitalism, this book examines the contemporary crisis of universities. Moving through 11 international and comparative case studies, it explores diverse features of contemporary academic life, from the coloniality of academic capitalism to performance management and the experience of being performance-managed. Affect has emerged as a major analytical lens of social research. However, it is rarely applied to universities and their marketisation. Offering a unique exploration of the contemporary role of affect in academic labour and the organisation of scholarship, this book considers modes of subjectivation, professional and personal relationships and organisational structures and their affective charges. Chapter 9 is available Open Access via OAPEN under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Within and beyond organization studies, an epistemology of practice allows us to view the ongoing interaction between doing and knowing, the knowing subject and the known object, social and material, humans, nonhumans, more-than-humans. This book is a collection of reflections by scholars across the social sciences around epistemological practices and the epistemology of posthumanist practice theory. Practice theories and practice-based studies have developed a rich methodology for studying working practices. This book is an epistemological reflection that challenges the distinction between theory and method, questions the knowing practices that give form to the object of knowledge, how they draw boundaries between what comes to matter and what is excluded from mattering. It will be of great interest to scholars and students of organization studies and beyond, allowing social science researchers to rethink their positioning within their own research practices and leaving them open to a broader, looser and more generous understanding of qualitative methodologies.