Academic Division Of Labour Research Articles

Academic housework in pandemic times: COVID-19 effects on the gendered distribution of academic work in Portugal

A large body of scientific literature has highlighted the gendered division of academic work, particularly the undervalued and invisible tasks that make up the less prestigious dimension of the academic professions. Informed by the concept of ‘academic housework’, this paper explores the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the gendered distribution of academic work, drawing from the results of a survey of 1750 lecturers and researchers from Portuguese public universities. Our results, based on a series of linear and categorical regressions, point to the reinforcement of gender inequalities in the division of academic labour during the pandemic. This is reflected in worsening imbalances in the allocation of time to unpaid, invisible ‘institutional housekeeping’ and to emotional, institutional care work, including mentoring and supporting students. The fact that women, regardless of their family or professional situation, bore the greater share of the effort associated with the increased material and emotional demands of teaching and academic service during this period is reflected in an increasing imbalance in the allocation of time to research, which involves fundamental activities for career advancement. Our findings underline the need to rethink the current neoliberal model of academic meritocracy and to begin to recognise and value the gendered and invisible work of academics.

My Formative Years

Abstract A pretty perilous and challenging exercise, especially for someone like me who indulges in thinking of himself, in a somewhat defensive and questionable way, I confess, as having no specific field or period of competence and evading any precise definition or classification in academic terms. As a matter of fact, I have been lucky enough to spend most of my life in an institution, the EHESS [École des hautes études en sciences sociales], which, in those days, having become an independent school, was open to people who refused to defer to the academic division of labor and which, under the rule of great personalities like Fernand Braudel and my friend Jacques Le Goff, would welcome young people with non-conformist backgrounds in order for them to develop their formation according to their own lines. To develop it—I wouldn't say to achieve it, for as far as I am concerned there seems to be no end to it: hence the challenge, which consists in having to look back at one's own intellectual past through the viewer and the lens of the present. Part of the picture, which happened to be of great consequence to me, was, and still is, a great freedom and encouragement to travel, lecture, teach, and study abroad, in my case especially in the States, where, for a long time, I felt much more at ease with authentic art historians and critics than I did in France, and developed some deep and enduring friendships with great individuals like Meyer Schapiro, Rosalind Krauss, Tony Vidler, Tim Clark, and Hank Millon, not to mention several artists and architects I will refer to later. Travelling: I don't claim any originality when saying that I owe to my urge to travel a large part of my formation as an art historian. I remember with emotion looking with Meyer Schapiro through his travel notebooks. I keep boxes filled with my own.

Lessons of the Cold War

Lessons of the Cold War

Idea moderna de universidad: de la torre de marfil al capitalismo académico

El presente artículo analiza la evolución de los discursos acerca de la universidad moderna a partir de la revisión reflexiva de textos clásicos y actuales sobre el tránsito desde la universidad como torre de marfil a la universidad emprendedora, examinando las tensiones que esta evolución genera en términos de principios formativos y organización del conocimiento. Para ello, este ensayo comienza argumentando que la universidad se hace parte de la Ilustración y accede a la modernidad cuando la Facultad de filosofía deja de ser conceptualizada como sierva de la Facultad de Teología y cuando deja, por lo tanto, de llevar su cola (philosophia theologiae ancilla), según ironiza Kant, para pasar en cambio a comprenderse como responsable de iluminar con una antorcha su camino. En las décadas siguientes el nuevo rol que asume la filosofía en la división del trabajo académico transforma las relaciones de la institución universitaria con el poder político y el poder religioso, abriendo las puertas, al mismo tiempo, hacia el Estado nacional y, más adelante, hacia la subordinación de sus actividades al capitalismo global. Consecuencia de lo anterior, los referentes normativos tradicionales de la universidad propiciados por Kant y Humboldt como responsable de la evolución de la sociedad moderna pierden plausibilidad y son sometidos a la crítica de las ideologías. El artículo concluye examinando futuras tendencias de la educación e investigación realizadas en las universidades contemporáneas y argumenta que la crisis de la idea moderna de la universidad es, de hecho, expresión de su carácter moderno que ahora se vuelve contra la misma institución.

Urban and Industrial Everyday Life under Socialism and Post-Socialism

The above quotations from two of the books under review here took me back to the early 1970s and my first weeks in Hungary. As a graduate student in sociology, struggling to get to grips with my surroundings, I distinctly remember thinking that what was needed was an anthropology for large-scale industrial society to explain their foreignness and remoteness. Everything in the metropolis of Budapest followed a different logic, and in the academic division of labour, anthropologists are those with the skills to interpret the meanings of societies which operate according to a logic different to that of industrialised West. But in those days anthropologists still tended to focus on pre-industrial societies outside Europe. I had not yet readThe Good Soldier Švejk, but a Hungarian sociologist told me was that I would never understand communist Eastern Europe without readingŠvejk. I did, and he was right.

Click to save and return to course: online education, adjunctification, and the disciplining of academic labour

There has been little analysis of how neoliberal adjunctification and online education (OLE) are shaping a new academic division of labour in US colleges and universities. OLE rationalises academic labour by separating it from the delivery of educational content while transforming learning into the self-disciplined completion of sequential tasks (e.g. ‘competency-based learning’) under the panoptic surveillance of online course management systems (CMS). OLE is subtly shifting the very hidden curriculum of higher education to meet the needs of global capital for a more effectively disciplined labour force that can work contingently and remotely with little or no overt coercion. This analysis of the process by which OLE is rationalising academic labour draws upon the ideas of Foucault and Tronti to argue that OLE is a tool for producing a type of disciplined labour that breaks down the borders between productive and reproductive labour in order to colonise all life as work.

Migrant Mindworkers and the New Division of Academic Labor

The reorganization of higher education has been made possible by a new division of labor that is rationalizing and deskilling college teaching. These new relations of academic labor are disempowering the professorate by transferring control over teaching to a growing middle management and automating it as online distance learning. In order to respond to this threat to higher education, it is necessary to shift the focus from the commercialization of higher education to the adjunctification of the professorate. This requires a critical rethinking of organizational tactics, strategies, and objectives of academic labor organizing.

When Hephaestus Fell to Earth

Braverman’s analysis of the changing division of labor is crucial for understanding the impact of the neoliberal assault on higher education on academic labor. Much like Taylorism a century ago, adjunctification of the faculty, online education, and data driven planning are rationalizing academic labor. Teaching is being “unbundled” and its components parts automated, outsourced, and transferred to a growing middle level administration. As a result, faculty are becoming “just-in-time,” deskilled, disempowered, contingent labor. This newly emerging new division of labor is fundamentally transforming higher education. No longer merely subject to commercialization, academic labor is being reorganized to resemble the interchangeable contingent work that is ubiquitous throughout the labor market. To resist these developments it is necessary for faculty to study the new division of academic labor in order to devise new organizing tactics and strategies, such as the systemwide local and Metro organizing models.

Journeying into interobjectivity: how worlds can be multiple and real

The culture-nature division is fundamental to the division of academic labour between the social and natural sciences. In the face of climate change and other broad environmental threats, natural and social scientists are becoming critical of this division of labour. This paper considers Contested Natures (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998) and heterotopia in the social sciences and social-ecological systems in the natural sciences as attempts to undo this division. These attempts, I argue, reproduce the ontological division fundamental to the problem they aim to overcome. Using a curious coincidence on a trip to the field, I explore a language that avoids the subject/object distinction characteristic of this ontological divide. By closely considering the point on my journey where my travelling companions — a GPS navigator and a small Japanese sedan — encountered their limits, I find a metaphysical starting point for a multiplicity of natures that are more than mentally-held cultural constructions of nature, or linkages between diverse social systems and an ecological realm. The argument suggests that multiple worlds emerge from the disentangling operations of interobjectively extended bodies and that the apparent unity between multiple worlds is itself a product of such interobjectivity.

On Being and Providing “Data”: Politics of Transnational Feminist Collaboration and Academic Division of Labor

On Being and Providing “Data”Politics of Transnational Feminist Collaboration and Academic Division of Labor Debjani Chakravarty (bio) Cross-border collaboration has emerged as central to the discourse on transnational feminism as well as a methodological imperative that, I argue, needs constant, reflexive scrutiny. Transnational feminism is a multi-connotative subfield within women’s/gender/sexuality/feminist studies in the United States featuring anti-hegemonic (anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, etc.) writings by feminists, many originally from the Indian subcontinent. These writings uphold the importance of praxis and interrupt a dominant notion of global sisterhood, multicultural solidarity, and conventional knowledge-making.1 As the field of women’s/gender/sexuality/feminist studies continues to internationalize, collaborative knowledge-making is one way to ensure epistemic justice and build global epistemological communities. What does this justice look like? Who belongs and has power in this epistemological community? In this paper I investigate the meaning and nature of collaboration from the vantage of the often-silent non-Western collaborators of transnational feminisms located in the global South—women who almost never author scholarship or exercise authority on what gets published in the name of transnational feminism. I argue that there remains an academic division of labor between authors located in the global North and collaborators in the global South. Theories, methodologies, and accounts of transnational feminist collaboration often display a spiral of silence about the material conditions of knowledge production and circulation. Transnational feminist writings in the United States focus instead on the politics of collaboration narrowly between two parties, namely, the writer and the readership overlooking the global processes of exchange and mobility that determine such projects. There is little focus, for instance, on the laws governing research funding or the economics of publication. Further, while researchers from the global North reflexively position themselves within their writings, their performance of candor, positionality, and reflexivity sometimes blurs discussions of their own privilege. [End Page 25] Motivations for engaging in cross-border research projects beyond feminist and/or activist motivations and what enables such motivations are seldom discussed.2 The purpose of this paper is to also point out the discord between transnational feminist writings published in the United States that uphold collaboration as a methodological imperative, on the one hand, and actual collaborative research practices, on the other. As a feminist scholar from India currently living and working in the United States, I approach this issue from the standpoint of research/activist collaborators in India who provide data and resources toward cross-national genderfocused (sometimes identified as “transnational feminist”) research projects that originate and are published in the United States. I was once in a similar position as a data provider for a “gender and development” project. This process of data gathering is common in anthropology and in the field of women’s studies since the 1990s. This is a characteristic of the internationalization of women’s studies in US universities, which has been critiqued as tokenism, Euro (or US)-centric hegemony and masked deployment of nationalist superiority in understanding the Other or testimonials of the Other.3 My analysis draws on interviews I conducted with twenty-five women located in academic and extra-academic spaces in India who at some point in their careers have worked with academic feminists located in the global North. While my paper could be located within a framework of transnational feminist collaboration, I am trying to understand the meaning and nature of the often-silenced non-US collaborators. In doing so, I hold up the methodology of collaboration for inspection. I investigate the politics of engagement and collaboration as a central claim made in transnational feminist scholarship. This claim often overrides other claims of recurrent powerlessness of collaborators located in the global South, as well as their perceived and articulated unease in the way they are positioned within such partnerships. These silent collaborators—because they are not the authors who write up accounts of such collaborations or the ones who exercise authority over transnational feminist discourses—often remain unable to express their concerns about their roles and marginalization in the process of collaborative knowledge creation. To understand this silence, a phenomenology of collaborator experiences on providing...

On Being and Providing “Data”: Politics of Transnational Feminist Collaboration and Academic Division of Labor

On Being and Providing “Data”: Politics of Transnational Feminist Collaboration and Academic Division of Labor

Geopolitics at the margins? Reconsidering genealogies of critical geopolitics

Critical geopolitics has become one of the most vibrant parts of political geography. However it remains a particularly western way of knowing which has been much less attentive to other traditions of thinking. This paper engages with Pan-Africanism, and specifically the vision of the architect of post-colonial Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, to explore this overlooked contribution to critical engagements with geopolitics. Pan-Africanism sought to forge alternative post-colonial worlds to the binary geopolitics of the Cold War and the geopolitical economy of neo-colonialism. The academic division of labour has meant that these ideas have been consigned to African studies rather than being drawn into wider debates around the definitions of key disciplinary concepts. However Nyerere's continental thinking can be seen as a form of geopolitical imagination that challenges dominant neo-realist projections, and which still has much to offer contemporary political geography.

Rattraper le nouvel Occident : « L’initiative d’excellence » allemande, les études régionales et la re-production des inégalités

In the wake of the recent university reforms, the new academic division of labor in Germany has subserviently followed the U.S.-model of creating a rift between research and teaching universities by establishing on the one hand so-called “elite universities” that benefit from considerable state funding and on the other hand trying to reduce the rest to pedagogical carbon copies of standard curricula that can only award bachelor‘s or at most master‘s degrees and where the teaching load allows (almost) no research. The so-called “excellence initiative”, an evaluation process taking place between 2006 and 2007, in the course of which 9 universities - among which the Free University of Berlin, the University of Munich, and the University of Heidelberg - were designated as “elite universities”, represents Germany‘s hitherto clearest and most highly institutionalized example of a state policy aimed at confining research to specialized institutions, such as was already the case with the Max Planck institutes, the Leibniz institutes and the Fraunhofer societies founded in the 1970s and 1980s. However, while earlier steps in this direction only created a wider array of employment options for researchers, the argument of this paper is that the excellence initiative represents what has been called a process of “indirect commercialization” (Reinhard Kreckel) or an instance of “academic capitalism” (Slaughter/Leslie) of/in the Western European university system, which traditionally relied on state financing and state control of university finances. To this end, the paper proceeds in two steps: First, following Reinhard Kreckel‘s argument that neoliberal globalization exerts new economic and fiscal pressures on the state that are then passed on to the higher education systems depending on them, the paper looks at how the new elite discourse of German higher education is producing new structures of exclusion instead of the professed more egalitarian and meritocratic system of self-designated “knowledge societies”. Second, using the examples of recent calls for grant applications by Germany‘s ministry of education and state-funded research agencies, the paper zooms in on the revival of area studies as one of the prominent targets of the excellence initiative and funding in order to show how strong state financial support for inequality and democratization research (in the context of Latin American studies) and transformation research (in the context of Eastern European studies) reinforces the main assumptions of modernization theory and reproduces the asymmetries of knowledge production characteristic of Euro- and state-centered approaches to the issues in question.

Reflections on the Trajectories of Social Science Research in Contemporary Japan

This survey on the science of the social sciences in Japan reflects upon a largely invisible discourse that has been hardly systematically explored so far. Since the current transformation of the field is first of all a reaction to a new global political economy of science, we introduce the concept of ‘academic neo-colonialism’ for a critical assessment of the vested and ramified dynamics impacting the social sciences. The survey features a short review of major contributions to the science of the social sciences, and evidence of the dynamics and consequences of the current process of change within the fields of social science demand, the academic division of labour and Japan's position within the international academic world. We argue that the apparent passivity of Japan's social sciences as well as the asymmetrical global flows of people, texts and ideas are a reflection of Japan's semi-peripheral position in the world system of the social sciences. ‘Science is in danger, and for that reason it is becoming dangerous’ (Bourdieu 2004: vii).

Geography (or geographers) and earth system science

A response to Pitman’s recent arguments regarding a perceived invasion of geographers’ territory within the academic division of labour by earth system science. Geography is not the grand synthesiser, the only discipline which can explain the big picture, and arrogant claims that it is are counter-productive, both within and outwith the discipline. Geographers should just get on with what they are doing—well.

The construction of academic time: sub/contracting academic labour in research

This article offers a poststructuralist analysis of the academic division of labour in the UK higher education sector. It takes the standpoint of a contract researcher and explores some new contradictions of an intensified academic division of labour. It raises some political, social and methodological questions of these divisions through exploring their class and gender dimension. As Paul Rabinow (1986) has argued despite talk of reflexivity, most academics remain deathly silent about the conditions of their own production. He argues that reflection upon our own social, political, economic and cultural location within the academy is one of the greatest taboos ? far greater strictures operate against addressing the significance of ‘corridor talk’ than operate against the denunciation of objectivism. Until we can bring to the surface and publicly discuss the conditions under which people are hired, given tenure, published, awarded grants and feted, ‘real’ reflexivity will remain a dream' (Gill 1998: 38)

Fragmentation around a Defended Core: The Territoriality of Geography

Geography, like all other academic disciplines, is fragmented into a large number of specialist communities, within which research occurs and individual careers are structured: Geography is characterized by at least four cleavages. Such fragmentation is necessary to scientific progress, but threatens the discipline's status and funding within academia, hence the attempts to defend Geography's territory within the academic division of labour. Geography's situation may be more acute than that for many other disciplines, because of its multifarious external links.

Partnership in Initial Teacher Training: after the shotgun wedding

Abstract This paper focusses on the institution of a partnership between one higher education institution (HEI) and several schools. The qualitative data reported here were collected from semi‐structured interviews with students, mentors and tutors. This study provides insights into how the partnership worked out in practice by highlighting contradictions and conflicts in these newly defined roles. Using the respondents’ accounts, the reconfiguration of relationships emerging in the partnership are explored. The academic division of labour and the traditions of initial teacher training in which authority and responsibility resided with the tutors in HEIs have circumscribed the formation of partnerships. In broader terms, the technical powers given to the mentors have been limited by the ways in which the partnership has been introduced. Despite the collaboration implied by the partnership, it appears in this initial year that it has reinforced the hierarchical relations and constituted a clearer demarcati...

The Coase Theorem and the division of academic labor

The extensive research in “transaction cost economics” motivated by the work of Ronald Coase seems to take place mostly in business and law schools and not in traditional economics departments where the vast majority of economists practice and the next generations are trained. This paper examines why the Coase program has not revolutionized economics. First, it reflects the unwillingness of Coase to use mathematical tools or the Walrasian paradigm. Second, the clientele of professional schools are less willing to tolerate abstraction acceptable to those of the economics departments. But the continuation of such division will hinder the quest for understanding economic life.

A blank sheet of paper: The phenomenological foundation of comparative media theory

Communication studies appears to be in an undecided, perhaps undecidable, state with regards to its significance for the human sciences. In one respect, it appears as a specialized area of investigation which, although it has its own internal issues and perhaps even classics, is distinguished more widely primarily by the fact that it is a latecomer to the academic division of labor compared to sociology, anthropology, political science or psychology. In another respect, it is often proposed as a synthetic approach to the human sciences outright, an interdisciplinary inquiry capable of linking the researches of specialized human sciences to the philosophical foundations of the project of human scientific inquiry itself. This characteristic oscilla? tion is indicated in the predominant rhetoric by which a study is proposed first as concerned with a "neglected aspect" of a social formation or, more often, social change and second as the secret, or "organizing factor," behind it. The formative perceptual, institutional and cognitive influence of media of communication are, by an increasing body of literature, first said to have been overlooked and then insinuated to be the key factor in the constitution of a social formation. The work of Harold Innis, Eric Havelock, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and several others, forms the core of this literature. From the standpoint of the relation between philosophy and the human sciences, the constitution of perception, institutions and thought by media of communication is the thesis proper to communication studies, the thesis from which its larger significance derives. I refer to this approach to communication studies, which focuses on the constitution of society by media themselves, rather than their contents or effects, as "comparative