Petra Angervall

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.

Dividing academic work: gender and academic career at Swedish universities

ABSTRACT Recent changes within the higher education system have affected the balance of academic labour. This article is based on interviews with 25 women lecturers in Education Faculties at Swedish Universities. It specifically addresses the shifting balance in terms of the increased separation between teaching and research in relation to gender, and the relationship between career advancement and gender this promotes. Distinctions concerning gender and academic labour and an enhancement of these power structures are identified, as well as how these affect possibilities of academic advancement. In conclusion, this study illustrates how women academics understand and navigate their academic career in relation to gendered attributes of academic work such as competitiveness, caretaking and responsibility are discussed.

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.

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.

Re-purposing fika: rest, recreation or regulation in the neoliberalized swedish university?

ABSTRACT Fika is the Swedish practice of assembling for a coffee break at work or home. This paper investigates the material, social and temporal investments in fika in accelerated and accountable organizational cultures, and asks what purpose it serves in neoliberalised academic employment regimes today. Analysis of our thirteen interviews with administrators and academics in a Faculty of Education in a large research-intensive Swedish university suggests that there are multiple interpretations of fika. Traditionally, fika has been used as a site for team-building, democratization, and well-being at work, but might have been re-purposed and incorporated in neoliberal surveillance and normalization technologies in which ones corporate loyalty and interpersonal skills are made visible for assessment. We noted an affective and gendered economy with fika eliciting feelings of pleasure in the social and recreational aspects, but shame and anger at what was perceived as coercion to perform a particular type of sociable subjectivity.

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.

The Excellent Researcher.

The neo-liberal university not only changes systems of governance but also impacts on how subject positions are valued. These changes justify critical questions on how academics manoeuvre in academia. In this study focus is on the told experiences of 18 researchers who describe how they made an excellent career in academia. The results show that most of the researchers express awareness about a performative culture in terms of how it is affecting their careers and how they should make mindful and rewarding choices. Accordingly, the “excellent researcher” is expected to know how to use specific locations in order to move in a profitable way. Some express that they move as they like, due to their individual competence. The results also illustrate how women more than men express uncertainties and complex self-images that create barriers (mental and physical). Men seem to think less about their conditions than women, and express clear views about where to go and how to move. Women move less distinctly and less collaborative, but also seem less rewarded. Many of the women appear anxious, especially in relation to the boundaries between private- and work-life, which partly could disable them in using their capacity of making distinct choices in their career.

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.