Jan Gustafsson

The unacknowledged value of female academic labour power for male research careers

Academic work in Swedens higher education system is changing character. Distinctly different career pathways are emerging, as facilities for developing research careers and capital have become both more restricted and more dependent on external funding. These developments are in focus in the present article. Based on ethnographic research and a series of semi-structured interviews with new academics and senior academic mentors in education faculties, the research suggests that several factors intercede in how careers are developed and experienced. The unacknowledged exploitation of female academic labour is perhaps amongst the more significant of these.

The Making of Careers in Academia: Split Career Movements in Education Science.

In this article the authors discuss developments in the Europeanisation of higher education policy context of Sweden, and in particular certain changes within the field of education science. Detailed career narratives from 30 interviews have been produced and analysed. These narratives illustrate how research careers in education are formed and conditioned by institutional demands, forms of career capital and the actions of researchers. In the making of careers in academia, the authors point out how some researchers get access to resources that make them competitive and influential, and that those with an already strong research career capital tend accumulate more of this. They also point out that researchers with a background in teaching seem to find it harder to develop research careers as they seem to be bound to forms of career capital that are seen as more needed in teaching. Accordingly, two career profiles have been identified: the successful and the supportive researchers, respectively.

Invited to Academia. Recruited for Science or Teaching in Education Sciences.

ABSTRACT In the context of higher education in Sweden, we see how major policy change is forming the field of Education Sciences. This change has promoted an increased focus on competitiveness, while reducing inefficiencies in mass-education. It has given legitimacy to specific recruitment strategies and career paths, but can also explain what determines how career capital is accumulated. The aim of the present study is to describe how academics experience recruitment and positioning processes in their career. How do academics gain career capital and symbolic value in career and use it to gain recognition? The results illustrate three career paths, identified as “the invited”, “the useful” or “the uninvited”. Thus, the present article describes a Matthew effect in recruitment, where young PhD students are positioned early on as either promising researchers, teachers, or as substitutes who are sorted out from both research and education.

Systematic quality development work in a Swedish leisure-time centre

ABSTRACT There is increasing activity in the area of quality issues in education in Europe. Diverse discourses of policy for quality are encountered in daily practice. This article explores systematic quality development work in a Swedish educational setting: the leisure-time centre. By following 2 teachers’ enactments of policy in planning, organising, documenting, and evaluating the quality of a leisure-time centre and childrens achievement of objectives, different logics were found. Tensions in practice that visualise pluralistic intentions in policy and educational approaches were also revealed. Planning and organising as parts of systematic quality development work reveal an emerging individualistic perspective. However, when teachers carry out documentation and evaluation, they reconstruct a social pedagogical approach grounded in the tradition of the leisure-time centre with a group-oriented focus.

Academic career: on institutions, social capital and gender

ABSTRACT During decades of change in the Western higher education sector, new ways of understanding academic work have reinforced notions of the impact of social capital. The present study investigates researchers’ experiences of their own career making within two areas of Education Sciences in Swedish higher education: Childhood Studies (CS) and Science Education (SE). The structure at the CS departments is collaborative and integrated; teaching and research are seen as an entity. This structure creates a coherent career path where members of the collective group jointly produce and accumulate social capital; it also appears to be related to discourses of femininity. In the SE departments, the career structure is strategic and differentiated; the two career paths work in parallel through a differentiation between teaching and research. This appears to be related to discourses of masculinity. In conclusion, our analysis shows how social capital and gender mutually create different ways of doing an academic career.

Differentiation through individualisation – an ethnographic investigation of how one Swedish school creates inequality

ABSTRACT The present article examines the general debate on curriculum differentiation and individualisation. Based on a policy ethnographic case study of class 9a at Forest School, it critically analyses how curriculum differentiation and individualisation are enacted in and interfere with classroom practice. The results show how Forest Schools curriculum model on differentiation and individualisation has created and reproduced a system in which different knowledge is available to different groups of pupils. In practice, owing to this policy, some pupils are categorised as successful, some as adequate and some as failing. The analysis also shows that this practice creates differentiation in relation to school achievement and grades, but foremost that pupils in this class of 9th graders are paying a high price for their schooling, in the form of underachievement and social inequality.

Challenges in making an academic career in education sciences

Abstract The competitive university has brought about changes in structural conditions and created contradictions which are embedded in institutions. The present study is based on interviews with 42 early career researchers in the field of education sciences in Sweden. We analyse how members of this group handle career possibilities and limitations in relation to gender and to the structural ambivalence embedded in the higher education system. Our results illustrate that the structure of education sciences contains power relations and processes of differentiation, which give researchers different access to resources that can be used to handle structural ambivalence. This is illustrated in how, for example, women researchers, more than men, lack resources to solve the experienced tensions surrounding them, and therefore often work in areas where they are able to cope. Men researchers can often solve their career ambivalence by avoiding traps and gaining recognition, and are therefore able to advance.

Projects as a policy tool: a policy ethnographic investigation in the field of education in Sweden

ABSTRACT Politics and educational policy have been increasingly projectified, and projects as an organisational form have become a symbol for solving complex educational problems and interventions. The present article is a policy ethnographic case study in the field of education in Sweden, concerning the use of projects as a policy tool in the Mountain School. The analytical focus is on using projects as a policy tool within a multi-project organisation, where the projects are aimed at promoting integration of pupils with immigrant backgrounds and improving their school achievements. Through the analysis I identified four distinct themes: Outward leadership and teacher teams, The projects have never belonged to the teachers, The lack of a common educational policy and Project as vision and reality. These four themes demonstrate the complexities and difficulties in relation to organisation, management, definition and implementation. These complexities and difficulties in the policy process are not unique to either regular or temporary organisations. However, what becomes apparent in the case of the Mountain School is that the number of projects was very high, which puts considerable pressure on the headmasters and the teachers in their decoding, interpreting, negotiating and enactment of project as a policy tool.

Workplace Learning in Higher Education: Two Examples from a Swedish Context

Abstract This chapter deals with aspects of the overall criticism in regard to higher education and its growing discrepancy between theory and practice, and the meaning of problem-based and authentic learning. The chapter is based on two specific cases that illustrate how higher education is organized in Sweden, and how education could be organized to correspond to the demands of authentic learning and a new form of knowledge production. Work-based learning started as an alternative to the ordinary three-year nursing program at a university college in the western part of Sweden. One main finding was that the students experienced the relation between the different types of teaching in the program as weak, and the different learning contexts in the program as being separate from each other. Higher Vocational Education (HVE) is a market-oriented vocational higher education program with close cooperation between an educational provider and working life. Work-based learning is a cornerstone of HVE, and authentic learning in a real-life setting constitutes a single course governed by its own syllabus. One main finding, was that students experienced a lack of progression in the work tasks and the subject content of the school-based education was not advanced enough. Workplace learning can serve as a structuring resource in education, but it can also be problematic because knowledge is inherent in routines and technologies.

Becoming an Academic Researcher

The neo-liberal restructuring of academia justifies research concerning what constitutes academic work, what it means to be an academic researcher and how researchers manoeuvre in academia. The aim of this article is to investigate how this reshaping of higher education affects how research careers are formed and impacts on ‘becoming researchers’. The authors analyse the processes of becoming an academic subject by means of detailed cartographies of 14 early career researchers and their experiences of making a career in academia. The authors see the nomadic subject as being in a becoming process of constant change and mediation between different levels of power and desire. She or he constantly searches and shifts between a conscious desire and unconscious needs. By using three intersected themes — ‘feeling a bit alone’, ‘I do “my own thing”’ and ‘I decided to move’ — the authors have identified how these 14 researchers, in the processes of becoming an academic subject, are driven by desires that are making it difficult for them to understand and read their situations. There appears to be a tension between how they understand what they need to do and what they actually do. In conclusion, the authors illustrate how these nomadic researchers are made into unproductive individuals who underperform. Their otherness is often understood as and proclaimed to be self-made. That is why academics in a nomadic subject position often seem to blame themselves for their lack of ability to adjust to institutional demands for performativity.