In this article, I critically analyze the social characteristics of performocracy as neoliberal
governmentality in Korean universities. Performocracy is the neoliberal governmentality that
control and manage our society through performance-based ideology. It functions like a new
social order and also dominates our mentality and behavior. Performocracy is very familiar with
the new public management used by business to increase economic productivity and efficiency.
State has implemented performance-related university policies to manage professor. Neoliberal
university policies have changed from the direct administrative intervention to the indirect
self-formation technology. Many professors became subjects of neoliberal governmentality. They
think performance indicators as a regime of truth. Performance indicators are to quantify
professor’s lives, and are functioned as the technology of self that make them neoliberal
subjectivities. Performocracy operates through three technologies: confession, reiteration and
recognition. Performacracy makes three different subjectivies that struggle with each other: the
entrepreneurial self, the blindness self, and the resistance self. Performance-related policies have
many negative effects on Korean university. It overemphasis individual competition, economic
rationality and instrumental reason, but undermine collegiality, solidarity, and public virtues. I
suggest the importance of ethical resistance and counter-behavior in order to struggle with the
oppressive domination of neoliberal governmentality.