{"title":"Between Delivery and Luck: Projectification of Academic Careers and Conflicting Notions of Worth at the Postdoc Level","authors":"Jonatan Nästesjö","doi":"10.1007/s11024-024-09541-3","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper investigates how early career academics interpret and respond to institutional demands structured by projectification. Developing a ‘frame analytic’ approach, it explores projectification as a process constituted at the level of meaning-making. Building on 35 in-depth interviews with fixed-term scholars in political science and history, the findings show that respondents jointly referred to <i>competition</i> and <i>delivery</i> in order to make sense of their current situation. Forming what I call <i>the project frame</i>, these interpretive orientations were legitimized by various organizational routines within the studied departments, feeding into a dominant regime of valuation and accumulation. However, while the content of the project frame is well-defined, attempts to align with it vary, indicating the importance of disciplines and academic age when navigating project-based careers. Furthermore, this way of framing academic work and careers provokes tensions and conflicts that junior scholars try to manage. To curb their competitive relationship and enable cooperation, respondents emphasized the outcome of project funding as ‘being lucky.’ They also drew on imagined futures to envision alternative scripts of success and worth. Both empirically and conceptually, the article contributes to an understanding of academic career-making as a kind of pragmatic problem-solving, centered on navigating multiple career pressures and individual aspirations.</p>","PeriodicalId":47427,"journal":{"name":"Minerva","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.2000,"publicationDate":"2024-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Minerva","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-024-09541-3","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper investigates how early career academics interpret and respond to institutional demands structured by projectification. Developing a ‘frame analytic’ approach, it explores projectification as a process constituted at the level of meaning-making. Building on 35 in-depth interviews with fixed-term scholars in political science and history, the findings show that respondents jointly referred to competition and delivery in order to make sense of their current situation. Forming what I call the project frame, these interpretive orientations were legitimized by various organizational routines within the studied departments, feeding into a dominant regime of valuation and accumulation. However, while the content of the project frame is well-defined, attempts to align with it vary, indicating the importance of disciplines and academic age when navigating project-based careers. Furthermore, this way of framing academic work and careers provokes tensions and conflicts that junior scholars try to manage. To curb their competitive relationship and enable cooperation, respondents emphasized the outcome of project funding as ‘being lucky.’ They also drew on imagined futures to envision alternative scripts of success and worth. Both empirically and conceptually, the article contributes to an understanding of academic career-making as a kind of pragmatic problem-solving, centered on navigating multiple career pressures and individual aspirations.
期刊介绍:
Minerva is devoted to the study of ideas, traditions, cultures and institutions in science, higher education and research. It is concerned no less with history than with present practice, and with the local as well as the global. It speaks to the scholar, the teacher, the policy-maker and the administrator. It features articles, essay reviews and ''special'' issues on themes of topical importance. It represents no single school of thought, but welcomes diversity, within the rules of rational discourse. Its contributions are peer-reviewed. Its audience is world-wide.