"Digital precarization" of scientific and pedagogical workers in conditions of socio-economic turbulence

Abstract

The article presents the results of a study carried out among scientific and pedagogical workers of Russian universities from April 24 until June 4, 2020, the purpose of the work is to assess the satisfaction with the prevailing working conditions of teachers in the light of the rapid socio-economic changes in 2020, taking place against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the current circumstances of turbulence, the digital transformation of the entire education system was scaled up both in Russia and around the world. Distance education, which existed for a long time, was used as one of the types of education, mainly for the correspondence format, in one minute it has become the only possible one now. The object of this study is the scientific and pedagogical workers of universities in our country; the subject is the precarization of the employment of the teaching staff in the rapidly changing socio-economic conditions. Proceeding from the goal, the author set the following main research tasks: to reveal the readiness of scientific and pedagogical workers for a peremptory transition to distance education in a short time and to determine the main difficulties associated with this; to assess the degree of satisfaction of teachers with the forced-transformed working conditions. The results of the analysis allowed us to conclude that during the transition to distance education in the context of a pandemic, scientific and pedagogical workers faced a number of problems such as technical, organizational, social and psychological. The author analyzed the consequences of forced changes in working conditions. According to the results of the study, one can note the aggravation of the signs of precarization of scientific and pedagogical workers. The results of the study are of practical importance and can be taken into account when organizing a system of combined classical and distance education after the end of the pandemic.