Between delivery and luck: how early career academics negotiate the project frame

Description

One of the most notable features of contemporary academia is the role played by projects. Project is the standard format for organizing research activities and the division of labour at department. Moreover, competitive project funding is the most common way to decide what research that is deemed worthy of being provided money and what research that is not. This process of projectification has deeply influenced the social and temporal structures of academia with an increase of short-term employment and hyper-competition especially evident among early career academics. For this particular group, projects not only characterise precarious working conditions, but are the very material upon which academic careers are structured, build, and assessed. Indeed, early career academics are frequently mentioned as those most strongly affected by these dynamics. However, their own perceptions are much less frequently considered.

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 on the level of meaning-making. Building on 35 in-depth interviews with fixed-term scholars in political science and history work-ing at five research-intensive universities in Sweden, the findings reveal that respondents jointly refer to competition and delivery in order to make sense of their current situation. Making up what I call ‘the project frame,’ these interpretive orientations feed into a narrow regime of valuation and accumulation shaping the respondents’ research practices and social identity as early career academics. Still, attempts to align to ‘the project frame’ varies, indicating the significance of disciplinary backgrounds, group memberships, and wider evaluative landscapes in understanding the dynamics of projectification. Additionally, early career academics do more than passively accept their situation as given. By emphasizing the importance of being lucky as well as drawing on imagined futures resondents alter the normative meanings of ‘the project frame.’ This let them adopt to certain institutional demands of the early career while committing to broadener recognition and the maintenance of moral worth.

Both conceptually and empirically, the paper contributes an understanding of academic socialization as a kind of pragmatic problem solving, centred on navigating multiple career pressures and individual aspirations. As such, it brings new insights into understanding how junior scholars make sense of themselves and their careers in a much-changed Nordic higher education context.

Period	2024 Mar 7
Event title	NERA 2024: Adventures of Education: Desires, Encounters and Differences - Malmö Universitet, Malmö, Sverige
Event type	Conference
Location	Malmö, SwedenShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International