Let’s form a positive academia collective transformation: Re-imagining our academic values and interactions

As Management academics, we could play a critical role in tackling the existential threats that our societies are facing by using our expertise in organizing resources and people to get things done. Instead, we seem to be stuck in an endless cycle of self-critique on the state of our academic discipline. In this provocation essay, we disrupt this vicious cycle by laying the foundation for an academic heterotopia through a concrete, comprehensive, and coherent re-imagination of both our academic values and our interactions. Discarding the convenient falsehood that as academics we are merely unwilling victims of neoliberalism and all-powerful managers, we instead embrace the inconvenient truth that we have co-created the current state of academia. We therefore urge all of us to take back freedom and invest our individual and collective efforts into crafting a more positive academia by joining our PACT (Positive Academia Collective Transformation).