A social‐psychological examination of academic precarity as an organizational practice and subjective experience

Abstract

Research and teaching conditions have, particularly for those who are junior or from disadvantaged backgrounds, deteriorated considerably over the years in the higher education sector. Unequal opportunities in access and advancement in careers have led to increasing levels of precarity in the higher education sector. Although the concept of precarity has been grasped in many other disciplines, the social-psychological understanding of this concept remains unexplored. In this paper, we aim to develop a social-psychological understanding of precarity to examine how identity dynamics and intergroup relations, as well as associated organizational controls, reinforce inequality regimes and power structures that create precarious conditions in academia. In doing so, we use social identity theory and system justification theory under an inequality regime framework. We argue that even though change towards equality and equity in academia should be possible, it is difficult to achieve this because of entrenched identity interests by power holders and the perceived legitimacy of the existing system. Therefore, academic precarity should be recognized both as a subjective experience and as an organizational practice to make inequalities more visible and decrease the perceptions of legitimacy-and to eventually achieve a fundamental positive transformation in academia.

Towards a social psychology of precarity

“…The ways in which academia and [social] psychology as a discipline are precarity‐ making is the focus of four of the eight contributing papers in this special issue; however, they approach and conceptualize this issue in different ways and from different positionalities. Albayrak‐Aydemir and Gleibs ( 2022 ) adopt a position ‘inside’ social psychology, drawing on social identity theory, system justification theory and the inequality regime framework from sociology, to illustrate how precarious conditions in academia are [re]created through sets of practices, highlighting how we both ‘do’ precarity and can ‘be’ made precarious in academia as an organizational setting. They call for changes, not only in how we do research but also in how we identify as academics.…”

“…Whilst subjectivities and affective dimensions are linked to the processual nature of precarity in social science theorizing, papers in this special issue explore the dynamics of these processes in depth. Adam‐Troian et al ( 2022 ) and Mahendran et al ( 2022 ) draw attention to the ways in which (different formulations of) precarity, experienced as ‘threat’, shape societal relations and political decision‐making. Mahendran and colleagues ( 2022 ) further expand this view of societal relations through their use of the migration‐mobility continuum (which locates all humans on a scale of migration) in exploring the different ways in which people make sense of, and might seek to change, our bordered world.…”

“…By revealing the coloniality of knowledge embedded in the social psychological research on Israeli‐Palestinian relations, Hakim et al ( 2022 ) invite us to re‐think and resist actions that weld more closely material and psychological colonizations. Finally, Albayrak‐Aydemir and Gleibs ( 2022 ) call for broad systemic change in academia to redress wage gaps, unequal power relations, unmanageable workloads and hostile academic environments. These proposals invite us to engage in actions that counter the epistemic and epistemological violence that can be inflicted when researching individuals in contexts of precarity and engaging in social psychological scholarship more broadly.…”

Precarious engagements and the politics of knowledge production: Listening to calls for reorienting hegemonic social psychology

“…Lastly, we take the view that whilst precarity is a universal, and politically induced condition (Butler, 2009 , 2012 ), it does not affect everyone in the same way because of how power operates to regulate humanity accorded to each individual and how vulnerability is unequally distributed (Ruti, 2017 ). For example, job precarity and constricted academic freedom affect women of colour (and other gender minorities) more in UK higher education (Albayrak‐Aydemir & Gleibs, 2022 ; Blell et al, 2022a ). Therefore, we observe how precarity affects everyone who engages with it, and highlight how multiple, intersecting oppressions collide within precarity to engulf folks already experiencing racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and white supremacy.…”

“…Hegemonic psychology's promotion of the neoliberal self has in fact spilled over to how it understands people in the Global South(s) (Bhatia & Priya, 2021 ). Within the discipline as it manifests in Euro‐American institutions, precarity is also a condition that is created through the avaricious expansion of short‐term teaching and research contracts that foist insecurity and vulnerability upon early career scholars (as discussed in Albayrak‐Aydemir & Gleibs, 2022 ). This condition in turn promotes competition and a scarcity mindset that is perfectly comfortable in the neoliberal, for‐profit paradigm that universities actively construct and maintain.…”