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

Description

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, the findings reveal that respondents jointly refer to competition and delivery to make sense of their current situation. Forming what I call "the project frame," these interpretive orientations contribute to a narrow regime of valuation and accumulation, shaping the respondents’ research practices and social identity as early career academics. However, there are variations in attempts to align with the project frame, indicating the significance of disciplinary background, 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 luck and drawing on imagined futures, respondents alter the normative meanings of the project frame. Understood as acts of keying, this allows them to adapt to certain institutional demands of the early career while committing to broader definitions of recognition and worth. Both conceptually and empirically, the article contributes to an understanding of academic career-making as a kind of pragmatic problem-solving centred on navigating multiple career pressures and individual aspirations.

Period	2024 Mar 14
Event title	Sociologidagarna: Övergång eller undergång
Event type	Conference
Location	GöteborgShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National