Professional precarity, 1

Posted on | June 16, 2009 | 1 Comment

This is a note to self, and to anyone who didn’t catch Mark Bousquet’s recent post on professionalism and academia. It really highlights how the sacrificial labour of academics helped to make voluntary labour commonplace beyond the campus, in turn contributing to a broader deterioration of professional status that can no longer be rewarded financially or psychologically.

Bousquet raises similar issues to those addressed in Andrew Ross’s latest book when he writes:

Higher education has played a crucial, innovative role in the new order of the global workplace, trading on the willingness of most of us to discount our labor-time in exchange for a little dignity and partial autonomy. It isn’t just faculty work that’s being spoiled; most people’s work is being ruined in similar ways.

What’s particularly interesting is how Bousquet charts some of these changes in relation to managerialism:

the tenure-track faculty now retain professional status in at least partial relation to their managerial function—they manage a vast range of parafaculty (adjunct lecturers, tech support, undergraduate tutors, graduate teaching and research assistants). Just as much legal work is done by paralegals supervised by lawyers, and physicians increasingly function to manage non-physician medical practitioners, nurses of various grades, students, nurses’ aides, technicians, secretaries, and other personnel.

And the economies of corporate campuses:

The smoothly-functioning campus is a post-Fordist company town, with a churning pool of self-subsidizing cheap labor that takes loans to spend in the company store, voluntarily poses for company marketing materials, pays for the privilege of serving as a “brand ambassador” for the campus, and so on.

These are problems I hope we can think through at the State of the Industry conference in November. Well worth reading Bousquet’s book in preparation for those discussions.

Category: Academia, State of the Industry 2009, Work
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One Response to “Professional precarity, 1”

  1. Free writing | A Memorable Fancy
    July 3rd, 2009 @ 2:04 am

    [...] to Melissa Gregg at  Home Cooked Theory for link to and insightful discussion of Bousquet’s piece) [...]

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