Greetings Nettimers,
I’m writing to ask for your support in relation to a developing
situation at the University of Essex. Colleagues in the Management and
Marketing Group at Essex Business School have drafted a public statement
in response to a series of compulsory redundancies that are currently
being implemented within the School. The statement raises serious
concerns about the scale, distribution, and lack of transparency
surrounding these decisions, which have had a particularly severe impact
on our Department.
The Management and Marketing Group at Essex University has, over many
years, built an internationally recognized environment for
interdisciplinary scholarship that brings critical questions of work,
democracy, inequality, sustainability, technology, and collective life
into business and management education. Through initiatives such as the
Centre for Commons Organizing and the Values, Equalities and Resilience
(COVER
<https://www.essex.ac.uk/centres-and-institutes/commons-organising-values-equalities-and-resilience>)
Research Centre, colleagues have developed innovative forms of teaching
and research that challenge narrow market-driven understandings of
organizations and economic life.
This work has sought to expand what business education can be. Rather
than treating management as simply the optimization of profit and
control, colleagues in the Group have explored commons-based forms of
organizing, democratic governance, cooperation, mutual aid, labour
rights, ecological sustainability, and socially embedded models of
economic coordination. This has involved engagement not only with
academic debates, but also with workers’ organizations, community
groups, public institutions, and broader civil society.
The current redundancies therefore cannot be understood simply as
isolated staffing decisions. They represent a broader attack on attempts
to create space within business and management education for genuinely
interdisciplinary and publicly engaged forms of scholarship. At stake is
not only the future of individual colleagues or research areas, but
whether universities will continue to support intellectual projects that
question dominant organizational orthodoxies and experiment with
alternative ways of understanding economic and social life.
What is being dismantled is a rare scholarly community that has
successfully combined internationally recognized research excellence
with ambitious teaching and public engagement. The disproportionate
targeting of this Group sends a troubling message about the kinds of
knowledge, values, and institutional cultures that are considered
supportable within the contemporary university.
We are now seeking signatures from colleagues across the university
sector and beyond who are willing to stand in solidarity with us in
calling for a pause to these redundancies, greater transparency in
decision-making, and a commitment to protecting the diversity of
scholarship at Essex.
You can read and sign the statement here:
https://sites.google.com/view/mmpublicstatement/home
Cheers + solidarity
Stevphen
--
Stevphen Shukaitis
Autonomedia Editorial Collective
http://www.autonomedia.org
http://www.minorcompositions.info
--
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