Academic leadership in a neoliberal managerial world: an autoethnography of my career

In this paper I am going to tell a story based on my own experiences, so in a sense this is an autoethnography. However, in order to protect the identities of the people and organisations involved in my story I am combining events that happened with different people, in different places, and over different time periods into one story. In that sense my story is fiction despite the reality of each individual experience I have used to craft the whole. I want to use my experiences as told in this story to illustrate what I believe are key elements of the neoliberal take-over of higher education, with a focus on the neoliberal shaping of academic leadership. In doing so, I will use the theoretical framework developed in my recent book (Sims 2020) to analyse my experiences so as to link my understandings with the work of others and to situate my thinking in the extant literature.