The study’s central insight is that resistance is not a single phenomenon but a differentiated set of practices whose viability depends on where a scholar sits within the intersecting structures of institutional type, career stage, gender, and disciplinary tradition. The researchers identify three distinct modalities. The first, dispositional resistance, is exercised by senior academics in traditional public universities who block technocratic intrusion through institutional mediation. The second, tactical resistance, is expressed in slow tempo, informal collaborative networks, and thematic subversion that reorganize practice without directly disputing the managerial regime. The third, individual coping, describes how precarious and early-career scholars sustain their professional identity through irony and selective compliance, with no effect on institutional structure. Each modality tells a different story about power, voice, and the limits of commensuration in relational fields.

Dispositional resistance is the most structurally powerful of the three. In Chile’s traditional public universities, senior academics occupy positions from which they can mediate between managerial demands and disciplinary practice, effectively filtering or blocking the intrusion of standardized indicators into the everyday work of community engagement. These scholars draw on long-established professional dispositions and on institutional arrangements that give them a voice in how engagement is defined and evaluated. Their resistance does not take the form of open rebellion; rather, it operates through committees, accreditation processes, and informal authority, ensuring that the metric infrastructure never fully penetrates the core of academic practice. The study suggests that this is why the academic field retains its internal hierarchies in such institutions: the managerial regime is present, but it is held at arm’s length by those with the standing to contest it.

Tactical resistance, by contrast, works within the system while quietly reordering it. Academics adopting this modality slow the tempo of their work, refusing the accelerated rhythms that quantification regimes demand, and build informal collaborative networks that operate beneath the radar of official reporting. They also engage in thematic subversion, reframing the categories through which engagement is counted so that the substance of their community work survives even as its surface is rendered legible to administrators. Crucially, this form of resistance does not dispute the legitimacy of the managerial regime itself. It accepts the existence of indicators while hollowing out their capacity to dictate practice. The researchers found this modality distributed across institutional types, but its character shifted with context: where institutional cultures were more corporate, tactical resistance became subtler and more defensive.

The third modality, individual coping, is the most sobering finding of the study. Precarious and early-career scholars, along with many women academics navigating the gendered organization of academic labour, lack the institutional standing to block or bend the metric regime. Their resistance contracts to subaltern irony: dark humour about the absurdity of counting relationships, selective compliance that protects what matters most to them, and private narratives that preserve a professional identity the institution no longer recognizes. The study is explicit that these coping strategies have no effect on institutional structure. They keep individuals whole while the managerial infrastructure advances untouched. This finding helps explain an apparent paradox that has puzzled scholars of higher education: how substantive epistemic resistance can coexist with a stable and expanding managerial apparatus.

The theoretical stakes of the research extend well beyond Chile. The study engages a rich international literature on the sociology of quantification, which examines how numbers are never neutral descriptions but active devices that reorganize the fields they measure. When community engagement, an inherently relational and context-dependent practice, is translated into standardized indicators, something is necessarily lost: the reciprocity, the long-term trust, the open-endedness that define genuine engagement with communities. The authors argue that commensuration has structural limits in relational fields, and that the Chilean case demonstrates those limits in action. Academics do not passively absorb quantification; they interpret it, contest it, and sometimes subvert it, but their capacity to do so is unevenly distributed.

The Chilean context is essential to the findings. The country’s higher education system has undergone rapid marketization and the consolidation of quality assurance and accreditation mechanisms, making it a revealing site for studying managerialist governance. The social sciences and humanities occupy a particularly exposed position in this system, since their modes of knowledge production and their traditions of public and community engagement fit poorly with indicator-based evaluation. The study situates itself within this national trajectory while drawing comparisons with international research on academic resistance in the managerial university, from analyses of compliance and resistance games to studies of academic capitalism and the gendered structure of precarious research careers. The result is a contribution that speaks simultaneously to Latin American higher education scholarship and to global debates on academic agency.

Methodologically, the research rests on a multiple-case design across four Chilean universities, combining analysis of the formal infrastructures of quantification with 49 semi-structured interviews with social sciences and humanities academics. The interview roster, documented in detail in the published article, captures variation in gender, academic rank, disciplinary area, and institutional affiliation, allowing the authors to trace how each modality of resistance is structured by position. The study was approved by the Scientific Ethics Committee of the University of Tarapacá, and all participants provided informed consent. The research was supported by ANID FONDECYT grants 1241102 and 1221758. The authors, Julio Labraña of the University of Tarapacá and José Joaquín Brunner and Jocelyn López of Universidad Diego Portales, frame their work as part of an ongoing research programme on quantification and university community engagement in Chilean higher education policy.

The implications of the findings are considerable for anyone concerned with the future of universities. For policymakers, the study warns that indicator-based accountability systems do not simply measure engagement; they reshape it, and they do so unevenly, privileging institutions and individuals already endowed with the standing to resist. For university leaders, the research suggests that managerial infrastructures encounter genuine epistemic limits when applied to relational practices, and that ignoring those limits produces not compliance but irony, a corrosive form of consent that signals institutional dysfunction rather than institutional health. For academics themselves, the study offers a vocabulary for naming the differentiated forms of contestation in which they are already engaged, and a reminder that the capacity to speak back to the metric regime is itself a resource, distributed by rank, gender, discipline, and institutional tradition, whose preservation may be one of the most important tasks facing the contemporary academy.

Ultimately, the study reframes the debate about managerialism in higher education. The question is not simply whether academics resist or comply, but which academics can resist, in what ways, and at what cost. By distinguishing dispositional resistance, tactical resistance, and individual coping, the research accounts for the coexistence of substantive epistemic defiance and stable managerial infrastructure, and it exposes the gendered and career-stage inequalities that determine who can contest the quantification of their work and who can only laugh at it. As universities worldwide continue to extend measurement into ever more intimate corners of academic life, the Chilean case stands as a detailed empirical demonstration that numbers change the fields they enter, and that the struggle over what universities owe their communities is, in the end, a struggle over who gets to define the terms.

Subject of Research: Academic resistance to the quantification of community engagement under managerialist governance in Chilean higher education

Article Title: Resisting managerialism through academic voice: contesting the quantification of community engagement in the social sciences and humanities

Article References: Labraña, J., Brunner, J. J., & López, J. (2026). Resisting managerialism through academic voice: contesting the quantification of community engagement in the social sciences and humanities. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01763-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01763-6

Keywords: quantification, community engagement, academic resistance, managerialism, social sciences and humanities, higher education, academic agency, Chile, academic labour, gendered organization, Resisting, academic