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

On the basis of a genealogical discourse analysis, Weber distinguishes four dispositives of creation. The ‘new’ is created and organised within systematic rationalities of creation. It emerges in (a) an organic cyclical transcendence, (b) a top-down pattern, (c) an entrepreneurial mode that designates man as creator and (d) a collective cyclical dynamic. The dispositives of man as creator and creation as an act are becoming particularly dominant in today’s academic organisations and these dispositives systematically produce institutional programmatics and organisational strategies. In this paper, we analyse how the new emerges in two academic organisations. The starting points of our analyses are two institutional innovations that emerged in Germany in the 2000s: the Excellence Initiative and the gender equality programme. Although they derive from different fields of discourse, both innovations share common features. The Excellence Initiative required universities to relate discourses of excellence and gender equality to each other, and this article investigates how the new emerges in academic organisations to understand whether these innovations produce equality or perpetuate traditional inequalities. Based on Foucault’s dispositive methodology, we use website analyses and interviews with gender equality officers and heads of early-career researchers’ departments. We highlight the discursive connections between gender and excellence for early-career researchers and outline various discursive organisational strategies.