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This article investigates the political potency of 'precarity' as an organising axiom in contingent workers' grassroots organisations. It studies a nationwide network of precarious researchers in Germany and deploys Frame Analysis to illuminate how the Network articulates diverse criticisms as parts of a coherent struggle against precarious academi...
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... composition of precarity as a class-formative frame and the specific collective action frames that highlight its various facets are now introduced at the levels of conflict, collective identity-construction and individual agency. Figure 1 summarises the main levels and instruments whereby precarity is articulated as a source of collective identity. The findings are discussed in the following. ...
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... One may expect that solidarity among employees who are in the same position and face similar risks is a different story. There is evidence that academic employees and even academic precariat are able to form solidarity networks and arrange collective resistance campaigns or protest actions (Atkins et al. 2018;Vatansever 2023). I witnessed two acts of professional solidarity at RI, in May 2011 and May 2017. ...
The article summarizes insider observations of a European "hybrid"-both research-and practice-oriented-institution. It goes beyond scrutinizing managerialism alone as the major source of detrimental effects for scholarly work and academic freedom and questions the role of market pressures by drawing attention to the maintenance of the organization's symbolic status and legitimacy and to the effects of activity selection in favor of simpler forms of performance. The considered institute and its founders sought visibility in public and thus encouraged short-term and applied projects. The institute's behavior resembled status rent extraction through the founders' allocations and on the contribution of external and unpayable partners and guest scholars. The demonstration of activities regardless of their content and outcomes did not require the staff's research capabilities and qualifications. Employees' working modes correlated with the treatment of researchers as temporary and replaceable workforce in an insecure position. The management scheme based on the unlimited discretion of the administrative head and the lack of protective mechanisms led to the abuse of power and mistreatment of the staff. Academic freedom in its narrow sense becomes largely irrelevant in this environment. All these patterns are supported by broader societal environment: Academic community and scholars at all career stages seem to increasingly accept and interiorize neo-liberal ethos as well as the rules of the game that rest on individual career considerations and individual flexible adaptation to employers' needs.
... The former is evident in the respondents' comments cited in previous chapters. The latter can be seen in various contemporary academic labor movements across the globe that exceed the scope of this study (Berry & Worthen, 2021;Hirslund et al., 2019;Vatansever, 2023). Second, on a theoretical level, based on these findings, the study confirms the analytical utility of the career paradigm framework for a better understanding of the long-term sectoral transformation beyond its immediate symptoms like precarity and contingency. ...
The decrease in public funding and the subsequent increase in temporary employment in academia are often viewed as crisis symptoms. While the crisis rhetoric may be premature, the turn towards hyper-competitive qualification systems that generate unfixed career advancement models may indeed mark a break from the tenure-oriented career structure. Drawing on a pilot online survey conducted with over 300 academics within the European Research Area (ERA), this study reveals a potentially radical transformation of the academic career paradigm from a tenure-oriented path towards an increasingly episodic, nomadic, and unsystematic drift, defined here as 'random-track'.
... While academics may not seem to be a prime example of a marginalised group, being able to access the discourse regardless of institutional affiliation and professional status is an important aspect in the context of fleeting employment relationships. Interestingly, while precarious working conditions are usually thought to undermine collective action (Rizzo & Atzeni, 2020), in the context of #IchBinHanna & #IchBinReyhan, 'precarity' itself emerges as the master frame for collective identity building (Vatansever, 2023). ...
... Unsurprisingly, befristet [temporary] and unbefristet [permanent] are both very frequent and characteristic, and are associated with opposing sentiments. Similarly, the word prekär [precarious] carries negative sentiment and is also both highly characteristic and frequent -a trace of the collective identity building of activists around their status as academic precariat (Vatansever, 2023). Nonetheless, the graph shows that contributors to the discourse did not exclusively vent frustrations and/or criticise the status quo, but also used positively connotated adjectives and adverbs to suggest alternatives and encourage each other (e.g., wichtig, lesenswert, gemeinsam, möglich [important, worth reading, together, possible]). ...
... We conceptualise the movement as a connective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012), driven by researchers connected through their collective identity as academic precariat (Vatansever, 2023). Following the typology of collective and connective action networks (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012), the #IchBinHanna & #IchBinReyhan movement is a selforganising network with little to no organisational coordination of action. ...
... Under New Public Management (NPM) governance of the academic labor market, short term contracts and high levels of competition became the norm, making precarity and acute future uncertainty a continuous challenge for scientists planning their careers (Bone 2021;Mulligan and Danaher 2021;Roumbanis 2019). In Germany, the topic of future uncertainty in academia recently breached into public discourse due to an all-time high of political mobilization of contingent faculty against precarity in academia 1 (Vatansever 2023). However, until structural changes occur, researchers have to accept the current status-quo, making the possibility of leaving academia a real alternative for many (Woolston 2020). ...
Academic careers between the completion of a PhD and the acquisition of tenure are characterized by short term contracts, high levels of competition, and future uncertainty. Existing research indicates that uncertainty is a primary cause for postdocs in all disciplines to constantly question the continuation of their career. Despite this commonality between disciplines, we argue that future imaginations, coping strategies and ultimately the decision-making practices to exit or remain in academia differ in each discipline. Drawing from 60 qualitative interviews with physicists and historians, we compared imaginations of the labor market inside and outside of academia, as well as narratives on how they perceive their agency to exit or remain. Our data shows that imaginations of the labor market outside of academia, have considerable consequences for their sense of precarity and planning of career paths. We propose that the uniform concept of future uncertainty must be separated into ‘existential uncertainty’ and ‘secured uncertainty’, which more accurately reflect the problems postdocs are confronted with and the resulting coping strategies. While those who consider their uncertainty as existential either evoke narratives of survival to continue in adverse conditions or begin parallel careers as added security. Those who perceive their future as uncertain but generally secured rely either on their ability to decide when necessary or postpone the question indefinitely. These differences that correlate with our chosen disciplines have important implications for research quality as well as mental-health hazards and further our understanding of self-exploitation and precarity in academia.
... In the past decade there has been intense interest in the subject of precarious work in higher educationtypically understood as work that is short-term, poorly paid, without workplace protections or prospects for improvement -and the precarity experienced by academics as a result. This research has focused on the impact of such work on workers' mental health, sense of self, relationships and lives (Loveday 2018, Manzi et al. 2019, Courtois and O'Keefe 2015, its intersections with race, gender, care, class, mobility and citizenship (Arday 2022, Crew 2020, Burlyuk and Rahbari, 2023, Ivancheva et al. 2019, O'Keefe and Courtois 2019, O'Keefe and Courtois 2022, Courtois and O'Keefe, 2024, its impact on teaching and learning and other functions of the university (Lopes and Dewan, 2014), and resistance (Vatansever, 2022). Though there has been much written to document how academic precarity is created, exacerbated and normalised within higher education, there has been relative scholarly silence on the ethics of researching academic precarity. ...
This article uses critical reflexivity as a method to document and analyse the ethical dilemmas that emerge when researching academic precarity across the permanent/precarious divide. With our project on long-term academic precarity as a case study, and as people who experienced long-term academic precarity, we take as the starting point other researchers’ silences on their positionality and about who does the work in the production of research on academic precarity. Although our small, unfunded project was driven by feminist ethics and transformative feminist praxis, there were some ethical issues we did not foresee, nor could we resolve. We focus on three main ethical dilemmas that arose as moments of discomfort, triggering extensive reflection and discussion: (1) authenticity and subjectivity, (2) disclosure of employment status and (3) complicity in and benefit from the precarisation of academic work, or what we term the ‘precarity dividend’. The article seeks to push the boundaries around how researchers hold themselves to account in the process of knowledge production. We suggest that precarity and especially the precarity dividend must become an inherent ethical consideration in all social scientific research design. It is a call for social researchers to make explicit – in writing, in ethics reviews and in presentations of their work – the labour process and labour conditions of all those involved.
... The urge to reflect jointly in scientific papers on the concepts of precariousness, resilience, shared responsibility, and solidarity represents a form of challenging the neoliberal university (Stoica et al., 2019). The works aim to create discursive space for topics not yet addressed or insufficiently addressed (Lundström and de los Reyes, 2021), which can contribute to the formation of collective identity and the organization of a response (Vatansever, 2022). ...
... Academically Adrift was written in 2011. The precariat workforce (Standing, 2011;Vatansever, 2022), the Trump Presidency (Brabazon, Redhead, Chivaura, 2018;McRae, 2020),Brexit (Brändle, Galpin and Trenz, 2022) and COVID-19 (Oliveira, Grenha Teixeira, Torres and Morais, 2021) have all intensified public concerns about the ability of citizens to read, write, interpret and think beyond fear, shame, blame and paranoia. Our universities have never been more important. ...
Academic writing is challenging to learn and challenging to teach. With the proliferation of graduate attributes and employability metrics throughout higher education, how is academic writing to be defined, valued, assessed and disseminated? This article situates academic writing into disciplinary literacies, aligned via information literacy, to enable, support and enhance a student writing culture. Noting the failures and challenges of online learning faced during and post- COVID-19, there is an opportunity to revise and reimagine student writing for new times. This article explores how teaching practices can evolve to provide a more meaningful, predictable and assessable undergraduate pathway for learners. Our goal is to anchor student writing with disciplinary literacies. Only when carefully connected can interdisciplinarity become possible.
... The last few years have seen a growth in the relationships between traditional unions and other collective actors in civil society with the purpose of organising and representing precarious workers, as well as an increase in grassroots forms of organising and mobilising emerging outside well-established unions (Cini et al., 2022;Meardi et al., 2021;Mezihorák et al., 2023;Royle and Rueckert, 2022). Consequently, a fruitful comingling has occurred between industrial relations and social movements' theoretical frameworks that has stimulated in both fields the development of approaches that take workers' agency as a starting point (Alberti and Però, 2018;Murgia and Pulignano, 2021;Però, 2020;Vatansever, 2022). This perspective therefore considers precarious workers as agential subjects, whose collective identity and organising practices take shape and are shaped not only through the socio-institutional context, but also through the types of relationships they create together with other workers (precarious or not) within trade unions, but especially within newly emerging activist groups. ...
... More specifically, the identified forms of critical agency highlight that the capacity to develop collective identities (Mattoni, 2012;Milan, 2015;Vatansever, 2022) and to build alliances with other actors (Cini et al., 2022;Hyman and Gumbrell-McCormick, 2017;Holgate, 2021;Mezihorák et al., 2023) can be considered proxies of precarious workers' possibility to sustain their mobilisation in the long run. We argue, on the one hand, that radical forms of critical agency can promote the emergence of strong forms of identification with the group, while they do not simultaneously facilitate the emergence of alliances, with the risk of making prospective mobilisation unsustainable. ...
This article investigates precarious workers’ organising by considering the case of freelancers, a category between the self-employed – usually represented by employer organisations – and employees – whose interests are traditionally defended by trade unions. Drawing on a 6-month ethnography conducted in the Netherlands within two freelancer associations, our study shows their capacity to exercise collective forms of ‘critical agency’ – on the one hand, by questioning their established practices and seeking to innovate their repertoire, and on the other, by staging protest actions, despite the long Dutch tradition of consensus-based social dialogue. The aim of the article is twofold. First, it contributes to the debate on precarious workers’ organising by considering freelancers as agentic subjects, whose collective identity and organising practices shape and are shaped not only by the socio-institutional context, but also by the type of relationships they create and in which they are embedded. Second, by focusing on collective everyday practices as fields of production of the new, it illustrates diverse forms of critical agency exercised by freelancers, thus offering an empirical contribution to the understanding of critical agency in its making.
... The urge to reflect jointly in scientific papers on the concepts of precariousness, resilience, shared responsibility, and solidarity represents a form of challenging the neoliberal university (Stoica et al., 2019). The works aim to create discursive space for topics not yet addressed or insufficiently addressed (Lundström and de los Reyes, 2021), which can contribute to the formation of collective identity and the organization of a response (Vatansever, 2022). ...
... Tobbell et al., 2010), and in the transition to research-centred careers in academia (e.g. Jones et al., 2022;Vatansever, 2022) and industry (Roach & Sauermann, 2010). However, less is known about the identity development of PhD graduates employed in non-research positions 1 inside and outside of academia, at a time when recent studies have revealed that non-research employment has become the career destination for increasing numbers of PhD graduates (Hancock, 2021). ...
In this study, we explore the identity development of PhD graduates transitioning into non-researcher roles. Through the conceptual lens of identity-trajectory theory and based on interviews with 26 PhD graduates from three leading research universities in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, we analyse their identity-trajectory development after their transition to non-research employment. The findings show that PhD graduates develop their identity trajectories based on their existing sense of researcher-self through a variety of practices that involve intellectual, networking and institutional dimensions. Individual agency plays a key role in overcoming structural constraints in the workplace, yet its level varies according to one's willingness to pursue a non-research career. The findings highlight the fluidity in identity development and the role of the researcher-self as a positive legacy of doctoral training, including for PhD graduates taking non-researcher roles.
本研究探讨了博士毕业生在向非研究型职业过渡后的身份认同发展。透过身份认同轨迹理论的视角，并对来自香港、澳门和台湾三所一流研究型大学的26位博士毕业生进行访谈，本文分析了他们在过渡后的身份认同轨迹的变化。研究结果显示，博士毕业生的身份认同轨迹是建立在他们已有的研究者自我认同的基础上，并通过智能、人际关系和机构三方面的各种实践活动逐渐发展。个体的能动性在克服工作场所结构性限制方面起着关键作用，但具体程度会因个体对从事非研究型职业的意愿高低产生差异。研究结果一方面强调了身份认同发展的流动性，另一方面也强调了博士期间所养成的研究者自我认同即便是对从事非研究型职业的毕业生也会起到积极作用。
