Precarious Academics: Information Practices and Challenges (original) (raw)
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Precarious academic labour is victim to forces of neoliberalization of the institution that naturalizes “competitiveness” and “efficiency” according to an almost mystic or transcendent understanding of economy that is self-actualizing and axiomatic in nature. This article will attempt to provide a brief survey of the precarious academic labour from in the Canadian context, subsequently assess this on the basis of alienation, and furnish a few possible solutions.
A Snapshot of Precarious Academic Work in Canada
New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry, 2020
In much of the developed world, tendencies associated with neoliberalism, the "corporatization" of the university, and cuts to government funding have led to a growing reliance on contingent or "non-regular" faculty. The vast majority of these academic workers are in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Precariously employed, these non-regular faculty constitute a reserve of low-paid and marginalized academic workers, and an increase in the number of doctorates granted each year in Canada guarantees a continuous supply of highly exploitable workers. While many books, articles, and blog posts discuss this phenomenon in the United States, less information is available for Canada. Using data collected by the Canadian Union of Public Employees and other published literature, this paper will measure the extent of the reliance on precariously employed contract faculty across Canada and offer suggestions for further research on the plight of these workers in Canada.
This book provides an in-depth qualitative report on casualised academic staff in the UK, mapping shared experiences and strategies for resistance. Bringing together testimonial data spanning seven years, it offers evidence of how precarious labour conditions have persisted, shifted and intensified. The book is a valuable resource for students and scholars in the fields of education, human resources management, labour studies and sociology, as well as trade unionists and university policymakers.
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The issue of casualisation in universities has received much attention in recent years, with strike action across the UK highlighting the extent of the issue in the sector. In this chapter, I look at the situation in Irish universities, paying particular attention to the anxieties that confront early career staff. Whilst wider neoliberal trends in employment practices has no doubt played a key role in the changing nature of the Irish university, this chapter intends to look at the issue from a slightly different angle. Ultimately, I argue that the crisis of casualisation is a crisis of bad faith, a term most closely associated with the French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre. Whilst it is useful to explore Sartre's discussion of the individual's role in relation to bad faith, this nevertheless fails to account for the institutional context in which casual academics now work. In response to this, I aim to show how bad faith is encouraged by the institution, who in turn profit from their employees becoming like 'things-in-themselves', and with the unguaranteed promise of a more authentic life in the future, those employees then serveand become subservient to-the institution itself.
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Recent changes in national legal agreements concerning appointment, promotion and working conditions have affected the work of academics in Swedish higher education. The current structure of the higher education system, descriptive data on working conditions, and institutional governance form the background for discussing academic autonomy and the academic profession in the future.
The changing academic workplace: Public and private transformations
Journal of Australian Studies, 2005
The workplace is changing from primarily being a site of production to one focused on knowledge creation, where there has been a re-engineering of work in what has been termed post-Fordism. 1 This changing workplace has experienced what some term a feminisation, as women have been entering the labour market in increasing numbers. 2 As Ian Watson, John Buchanan, Iain Campbell and Chris Briggs highlight in their recent book, Fragmented Futures, changing workplace participation has had both positive and negative effects. 3 Indeed, with all the talk about feminist theorising, workplace reform and changing societal norms, it would be expected that much has changed for Australian women over the past twenty-five years. Certainly, if one follows the commentary of certain sections of the media, one could be forgiven for thinking that perhaps gender reforms had, in fact, gone too far, with women supposedly taking jobs from men. Also, the argument is regularly made that gender is no longer an issue in contemporary Australia. 4 This change also plays out in the university workplace, where economic rationalism and global competitiveness are now firmly entrenched in university discourses. 5 Anna Yeatman asserts that restructuring within universities is dominated by market-orientated economic cultures of action and laissez-faire ideology because universities need to respond effectively to ongoing sociocultural change and complexity. 6 For Milton University (MU), a pseudonym for a regional Australian university, this included the introduction of information and communication technologies, the restructuring of faculties, mass marketing to international students, changing employment patterns to hire more casual, contract and part-time staff, and a focus on vocational degrees. But as Jeremy Rifkin suggests, it is not enough to introduce new technologies in response to the postindustrial or post-capitalist workplace; rather, there needs to be a re-organisation of institutional structures-the university being one such site-and a reevaluation of what is means to be a worker in the new knowledge economy. 7 This article draws on research carried out as part of my PhD thesis, where I used experiences related to me by four academic women who worked at MU in order to focus on the ways in which discourses circulating within this particular campus shape the performances and discursive positionings of these women-Veronica, Tamaly, Alice and Madonna (the names are fictional and were chosen by the women to represent themselves)-and how, in turn, these women negotiated these discourses. This research is therefore located in a qualitative paradigm that combines the use of a grounded theory approach 8 and a discourse/ textual analysis. 9 The use of a grounded theory approach enabled me to form or build theory from lived experience and present the voices of the women. Multiple data sources were used, including two formal interviews with each participant, numerous informal conversations with these women at various meetings, functions and seminars, peer debriefings with other academics, both male and
Labour & Industry: a journal of the social and economic relations of work, 2018
Coser's 'greedy institution' (GI) theory provides a conceptual lens to examine how institutional structures are negotiated and maintained by precarious workers in the contemporary university. Giddens' theory of structuration assists the analysis of empirical multi-case data generated from the Australian context where young academic workers were interviewed multiple times. This sociological analysis uniquely highlights the reciprocal and recursive processes that contribute to an agentic view of precarious employees who strategically navigate their careers and positions within prescriptive institutional structures. Findings supported the construction of a typology, comprising three agentic 'types'. The 'giving' and 'resisting' types presented depict how structures of greed encourage over-committed enactments from the participants. The 'insulated' type shows an antithetical portrayal of employment at the university, challenging often legitimated greedy norms in a way that highlights the role of supervisors in constructing workplace practices for precarious workers. The three 'types' reflect how participants complied with the demands of their work contexts in order to align their identities with institutional values. This article draws Coser into the precarious work literature and offers a socialised view of how the GI can be reproduced in differentiated ways through the agentic work of employees at the university.
Higher Education, 1997
Interest in the status and functions, the potential and the vulnerability of the academic profession has grown in recent times. International comparison is of special interest in this context: are the problems experienced more or less universal, or are there options and conditions in individual countries which might suggest solutions for the future? The paper analyses some findings and implications of the 'International Survey of the Academic Profession' with a special focus on the various subgroups of academics in the European countries involved in this empirical study. The analyses focuses on the employment and working conditions, as well as the way academics handle their various professional tasks and functions. Considerable differences between the university professoriate, middle-rank and junior staff at universities and staff at other institutions of higher education are noted. At least in the majority of European countries surveyed, one would hesitate to consider them part of the same profession. By and large, however, the relatively independent nature of their jobs allows most academics to find areas of professional activity which are the source of professional attachment and satisfaction.