Dispositives of newness and change: academic organisations' discursive practice at the intersection of excellence and gender

The study investigates how ‘the new’ emerges within academic organisations at the intersection of excellence discourses and gender equality policies in Germany. Excellence has been institutionalised through the Excellence Initiative/Strategy to foster top-level research, while gender equality derives from movements to transform patriarchal institutions. Both discourses increasingly converge around the subject position of early-career researchers. The paper asks: which dispositives of creation underpin organisational strategies; how organisations relate excellence and gender equality; and whether these innovations produce equality or reproduce inequalities.

Building on Foucault’s notion of the dispositive, the authors draw on Weber’s genealogy of four dispositives of creation: (1) transcendence (cyclical, organic newness); (2) creation as act (singular-static order, expertocratic control); (3) man as creator (singular-dynamic generativity, genius/entrepreneurial subject); and (4) collective imagination (collective, experiential creativity). In modern academia, dispositives (2) and (3) dominate, intensified by neoliberalisation since the 1980s: the entrepreneurial self and expertocratic, evidence/prognosis-based control (rankings, evaluation, visibility platforms such as Google Scholar/ResearchGate). Excellence becomes a market logic organising visibility and competition. Gender equality in German academia evolved from bottom-up women’s movements (1980s) to institutionalised offices and later became a criterion of excellence in funding programmes. Research shows persistent gendered inequalities in recognition, supervision, and career trajectories, and critiques the neoliberal co-optation of feminism that individualises structural inequalities, producing ‘unspeakable inequalities’.

The study employs dispositive analysis as methodology to connect discourses, subjectivities, and power–knowledge. Empirically, six publicly funded German academic organisations (four universities, two extramural research organisations) were examined. Two data sources were used: (1) multimodal website analysis (March–June 2017) following van Leeuwen’s categories and Panofsky’s image analysis, tracing the organisations’ web architectures from homepages to pages on gender equality, excellence, and early-career researchers; and (2) ten semi-structured, discourse-analytical interviews (July 2017–January 2018; ~1.5 h each) with gender equality officers (GEOs) and heads of early-career researcher (ECR) departments. Analysis focused on ‘Who speaks?’ (institutional programmatics and speaking positions) and ‘How is speaking possible?’ (performative speaking practices), treating discourse as performative and polyphonic. For reasons of anonymity, direct website quotes and images are not reproduced.

Two contrasting organisational types are presented. 1) Global Player Organisation (GPO): A large extramural research organisation positions itself against elite US institutions (Harvard, Stanford, Yale) and frames researchers as human capital to ‘maximise potential.’ Website imagery displays an ordered diversity yet subtly centres an older white man, reflecting a symbolic hierarchy. Excellence is the hegemonic, static discourse; gender equality is reframed as an external imposition and potential constraint. Speaking zones are narrow: the ECR head uses a managerial ‘we as an organisation’ voice, aligns with leadership, and ‘casts shadows’ over negatives; the GEO exhibits tension and occasional sarcasm, experiences silencing (e.g., withdrawing from topics as ‘too private’), and adopts a marginal ‘consultant/outside the line’ stance to pursue counter-practices. Inequalities (gender/ethnicity) become largely unspeakable; ‘generation’ is invoked instead. Newness is organised through a singular-static generativity aligning with ‘creation as act’ and expertocratic control (monitoring, evaluation), subordinating gender equality to neoliberal excellence. 2) Aspiring Organisation (AO): A university openly aspires to top-10 status and leverages Excellence Initiative indicators (rankings, clusters). It presents individuals as embedded in social spheres (care, family, work–life balance); website imagery centres a woman in an urban park scene with children and men, surfacing discourses on caregiving and ‘new fatherhood.’ Speaking zones are broadened; discourses are in process. The ECR head performs as an intrapreneur/start-up founder, building structures (e.g., graduate school) and actively addressing gendered attrition (‘scissors diagram’). The GEO adopts a managerial, reflective approach, using monitoring/statistics and opportunistically ‘jumping on the bandwagon’ to create openings. Cooperation between GEO and ECR yields workshops (e.g., ‘Doing a doctorate as parent’, ‘Women in Science’). Newness follows ‘man as creator’ (dynamic generativity) with micro-alliances and co-creation, yet remains legitimated through entrepreneurial logics. Mapping to dispositives: GPO embodies creation-as-act (expertocracy, control) and a singular-static order of excellence; AO embodies man-as-creator (entrepreneurial subject) with emergent micro-alliances. Both lack the transcendence and collective imagination dispositives. Contextual statistics noted in the field: female professors in Germany rose from 8.2% (1999) to 24.7% (2018).

The findings show how organisational dispositives shape the emergence of ‘the new’ at the nexus of excellence and gender equality. In the GPO, the hegemonic excellence discourse absorbs and constrains gender equality, producing narrow speakability and perpetuating structural inequalities under a regime of surveillance, evaluation, and control (creation-as-act). In the AO, an entrepreneurial mode (man-as-creator) opens discursive spaces and fosters co-created initiatives that address inequalities, but these are framed and legitimised within neoliberal entrepreneurial rationalities, risking the individualisation of structural issues. Thus, while both innovations (excellence and gender equality) are institutionalised, their organisational uptake can either repress critique (GPO) or enable bounded openings (AO). The study underscores how early-career researcher subject positions are produced through these dispositives and how organisational strategies either hinder or facilitate equality-oriented change.

The paper contributes a dispositive-analytic account of how excellence and gender equality discourses materialise in academic organisations. It identifies two contrasting regimes of newness: a singular-static, expertocratic configuration that subsumes gender equality under hegemonic excellence (GPO), and a dynamic, entrepreneurial configuration that broadens speaking zones through micro-alliances and co-creation (AO). Both cases, however, largely omit alternative dispositives—transcendence and collective imagination—which could cultivate heterotopic spaces (agora, parrhesia) for ethical self-transformation, collective creativity, and open, co-designed futures in universities. Future research should explore organisational designs and practices that operationalise these alternative dispositives, examine wider samples across national contexts, and assess long-term equality outcomes beyond entrepreneurial metrics.

The empirical presentation focuses on two cases from a larger set of six organisations, which may limit generalisability. Data derive from 2017–2018 website materials and interviews, reflecting that period’s configurations. Anonymity constraints preclude reproducing website quotations and images, limiting direct evidentiary display. As a discourse-analytical study, findings capture performative speakabilities and programmatics rather than causal effects on career outcomes.