How universities uphold ideal worker norms through crisis emails

This new paper Thriving Heroes: Constructing the Ideal Worker During the COVID-19 Pandemic by Dawn Kiyoe Culpepper and Michael Anthony Goodman, explores through a critical discourse analysis, how the ideal worker is portrayed through emails from 14 US universities. Main themes include that institutional messages present the image of higher education employees as self-sacrificing heroes who were individually thriving despite, and maybe because of the pandemic. The paper describes a worker as successful when they choose to redefine and pivot on their own, and not that the messages describe how the expectations are changing. The authors point to recommendations for how universities can disrupt ideal worker norms and transform organizational cutlure by redfining it.