With the new academic year about to start, I wanted to post something about what I’ve been up to over the last few months. Being an academic is never an easy job to describe and for me it always will have been a vocation, something that doesn’t turn off or dissipate with the seasons which I seem to spend ten to twelve hours per day doing. Recent events have encouraged me to reflect on what exactly it is that I supposedly “do”. There’s just been so much happening or so much that I’m responsible for lately that it all seems to start to blur together and I’m starting to have difficulty keeping track of it all… update a spreadsheet that contains all of the assessment deadlines for the BSc Management programme and in the process have to chase multiple colleagues all of whom are senior to you for the deadlines on their modules do a webinar with the title Becoming-manager: On the challenges facing managers in contemporary organizations (which the marketing team seem determined to repeatedly get wrong) in order to get new students excited about studying at KBS record induction videos for the incoming group of Stage 1 students in order to introduce them to studying at university and brief them on what’s going to happen work on assignments for PGCHE modules which helps you to learn more about how not to teach and manage a module than it helps you to develop as a pedagogue assist on the Clearing hotline for a lot longer than you expected but enjoy being able to speak to future students who didn’t think that they’d have a place and reassure them that Kent would take them and realize in the process that you’d never be able to do a job outside of academia because you were tremendously bored and inefficient on the Clearing hotline and then redouble your efforts at publication and research funding give in and make a Twitter page to try to augment your presence in the public eye but never post anything submit a paper on Traffic Officers and the “extreme” work in which they are often involved which is the product of a long collaboration between you and a colleague to a 4* journal with a great exasperated sigh of relief try to nudge another colleague to work on another paper on Accelerationism and Business School pedagogy to submit to another 4* journal notice that someone has not just cited one of your articles in one of theirs but they draw on it heavily in order to develop commentary on microfascism and feel so flattered that you think about emailing them but decide not to be so full of yourself instead start planning meetings for the teaching term with the team on the BSc Management programme as well as the team on the 550+ student Introduction to Management module and you’re going to be convening and have the distinct experience that everything is happening much too fast you your job becomes to slow it down so that everyone can understand continue to watch the University attempt to implement a large scale organizational restructuring with all of the competency and grace of a wrecking ball while still navigating a pandemic and observe the paranoia and politicking that sets in to your colleagues as they all start angling for ways to keep their jobs and avoid wider lay-offs keep looking for organizations who might want to collaborate on ethnographic projects keep planning blog entries that you never find the time to write and thus transforming your blog into a full blown academic cliché in the form of an academic project that gets left to languish as other projects come along keep running Twitter pages for your undergraduate and postgraduate modules by posting news articles about case study organizations or trade unions that you hope that students will read but are fairly certain that few will try to remember to exercise every morning wonder when you’ll be able to resume Scouting attend session after session on teaching online and watch as academics fail to discuss anything other than their own anxieties and misgivings for example in one session that was supposed to be about ways to get students to engage in an online class watch instead as a large number of confused academics ask basic tech support questions like how do I turn off notifications or how do I get my audio to not echo and wonder how they can have PhD’s and not be able to use Google keep participating in a weekly Reading Group of early career organizational scholars who get together to focus on ethnography and interesting developments in organization studies attend a even more meetings to prepare for online teaching start preparing for your own online teaching by setting up Moodle pages and designing assessments and activities continue to panic about having to teach a small module with a colleague because you have a hard time working with others realize that when multiple colleagues send you lecture clips, plans for assessments, or papers that they’re working on that people actually value your opinion finish writing a book with the cheerful title “The Mall at the End of the World” and send it to colleagues to get their thoughts and get unduly excited about it because it’s one of the few honest and frank things that your been able to write outside of your blog that isn’t dressed up in layers of sycophantic brown-nosing keep thinking about funding keep practising your bass and try to find time to record a heavy metal album spend an absurd amount of time trawling blogs, twitter pages, and forums for other accelerationists and tracing out this bleak line of thought which seems to be the most interesting and exciting branch of contemporary theory develop a weird obsession with reading about organizations that play a large role in our lives without being noticed like Serco or 3663 spend a lot of time reading emails spend a lot of time researching and writing lectures spend a lot of time preparing for the start of term notice that you’re grinding your teeth a lot more than you used to develop a curious habit of going for a walk shortly before bed to try to calm down and taking photos of the discarded disposable masks which will quickly become the new cigarette butt or coke bottle in terms of being an object of frequently observed detritus lingering on streets and in bodies of water everywhere and resolve to write something about that because it’s probably important but realize that you probably won’t get time to.