Universities and Academic Labour in Times of Digitalisation and Precarisation 9780367654948, 9780367672164, 9781003129776

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UNI SITIES A D ACAD · IC LABOUR IN TIMES DI GITALI JI N AND REC RISATIO Thomas Allmer

Universities and Academic Labour in Times of Digitalisation and Precarisation

This book provides a critical perspective on the digitalisation of universities and precarisation of academic labour. While research and teaching become more virtual and digital at universities, academic labour is becoming more and more casualised and temporary. This book aims to analyse and theorise academic labour and study the experiences academic workers have made at universities that are shaped by economic, political and cultural contexts . It will be a valuable tool for international scholars and students of subjects such as media, communication and cultural studies, sociology, education, management and labour studies. The insights will also be of particular relevance for unions and other initiatives that are concerned about the working conditions at universities. Thomas Allmer is a research associate in the Department of Media Studies at Paderborn University in Germany. He is also the coordinator of Research Network 18 - Sociology of Communications and Media Research of the European Sociological Association and a co-editor of the open-access journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. His research and teaching are grounded in critical social theory and the political economy of media and communication, with a special focus on digital media and digital labour. His publications include Towards a Critical Theory of Surveillance in Informational Capitalism (2012), Critical Theory and Social Media: Between Emancipation and Commodification (2015) and Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism (co-edited with Ergin Bulut, 2018) . Website: http:// thomasallmer.net/

Routledge Advances in Sociology

3 5 7 Governing Families Problematising Technologies in Social Welfare and Criminal Justice Rosalind Edwards and Pamela Ugwudike 358 Class, Trauma, Identity Psychosocial Encounters Giorgos Bithymitris 359 Protest in Late Modern Societies Dynamics, Forms, Futures Edited by Monika Banas and Ruslan Saduov 360 Virtually Lost Young Americans in the Digital Technocracy Garry Robson 361 Will Schooling Ever Change? School Culture, Distance Learning and the COVID-19 Pandemic Piotr Mikiewicz and .Marta Jurczak-Morris 362 Exoskeletal Devices and the Body Deviant Bodies, Extended Bodies Denisa Butnaru 363 Social Protection Programmes Narratives of Nigerian Women and Anti-Trafficking Practitioners in Italy Michela Semprebon 364 Universities and Academic Labour in Times of Digitalisation and Precarisation Thomas Allmer For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge­ Advances-in-Sociology/book-series/SE0511

Universities and Academic Labour in Times of Digitalisation and Precarisation Thomas Allmer

I� ��o�;!:n��;up LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Thomas Allmer The right of Thomas Allmer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-367-65494-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-67216-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-12977-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003129776 Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgements Introduction PART I

British Universities and Academic Labour 1 2

British Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism Precarious, Always-on and Flexible: How Temporarily Employed Staff Experience the Working Conditions at UK Universities

PART II

German Universities and Academic Labour 3

German Universities and Academic Labour Between Neofeudalism and Neoliberalism

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47 67 69

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Contents

4

Interview With Kerem Schamberger About Occupational Bans, Left-Wing Communication Studies and Critique of German Academia

113

KEREM SCHAMBERGER, THOMAS ALLMER AND CHRISTIAN FUCHS

Conclusion

127

Index

132

List of Figures and Tables

Figures 3.1 A stage model of capitalism 3.2 Full-time academic staff at universities in France, Germany, England and the US (data source: Konsortium Bundesbericht Wissenschaftlicher Nachwuchs 2013,82) 3.3 A stage model of academic labour 3.4 A relative perspective on precarity (based on Brinkmann et�.2006,17) 3.5 Comparison of staff distribution at the chair and department structure (source: Specht et al. 2017,6)

72 74 82 86 99

Tables

1.1 Conditions of academic labour 2.1 Sociodemographic profiles of the respondents 3.1 Comparison of the main characteristics of feudalism and German universities 3.2 Dimensions of precarious labour (based on Brinkmann et al. 2006,18; Dorre and Rackwitz 2018,191-93) 3.3 Dimensions of precarious academic labour

33 49 77 88 96

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 has initially been published in tripleC: Communication, Capital­ ism & Critique 16 (1): 49-77, 2018. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec. v16i1.868. Chapter 2 is a combination of parts from two articles that have initially been published in the European Journal of Communication 33 (4): 381395, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323118783794 and in Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation 12 (1): 62-77, 2018. https://doi. org/10.13169/workorgalaboglob.12.1.0062. Chapter 4 has initially been published in tripleC: Communication, Capital­ ism & Critique 15 (1): 82-90, 2017. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec. v15i1.840.

Introduction

The book at hand addresses universities and academic labour in the light of digitalisation and precarisation. It aims to shed light on the questions of how to best analyse and theorise academic labour and what experiences academic workers have made at universities that are shaped by economic, political and cultural contexts. Modern universities have always been part of and embedded into capital­ ism in economic, political and cultural terms. In 1971, at the culmination of the Vietnam War, the Chomsky-Foucault debate reminded us of this fact when a student asked: 'How can you, with your very courageous attitude towards the war in Vietnam, survive in an institution like MIT, which is known here as one of the great war contractors and intellectual makers of this war?' (Chomsky and Foucault 2006, 63). Chomsky responded dialecti­ cally but also had to admit that the academic institution that he is working for is a major organisation of war research and, thereby, strengthens the political contradictions and inequalities in capitalist societies. Edward P. Thompson (1970), one of the central figures in the early years of British cultural studies, edited 'Warwick University Ltd.' in the 1970s. Thompson was working at the University of Warwick then and published, together with colleagues and students, a manuscript that discovered, as the title suggests, the close relationship of their university with industrial capi­ talism. The book also revealed some evidence of secret political surveillance of staff and students by the university uncovered by students occupying the registry at Warwick at that time. The renowned Marxist geographer David Harvey faced an interview ques­ tion about managerialism and the pressure to raise external funding at his university, City University of New York: I had a dean saying to me that I wasn't bringing in any money. You're worthless, he said, as far as we're concerned. So I asked what I was sup­ posed to do. Was I supposed to set up an Institute of Marxist Studies funded by General Motors? And the dean said, 'Yes, that's a good idea. I'll support you if you can do that'. (Taylor 2010) DOI: 10.4324/9781003129776-1

2 Thomas Allmer It is often argued that we have now reached a societal stage that could only be claimed as a possibility so far: a knowledge-based society depending on the brains of human beings and the social intellect (Dyer-Witheford 2005, 73; Bulut 2011, 161). The brain has become an important productive force in informational capitalism (Fuchs 2008, 200). The last decades of capitalist production have been characterised by an intensification and extension of informational commodities being based on knowledge, ideas, communica­ tion, relationships, emotional artefacts, cultural content and so on. That is to say, labour is not only based on information, but information and commu­ nication are now direct forms of labour. A fundamental cornerstone of this information and knowledge is created and shared by academics at universi­ ties. Universities, thus, play an important role in informational capitalism. The realm of academia is a specific subsystem of the information and knowl­ edge sector. Academic work is a specific form of information work producing and distributing academic knowledge, skills and practices. Because culture entails information work, creating content and communication, academics can be considered cultural workers (Gill 2014, 12). In sum, academic work is part of informational work that is part of cultural work. Universities and academic labour have become digital in recent times. Digital communication, online networks and conferences, virtual learning environments, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and so on are now daily routines for many researchers, teachers and administrators at universi­ ties. Digital academic labour is a specific form of academic labour that is mediated through digital media. The use of digital technologies is a rela­ tively new phenomenon and has generated a rapid quantitative expansion that simultaneously raises questions of a qualitative shift. There has been a gradual expansion of educational technologies (quantity) that led to a new digital realm at universities (quality). In tandem with changes to the digitalisation of academic labour, several studies have illustrated the tendency of precarisation of work at universities. Precarious academic work tends to have an impact on economic security and control, exclusion from faculty, relationships with other colleagues, and a lack of opportunities for career development and promotion. Precarious academic work is much needed and included in economic terms but tends to be invisible and exposed and, therefore, excluded in social and political terms. While the analysis can be applied - with limitations - to other parts of the world, this book focuses on British and German universities and aca­ demic labour. In 'Varieties of Capitalism', Hall and Soskice (2001, 8) have introduced the distinction between liberal and coordinated market econo­ mies. While liberal market economies are primarily constituted through competitive market mechanisms (e.g. US, UK, and Australia), coordinated market economies rely more heavily on non-market arrangements and state interventions (e.g. France, Germany, and Japan). A similar distinction has been made between the Anglo-Saxon and Rhenish model of capitalism.

Introduction 3

The terms have been controversially debated and often criticised as being too mechanic and static. However, the book at hand spots dimensions of universities and academic labour that tend to indicate a justification for the talk of a liberal/Anglo-Saxon and a coordinated/Rhenish model of academic capitalism. While, in Anglo-Saxon academic capitalism, universities are pri­ marily considered private entities competing with each other, the state con­ trols universities and interferes in academic practices in Rhenish academic capitalism to a certain extent. Both the UK and Germany are good examples and representatives of the Anglo-Saxon and the Rhenish model of academic capitalism, respectively. Equally, both countries consist of a large and lively university landscape with a rich history, long-standing tradition and impor­ tant figures, such as, to name but a few, David Hume, Adam Smith, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Karl Marx. Though in different ways, both university systems have an impact on the working conditions and practices of academ­ ics that is worthwhile to scrutinise. In short, the book at hand studies British and German academic labour as varieties of academic capitalism. The book also stands in the light of my own academic experiences over many years. After I had finished my PhD at the University of Salzburg in Austria (2010-2014), I worked as a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Stirling in Scotland (2014-2019), before I moved back to the German-speaking world (2019-present). While the chapters covering British academic labour were drafted during my time in the UK, the chapters that deal with German academic labour were primarily written after I had moved back to the German-speaking world. In this sense, the book at hand is also a reflection of my own working and living conditions. The selected university landscapes in this book (UK and Germany) repre­ sent examples of the Global North. Research and teaching are dominated by the Global North and voices from the Global South often remain unheard and marginalised. There have been recent calls to decolonise academia and give voice to the voiceless in the Global South. The political economy of aca­ demia in the Global North is connected to the political economy of academia in the Global South in many ways. Universities, nowadays, aim to respond to market demands and compete in a global market for students through different practices, including international recruitment programmes, satellite branches and online education technologies (McGettigan 2013, 121). While the official claim is to promote openness, inclusiveness and diversity, it can be considered a further strategy to access the population of countries such as India, China and Indonesia. This sheds light on higher education as instru­ mental training for knowledge workers to make them fit for global capitalism (Ross 2009, 202). Fuchs (2022, 64) reminds us that the potentials and limi­ tations of academic knowledge production and higher education are shaped by power and material resources, such as money and infrastructure; which tend to be relatively high in the Global North and low in the Global South. From a critical political economy perspective, giving voice to the voiceless in the Global South is a necessary but not sufficient condition for decolonising

4 Thomas Allmer academia. Decolonisation needs the collaboration of critical perspectives on universities and academic labour that challenges capitalism and argues for the need for a socialist university on a global scale. 'De-colonisation is not a moral question and not a question of individual behaviour, but first and foremost a question of political economy and power' (Fuchs 2022, 103). The book at hand provides a critical political economy perspective on academic capitalism in the Global North that is connected to the Global South. While the book pays special attention to British academic labour in Part I, it scrutinises German academic labour in Part II. Both parts start with a theo­ retical chapter, followed by a chapter that shares insights from the ground. The concept of digitalisation is analysed in Chapter 1, and the concept of precarisation is theorised in Chapter 3. In liberal academic capitalism, working conditions have a strong economic dimension and rely on mar­ ket mechanisms. The interviews conducted in Chapter 2 primarily consider the neoliberal conditions of academia. In coordinated academic capitalism, working conditions have a powerful political dimension that has also led to occupational bans based on political grounds. The interview in Chapter 4 reflects on such forms of political discrimination and state intervention. In detail, the structure of the book is provided below.

Part I: British Universities and Academic Labour The aim of Chapter 1 is to contextualise universities historically within capi­ talism and to analyse academic labour and the deployment of digital media theoretically and critically. It argues that the post-war expansion of the uni­ versity can be considered a medium and outcome of informational capitalism and as a dialectical development of social achievement and advanced com­ modification. The chapter strives to identify the class position of academic workers, introduces the distinction between academic work and labour, discusses the connection between academic, information and cultural work, and suggests a broad definition of university labour. It presents a theoretical model of working conditions that helps to systematically analyse the aca­ demic labour process and to provide an overview of working conditions at universities. The chapter, furthermore, argues for the need to consider the development of education technologies as dialectics of continuity and discon­ tinuity, discusses the changing nature of the forces and relations of produc­ tion, and studies the impact on the working conditions of academics in the digital university. Based on Erik Olin Wright's inclusive approach to social transformation, the chapter concludes with the need to bring together anar­ chist, social democratic and revolutionary strategies for establishing a social­ ist university in a commons-based information society. Universities play a central role in informational capitalism. However, higher education institutions have undergone economic, political and cultural trans­ formations, leading to competition, market orientation and new manage­ ment forms. These changes have effects on many levels, including the working

Introduction 5 conditions and practices of individuals involved in the information-gaining process. Chapter 2 aims to find out how the existing working conditions and practices at universities form the meanings, identities and experiences of individuals by focusing on precariously employed academics. I address this question based on qualitative interviews with casualised academic staff. Part II: German Universities Academic Labour

Chapter 3 addresses questions focused on German universities and academic labour in the context of neofeudalism and neoliberalism. It aims to find answers to the questions about what the historical context of German uni­ versities looks like, how to best conceptualise precarious academic labour, and what the potential and challenges of critical scholarship are. The chap­ ter provides a stage model of the development of academic labour that describes the German university system as a dialectical synthesis of neofeudal and neoliberal structures. The German university landscape is characterised by a very high number of temporarily employed academics. Therefore, the chapter theorises and conceptualises precarious labour and then applies it to the realm of academia. As important as the analysis of precarious academic labour might be, a critical political economy approach needs to move beyond this concern and look at the conditions for producing and reproducing criti­ cal scholarship. The chapter, thus, analyses the potential and challenges of critical scholarship in the neofeudal and neoliberal university. The chapter concludes with three dimensions on a political level and the need to establish a socialist university. From 2017 to 2021, Kerem Schamberger was a doctoral student at the University of Munich's Department of Communication Studies and Media Research. He is also a left-wing activist, and he was a member of the German Communist Party [Deutsche Kommunistische Partei (DKP)]. In the course of his appointment, the Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Consti­ tution [Bayerisches Landesamt fiir Verfassungsschutz], based on Bavarian legislation, assessed whether Kerem should be considered being a threat to the constitution and whether he should be denied employment. In German media sociology, there was a comparable case in the 1970s when an occupa­ tional ban [Berufsverbot] was carried out against Horst Holzer. In Chapter 4, Thomas Allmer and Christian Fuchs (tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique: Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society) interviewed Kerem and asked him to explain the background in more detail. References Bulut, Ergin. 201 1 . " Creative Economy: Seeds of Social Collaboration or Capital's Hunt for General Intellect and Imagination?" In Cognitive Capitalism, Education and Digital Labor, edited by Michael Peters and Ergin Bulut, 15 1-68. New York: Peter Lang.

6 Thomas Allmer Chomsky, Noam, and Michel Foucault. 2006. "Human Nature: Justice vs. Power ( 1971 ): A Debate Between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault." In The Chomsky­ Foucault Debate: On Human Nature, edited by Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, 1-67. New York: New Press. Dyer-Witheford, Nick. 2005. "Cognitive Capitalism and the Contested Campus." In Engineering Culture: On the Author as (Digital) Producer, edited by Geoff Cox and Joasia Krysa, 71.-93. New York: Autonomedia. Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge. --. 2022. Digital Humanism: A Philosophy for 21st Century Digital Society. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Gill, Rosalind. 201.4. "Academics, Cultural Workers and Critical Labour Studies. " Journal of Cultural Economy 7 ( 1 ) : 12-30. Hall, Peter A., and David Soskice. 200 1. . "An Introduction to Varieties of Capital­ ism." In Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, edited by Peter A. Hall and David Soskice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGettigan, Andrew. 201.3. The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Higher Education. London: Pluto Press. Ross, Andrew. 2009. Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times. New York: New York University Press. Taylor, Laurie. 201.0. "Of Human Greed: Laurie Taylor Interviews David Harvey." New Humanist, June 29. https://newhumanist.org. uk/articles/2325/of-human-greed­ laurie-taylor-interviews-david-harvey. Thompson, Edward P., ed. 1.970. Warwick University Ltd. London: Penguin Books.

Part I

British Universities and Academic Labour

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1

British Academic l,abour, Digital Media and Capitalism

Introduction Universities are often seen as intellectual spaces and communities of scholars, rather than workplaces. At least historically, university lecturers and profes­ sors have been considered being engaged in a higher vocation, similar to writing poetry (Harvie 2006, 9). The activities of academics have been under­ stood as a high mission, rather than labour, and academics as citizens, rather than workers. This argument is often used to dismiss the political concerns of academic workers (Gulli 2009, 15). Academic labour studies are an interdisciplinary field in the intersection of subject areas, such as education, management, policy studies, cultural studies and sociology. The field is constantly growing, reflected in expanding litera­ ture reporting about the changes in the working conditions of academics. One of the aims of academic labour studies is to bring down university work from its high mission. However, Winn (2015, 4, 10) argues that the academic labour studies lit­ erature tends to be essayistic in style, hardly engaging on a theoretical level, but criticising neoliberal developments, romanticising the 'golden age' of uni­ versities and wanting to restore Fordist configurations. This chapter strives to move beyond this critique by focusing on a critical social theory approach, contextualising universities historically within capitalism and analysing aca­ demic labour theoretically. While teaching and research at universities become more virtual and digi­ tal (e.g. online research and digital methods, virtual learning environments and Massive Open Online Courses), several authors (Noble 1 998; Gregg 2013; Lupton 2014; Poritz and Rees 2017) have suggested that the deploy­ ment of digital media has an impact on the working conditions of academics, to name but a few, the blurring of working space and other spaces of human life, always-on cultures and digital surveillance.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003129776-3

10 Thomas Allmer Therefore, this chapter focuses on the following areas by moving from the abstract to the concrete level: • Historical context: universities and academic labour • Academic labour: theoretical analysis of forms, concepts and conditions • Digital media: impacts on universities and academic labour I address these points based on a critical social theory approach. In doing so, I engage with the history and context of universities in the next section. Section 2 deals with the forms and concepts of academic labour and pro­ vides a systematic analysis of working conditions at higher education institu­ tions. The impact of new information and communication technologies on academic labour is outlined in section three. The chapter concludes with a summary and discusses political potentials and alternatives. While occasional references are made to other areas, such as the US and Continental Europe, the chapter mainly focuses on the UK. 1 Historical Context: Universities and Academic Labour in Informational Capitalism Older universities, such as the ones in Oxford and Cambridge, had been founded before the modern British state was created. Considered histori­ cally, British universities have been understood as communities of scholars pursuing knowledge and advancing learning. The medieval idea was that academics should organise themselves, where collegiality plays an impor­ tant role (Callinicos 2006, 21). This idea is still reflected in their current legal form, and so most of them are today independent corporate institu­ tions with charitable status. British universities are not public organisations owned by the state as they are/were in many other European countries, such as Germany and Italy. Nor can their employees be considered civil serv­ ants. Because UK universities have always been independent institutions, care must be taken in using the term 'privatisation'. Although the UK gov­ ernment has recently implemented new legislation that provides universities with the freedom to change their corporate form in order to better access private investment (McGettigan 2013, 128). Outsourcing several tasks and creating joint ventures with the private sector are further strategies of uni­ versities to undermine their charity status (for further information on this, see McGettigan 2013, 128). The higher education landscape has changed in the last decades. One of the most obvious changes is the expansion in terms of providers, student population and university staff in absolute numbers. Considering Scotland as an example, 232,570 (part- and full-time, under- and postgraduate, national and international) students were enrolled in the academic year 2014/2015. In contrast, 223,530 people studied in Scotland in 2006/2007 and 163,519 peo­ ple in 1996/1997. This is an increase of 36.7 per cent from 1996 to 2006 and

British Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism 11 a further increase of 4.0 per cent from 2006 to 2014. One of the main drivers of this expansion is the internationalisation of the higher education sector: 50,015 international students (other European Union and non-European Union students) study at one of the 19 higher education institutions in Scot­ land. Considering the postgraduates separately,40.7 per cent of the students come from outside the UK. In total, 19,250 (part- and full-time) academics, 10,515 academic atypical staffl and 23,650 non-academic staff are employed at Scottish universities. Almost two-thirds (64.9 per cent) of them work in the major cities Edinburgh and Glasgow (all data for the academic year 2014/2015: Higher Education Statistics Agency 2016) . One of the crucial questions is how to assess the expansion of the universi­ ties. According to Callinicos (2006, 5), there are two main competing ways of interpretation: 1. One way might be to criticise those developments based on the argument that an expansion of the university necessarily brings down the quality of higher education. The expansion leads to quantity instead of quality, worsened staff-student ratio, and a devaluation of the university degree in general. This line of argument is often accompanied by the idea that universities should remain a privilege for a minority being educated at elite universities. This position considers the expansion of universities as a negative development and is traditionally linked to conservative politics. Indeed, the staff-student ratio has decreased (Higher Education Statistics Agency 2016), and the workload and time pressure for academic staff have increased (University and College Union 20166, 18-19) in the last decades, which might also harmfully affect the quality of research and teaching at uni­ versities in the UK. However,the question remains if these developments are necessarily an outcome of the expansion of universities or rather its political and economic conditions. One could imagine expanding higher education with the provision of the necessary resources and thereby promoting real social inclusion. The critique on the vanishing quality of higher education entails some true elements,but it remains fragile in the analysis of the causes and the suggested solutions. Romanticising the past,arguing for higher edu­ cation as a privilege for the few and defending elite universities remains a deeply conservative and reactionary ideology. One important issue worth mentioning here is that the British higher education sector does have a long tradition of classifying people along their socio-economic background. One segregation strategy is the clear distinc­ tion between undergraduate and postgraduate studies. The undergraduate programmes are primarily oriented towards vocational training and employ­ ability to serve business and industry,whereas postgraduate programmes are more tailored towards a research degree. Of course, every student has to go through the undergraduate programme in the first instance (with some exceptions), but someone can find fewer students with lower socio-economic

12 Thomas Allmer status in postgraduate programmes (Reay, Crozier and Clayton 2010). The higher the educational degree,the lesser the diversity. There is a tendency to provide vocational training according to market demands for the lower class and research degrees more likely leading towards powerful positions for the upper class (Bathmaker et al. 2016). In contrast, in many other European countries such as Germany, students were educated towards a diploma as the standard academic degree and thereby graduated with a master's. In this sense,there was no classification,and every student graduated with the same degree,although the Bologna Process has been forcing Continental European universities to implement the Anglo-American system of bachelor and mas­ ter levels in recent years. A further segregation strategy is to maintain elite universities educating,thereby reproducing the powerful class, although the official proclamation is to have top research universities helping to flourish society (Hall 2016). The UK higher education sector traditionally consists of the Russell Group with very prestigious and primarily ancient2 universities such as Oxford and Cambridge at the top, some universities in the mid­ dle and the post-1992 universities at the bottom in terms of prestige and research output (Freedman 2011, 1-2). The Ivy League at the very top,the community colleges at the very bottom in the US (Gulli 2009, 24) and the Excellence Initiative/Strategy in Germany have similar functions. Since Brit­ ish universities are free in order to set up their tuition fees on their own and elite universities tend to have the highest ones, there are visible and obvi­ ous barriers for people from poorer backgrounds to enter such universities. Because different schools offer different curricula and some prepare for the entrance examination at prestigious universities many years in advance and others do not,there are also invisible barriers explaining the narrow socio­ economic background of the student population at such universities. In terms of academic staff,there are even better working conditions at prestigious uni­ versities. For example,they tend to pay higher salaries in comparison to the post-1992 universities (University and College Union 2016a). In addition, many post-1992 academics have to negotiate research time because it is not part of their employment contract as in most older universities (Callinicos 2006, 25). However, research outcomes are an important element for the individual academic career and promotion prospects. 2. Another position might be that the expansion of the university widens access for people from poorer backgrounds, women and ethnic minori­ ties and,thereby, provides inclusion,equality of opportunities and social justice. Education is considered a route out of poverty and disadvantage and to build a more socially just society. Traditionally linked to labour politics, the expansion of the university is rather considered a positive development. The expansion of the university and the widening of its access for students and academics from poorer backgrounds, women and ethnic minorities can

British Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism 13 be considered an important achievement and social advancement of the last century and was partly the outcome of class struggles, women's move­ ments and civil right movements (Dyer-Witheford 2005, 80). In addition, the expansion of higher education also led to a broader politicisation across social strata and resulted in student movements in several advanced industri­ alised societies such as Germany and France in the late 1960s. These develop­ ments can be considered to be on the subjective level because human actors, agencies and social groups stood up,raised their voices and fought to change university structures and society for the better. It is the impact of humans on society. With this argument, problems arise on the university, educational and societal levels: • On the university level,access is still far from equal. Lower socio-economic groups are underrepresented in higher education; the higher the hierarchy, the fewer women can be found at universities. For example,56.2 per cent of students in the UK were female in 2014/2015, but only 23.1 per cent of the professors were women (Higher Education Statistics Agency 2016). In addition, the implementation of tuition fees at UK universities up to £9,000 has made it more difficult for people from poorer backgrounds to enter higher education. Studentships are not able to offset the massive inequalities. • On the educational level,inequalities are being produced and reproduced long before people enter university. The school people attend, and how far they are prepared and taught towards entering higher education are of certain importance. Students from deprived areas are underrepresented at universities. • Even if universities were fully diverse,open and participative,asymmetri­ cal power structures would still exist as higher education is not the only factor producing inequality in society. Although the education degree has a major impact on someone's life,people are able to gain power and influ­ ence based on a multitude of factors such as economic,cultural and social capital (Bourdieu 1983 ). Of course, it is important to promote equity at higher education institutions,but it would be naive to think that diversity at universities would automatically bring about an equal society. Power structures are complex,dynamic and contradictory fields in society. Power asymmetries,domination and resource distribution can only be overcome on a societal,not purely on an educational level. Capitalism has changed from a Fordist to a post-Fordist accumulation regime and from a Keynesian to a neoliberal mode of regulation (Jessop 2002). Even more than Fordism, informational capitalism requires and rests on trained and skilled workers such as managers, technocrats and scientists being able to plan, manage and operate the sophisticated production pro­ cess. The expanded university provides such a workforce by being an ideal place for employability and training workers for the post-Fordist market

14 Thomas Allmer (Dyer-Witheford 2005,71). The neoliberal university provides the workforce for corporations at no cost as higher education is funded by the state and/ or paid individually through tuition fees. Capital thereby expropriates the commons. Besides the tight subordination of teaching to economic needs, research has been changing in the post-Fordist area as well. Much more research is necessary since the spheres of production,circulation and consumption have become more complex. While bigger companies tended to have their own research laboratories,the post-Fordist accumulation regime requires research at a scale that urges companies to outsource research to universities in order to reduce costs (Callinicos 2006, 13). New joint ventures between universi­ ties and the private sector have emerged based on the logic of international competition and profit. The costs and risks of research have thereby been socialised, while the benefits of innovation are privatised (Dyer-Witheford 2005,76; Noble 1998). Because of the changing nature of both teaching and research in the neoliberal era,Dyer-Witheford (2005,76) claims that 'capital becomes more intellectual; universities become more industrial'. Academic research has become crucial for post-Fordist accumulation (Dyer-Witheford 2011,279). In summary, the post-war expansion of the university can be considered a medium and outcome of informational capitalism. While research labora­ tories contributed to bringing forward information technologies and techno­ scientific innovations that helped to develop a knowledge-based economy (medium), informational capitalism requires a highly trained and skilled workforce being provided by the neoliberal university (outcome). As part of the neoliberal project,the state has gradually pulled back,and radical privatisation,liberalisation and deregulation of the market have been pushed forward in order to stay internationally competitive. It was primarily the neoliberal ideology of the Margaret Thatcher era in the UK and Ronald Reagan epoch in the US in the 1980s, starting a process of massive cuts in social services and a reduction in tax for business and simultaneously pro­ viding subsidies, which had an enormous impact on working conditions, including the introduction of flexible working hours, lowering wage level, increased workloads, less job security and so on. These developments have taken place not only in the private sector but also in public institutions such as universities. With the rise of neoliberalism, a 'new manageralism' (Deem, Hillyard and Reed 2007) was implemented in the public sector,affecting both students and staff at higher education institutions. Today's universities have thus to be considered in the context of capitalism's transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist accumulation regime and a Keynesian to a neoliberal mode of regulation. As I argued above,the widened access to universities is the historical suc­ cess of social struggles by humans on a subjective level. Simultaneously,

British Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism 15 capitalism rests on the expansion of universities as it requires advanced research and a highly skilled workforce under neoliberal and post-Fordist conditions. These developments are objective in contrast because social struc­ tures enable and constrain individual actions. In order to answer the question of whether the expansion of the university can be considered a positive devel­ opment that promotes social justice, one has to take into account not only the subjective but also the objective level and the neoliberal and post-Fordist context. In principle, capital does not mind about the social background of people, as long as they conduct valuable research and can be exploited as a trained and skilled workforce. The impassable limit of campus identity politics is marked by its recu­ peration to cognitive capital's drive for a wider recruitment of social intelligence. An official academic credo of multiculturalism and gender­ equity opens the way to more comprehensive and efficient commodifi­ cation of intellectual labour-power. (Dyer-Witheford 2005, 80) The expansion of the university is neither positive nor negative but a con­ tradictory development by widening access for both subordinate groups and capital's interests. In analogy to Horkheimer and Adorno's (1969) under­ standing of the enlightenment as a dialectic process of progress and regress, liberty and barbarism, the university expansion can also be understood as a dialectic development of progress and regress, social achievement and advanced commodification. Because the two main competing ways of interpreting the expansion of the university are flawed, a third option is introduced here. 3. Terranova and Bousquet (2004) argues that 'the debate seems to be stuck in the false opposition between the static, sheltered ivory tower and the dynamic, democratic market'. As a result, we need a socialist expansion of the university that provides the necessary material resources in order to ensure teaching and research at high quality on the one hand and a political and economic context in order to widen access to education in general and higher education in particular for all social groups without interferences of capital's interests of cheap labour power and industrial research on the other. 'Our understanding of the mode of knowledge pro­ duction in higher education and its conceived role and purpose in public life over the last century must start from a categorical understanding of capitalism and the historical mode of production that reproduces the uni­ versity' (Winn 2015, 11). The struggle for better universities can thus not be separated from the struggles against capitalism (Callinicos 2006, 7; Gulli 2009).

16 Thomas Allmer

2 Academic Labour In the following, I deal with the forms and concepts of academic labour before a systematic analysis of the working conditions at universities is provided. 2. 1 Forms and Concepts ofAcademic Labour

The discussion about academic labour brings up the question of whether academic workers are part of the proletariat, create value and are exploited in capitalist societies. These questions are important theoretical ones in order to be able to situate academics in a class concept appropriately. Identifying the class position of academic workers is important for political reasons: to create relationships and solidarities and to understand class struggles. In the introduction to the English version of 'Capital: Volume Two', Man­ del argues that Marx used a broad concept of the proletariat that includes all workers who must sell their labour power. The defining structural characteristic of the proletariat in Marx's analy­ sis of capitalism is the socio-economic compulsion to sell one's labour­ power. Included in the proletariat, then, are not only manual industrial workers, but all unproductive wage-labourers who are subject to the same fundamental constraints: non-ownership of means of production; lack of direct access to the means of livelihood . . .; insufficient money to purchase the means of livelihood without more or less continuous sale of labour-power. (Mandel 1992, 47) If we accept such a broad understanding and reject the narrow definition of the proletariat as constituted only of productive workers, academics can be considered part of the proletariat, independently if they create value and are productive or unproductive labourers. In order to answer the question of value creation and exploitation of aca­ demics, it makes sense to have a look at how state theorists analyse the role of public organisations and civil service employees in general. In reference to Yaffe and O.ffe, Wright (1978, 155-56) argues that 'state production is itself not production for the market and thus the state does not accumulate capital out of any realized profits from its own production. Most state expenditure therefore do not directly produce surplus value'. In 'Class Counts', he fur­ thermore claims that state employees' 'wages are largely paid out of taxes, and thus they have a different relationship to private profits and public taxa­ tion than employees of capitalist firms' (Wright 1997, 462). If we follow this line of reasoning, one can say that in comparison to workers in other sectors, such as engineers in a private company, academics are normally not employed and therefore not directly exploited by capitalists. Many academ­ ics are employed by the state or a charity not producing profit and thus

British Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism 17 cannot be regarded as capitalist enterprises. For schools, which are in this context comparable to universities, Harris (1982, 57) argues that teachers 'are employed by the State and they are paid out of revenue - they are there­ fore unproductive labourers'. Teachers are 'outside of the valorisation pro­ cess, and they do not directly produce surplus value' (Harris 1982,128). At universities, there is no such relationship between workers on the one hand and an owner of productive forces (i.e. capitalist) on the other. Operations such as investing in the stock market,creating joint ventures with the private sector, outsourcing several tasks, minimising democratic structures, imple­ menting new management methods and so on let higher education institu­ tions appear very similar to private companies, but the main difference is that universities are owned by the public and not individuals. The property relations between private companies and universities differ. Marx describes land and nature as the objects of labour,but one can argue that information and knowledge might also serve as objects of labour in the mode of production. Marx himself draws this possibility in the 'Grundrisse'. The technological development of productive forces causes the rising impor­ tance of science, information and general social knowledge in the capitalist process of production. Knowledge becomes a direct force of production. In this context,Marx (1993) has raised the notion of the 'general intellect'. Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric tele­ graphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objecti­ fied. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production,and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice,of the real life process. (Marx 1993,706) It can be stated that capitalism has now reached a stage that Marx only claimed as a possibility,a knowledge-based economy depending on the brains of human beings and the social intellect (Dyer-Witheford 2005, 73; Bulut 2011,161).The brain has become an important productive force in informa­ tional capitalism (Fuchs 2008, 200 ) . The last decades of capitalist production have been characterised by an intensification and extension of informational commodities being based on knowledge, ideas, communication, relation­ ships,emotional artefacts,cultural content and so on. That is to say,labour is not only based on information, but information and communication are

18 Thomas Allmer now direct fo rms of labour. Different types of work include agricultural, industrial and informational labour (Fuchs and Sevignani 2013, 257). Part of this information and knowledge is created and shared by academics at higher education institutions. Universities thus play an important role in info rma­ tional capitalism. Autonomist Marxism has raised the concept of the 'common'. The germ form [Keimform] of capitalism is the commodity, and the germ form of com­ munism is the common (Dyer-Witheford 2007, 81; Hardt and Negri 2009, 273). A commodity is a good produced for exchange, and a common is a good produced by collectivities to be shared with all. The common is the dialectical sublation of private property and public goods. The capitalist logic has a very contradictory relationship to the common because it needs and opposes it at the same time (Sandoval 2014, 234). Capi­ tal rests on the common and cannot survive without it and permanently tries to expropriate and commodify the commons. The commons are produced and reproduced by all but only appropriated by capital in order to achieve profit. Capitalist accumulation and development paradoxically require and even make possible the expansion of the common and simultaneously tend to destroy it (Hardt and Negri 2009, 153). The capitalist logic is based on collective production and productive subjectivities and depends ever more on the common due to the increased importance of information, commu­ nication, knowledge and creativity for capitalist production. The capitalist command, again and again, privatises economic, political, cultural, natural and technological commons and strives to transform them into private prop­ erties. Hence, current capitalist accumulation expropriates and destroys the commons. One can argue that knowledge and skills that are created and shared at universities are part of the commons. Academic knowledge creation can be considered a social process. Academics create knowledge that is based on preceding knowledge of society, share this outcome with society so that fur­ ther knowledge can be created in society and so on. Academic knowledge creation is the result of a common social process and an infinite social cycle. Students are also involved in producing the knowledge commons since teach­ ing is not a one-way process. The interaction between lecturer and students can be considered the production and reproduction of educational knowl­ edge. Informational capitalism rests on the knowledge commons that are partly created at universities. On the one hand, capital needs the knowledge as an outcome of academic research for pushing innovation forward; on the other hand, capital requires a highly skilled workforce that has been trained in higher education institutions. Because universities are primarily funded by the state and through tuition fees, capital receives the knowledge commons at no cost. Capital appropri­ ates the commons and thereby exploits the results of the societal produc­ tion process at universities. Capital exploits the commons and society. The

British Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism 19 implementation of patents and intellectual property rights is an attempt to transform scientific knowledge and academic commons into private proper­ ties. Although academic workers and students are not under the direct com­ mand of capital, they are part of the knowledge workforce producing the commons that are consumed by capital. Academic labour is thus indirectly producing surplus value and exploited by capital. Academic workers and stu­ dents can be considered part of what Hardt and Negri (2004) call the 'mul­ titude'. The multitude is an expanded class concept going beyond manual wage labour and taking into account that labour is increasingly based on the commons. Capital's consumption of the education commons is not an automatic, all-encompassing process. It also leaves space for niches of critical,counter­ hegemonic teaching and learning that do not serve capital's interests and cannot be subsumed under capitalism. This form of academic labour is unproductive and does not create surplus value. Although critical research and teaching are tolerated to a certain extent (and tend to be higher in envi­ ronments where the neoliberal idea is less advanced), it reaches limitations and constraints since students need vocational training and employability skills for the job market. In addition,institutions and departments being in the tradition of critical, non-valuable education are often confronted with financial problems,redundancies or even closures. Taken globally,this form of education tends to be marginalised, and (higher) education serves the interests of capital to a great extent (Harris 1982,70). Besides the dimension of commodity critique and academic labour,there is also an ideological level of higher education and universities. The labour process is a human activity where,with the help of the instru­ ments of labour,an alteration of material is affected. Marx understands the labour process as a relationship of human activity with its physical and intel­ lectual capabilities and the means of production with its instruments and subjects of labour. The productive forces are a system of living labour forces and facts and factors of the process of production that cause and influence labour (Leisewitz 1990, 939). There is a relationship between labouring human actors (subject) and means of production (object) that changes his­ torically and is based on a concrete formation of society such as capitalism. On the one hand, subjective productive forces are the unity of physical and spiritual labour fo rces of an individual,that is,physical ability,qualification, knowledge, abilities, experiences and so on. On the other hand, objective productive forces are factors of the process of labour and production that are not related to an individual,that is,objects of labour,such as resources and raw materials, and instruments of labour including technology. Similarly, academic work is an activity where academics transform and organise with the help of instruments an object in order to produce an aca­ demic outcome. The productive forces are a system of academic workers and facts and factors of the process of production that cause and influence

20 Thomas Allmer academic labour. The relationship between academics (subject) and means of production (object) forms the productive forces of universities. On the one hand, subjective productive forces are the unity of the physical and intellec­ tual abilities of academics. On the other hand,objective productive forces are factors of the process of academic labour,that is,objects of academic labour, such as knowledge, skills, practices and instruments of academic labour, including libraries,computers,laboratories and equipment. Academics make use of libraries, computers,laboratories and equipment in order to produce knowledge,skills and practices and pass it on to society and students. These are 'the general productive forces of the social brain' (Marx 1993, 694). The process is extinguished in the product and includes research outcomes,such as publications and technical innovations,and teaching degrees held by bach­ elor,master,and PhD graduates. Fuchs and Sevignani (2013,239-49) remind us of the importance of mak­ ing a semantic differentiation between work and labour in the English lan­ guage. Work is a creative and productive activity that produces use values in order to satisfy human needs. Work is a general and anthropological concept common to all societies. Labour,in contrast,is a concrete form of work that produces value. Labour is a historical form of the organisation of work in class societies. It is a specific historical characteristic of work embedded into class relations. Work is essential and takes place in all societies; labour only takes place in capitalism. Because universities are part of capitalism and aca­ demics are embedded into class relations,it thus makes sense to speak about academic labour,instead of academic work (Winn 2015,1). Academic labour is a specific historical form of academic work. According to Giddens (1981, 64) and Bourdieu (1977, 4), social phe­ nomena are characterised by a mutual relationship between social structures and social actors. Social structures can be understood as institutionalised relationships that enable and constrain the individual. Social actors can be understood as human individuals that act within and might react to social structures. Social phenomena consist of social structures enabling and con­ straining social actors that react upon social structures. Academic work is also characterised by a mutual relationship between social structures and social actors or, speaking more specifically, of form and content. The social struc­ ture and form of academic work can be understood as the political,economic and cultural contexts of universities. This includes political power relations, the economic structure and cultural hegemony of academic labour and see­ ing universities as institutions within capitalism. These structures do have an enabling and constraining effect on academics. Structures enable academics in the sense that they make possible work in the first place. For example,uni­ versities provide employment contracts and material resources,thereby mak­ ing possible academic work conducted by individuals. However, contracts and resources are limited in many ways and thus also constrain individuals and academic work. The social actors can be understood as human individu­ als conducting academic work resulting in academic content. This includes

British Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism 21 the academic as subject creating a certain outcome of academic knowledge, skills and practices, the analysis and assurance of the quality and values of this outcome and the pedagogical impact. Social actors might react to social structures within universities. Social structures are the historical outcome of struggles and are thus changeable to a certain extent. For example, salary bargaining, reduced workloads, additional resources, new staff and so on are possible reactions of academics to the social structure within universities. These new social structures again affect individuals. Academic work is thus a permanent process of social structures enabling and constraining individuals that react upon social structures. Yet, Winn (2015, 1-2) argues that there is a tendency within the exist­ ing literature to focus on the content of academic practice, values of as well as teaching and assessment in higher education, concerns with identity and what it subjectively means to be an academic. Such a focus is one-sided,undi­ alectical and leaves out the political economy of higher education and the critical engagement of capitalism. Bringing back the relationship between the political-economic context and the academic as a worker within academic labour studies is the focus of this chapter. The distinction between form and content of academic labour is related to the distinction between relations and forces of production. Both the content of academic work and productive forces consider the particular production process,and the form of academic work and relations of production take into account the social context of this process. Talking about the content and omitting the form of academic work is similarly as problematic as talking about specific forms of the organisation of the productive forces,cumulated in terms such as 'information society' or 'network society',and omitting questions of the relations of production with regard to ownership,power and division of labour. As outlined in the previous section, although the university as a place of academic knowledge creation has a long tradition, its development from an intellectual circle of elites to a broader institution of higher education can be considered a medium and outcome of informational capitalism. The realm of academia is a specific subsystem of the information and knowledge sector. Academic work is a specific form of information work that has to do with the production and distribution (reproduction) of academic knowledge,skills and practices. Because culture entails information work creating content and communication, academics can be considered cultural workers (Gill 2014). In sum,academic work is part of informational work that is part of cultural work. 'Artistic and academic traditions extol sacrificial concepts of mental or cultural labour that are increasingly vital to newly important sectors of the knowledge industries' (Ross 2000, 2). The strong relationship between uni­ versities and neoliberalism indicates how the spheres of culture and economy are interrelated. Academic work is linked to other forms of work such as clerical, techni­ cal and manual work. Many different forms of work are directly and indi­ rectly involved in the creation and sharing of information and knowledge at

22 Thomas Allmer universities beyond the academic activities of scholars. Think, for example, of the secretary who organises the administration behind teaching,the librar­ ian who arranges books and journals, the IT technologist who maintains the websites and servers at universities,the manual worker who services the equipment in classrooms, the cleaner and janitor who keep the university building running and so on. Academic activities would hardly be possible without all these different forms of labour at universities. This just indicates that work tends to be a social process where many individuals are involved and what Marx termed 'collective worker' [Gesamtarbeiter]. Marx argues that work tends to be a combination of workers, a combined labour force, resulting in a combined product. 'In order to work productively, it is no longer necessary for the individual himself to put his hand to the object; it is sufficient for him to be an organ of the collective labourer, and to perform any one of its subordinate functions' (Marx 1976,643-44). If we take a look at the higher education landscape in Scotland,one can see how many other forms of work are involved beyond academic work at universities. In total, 19,250 academics,10,515 academic atypical staff,and 23,650 non-academic staff worked at Scottish universities in 2014/2015 (Higher Education Sta­ tistics Agency 2016). That means 44.3 per cent are non-academic workers, such as administrators, technologists and manual workers, at universities. If we talk about labour at universities,one should not oversee this form of work and workforce that comprises almost half of the workers in absolute numbers at least in the Scottish context. To be precise, one could make the distinction between academic work of research and teaching and academic work of administration and technological assistance at universities. However, these tasks are overlapping to a certain extent; for example,academic work­ ers also have to conduct administrative tasks, such as keeping registers of their student cohort. Similar to a broad definition of cultural labour (Fuchs and Sandoval 2014, 488), taking into account all different forms of work that are directly and indirectly involved in the creation and sharing of aca­ demic knowledge (1) avoids an idealistic understanding of academic work that ignores its materiality, (2) considers the connectedness of technology and content and (3) can inform political solidarities between different groups within universities. For example, I was recently involved in a union meeting at my school. One of the discussions was about keeping records of the student attendance at modules. The procedure is that lecturers hand out a register to the students for signing. The register was handed over to the secretary after the lecture, who had to keep records of the student attendance in an online programme. The university administration now wants the lecturers to do this procedure. It was raised at the union meeting to resist this new implementation as it would further increase the administrative tasks and thus the workload of academics. I certainly agree that universities try to put ever more responsibili­ ties and administrative tasks onto academic workers beyond their research

British Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism 23 and teaching commitments. However, there are two points that have to be considered here: • In the first instance, one has to ask why universities are keeping records of students' attendance anyway. One could see it as a tendency to mis­ trust adult learners and a further strategy in surveilling and disciplin­ ing individuals. This could raise political solidarities between staff and students in order to fight against such university regulations in the first place. • Resisting such implementations as academic automatically means to bur­ den the workload of the secretary. This strategy can only be politically progressive if someone also stands for an increase in administrative staff or a decrease in other work tasks for the existing ones. Otherwise, the union might end up playing one workforce off against another. Progres­ sive politics could mean finding solidarities and fighting against increased workloads and stress for all workers at universities. 2.2 Conditions ofAcademic Labour

The neoliberal restructuring of universities led to transformations such as reducing public expenditure, squeezing costs and allocating resources based on competition and quasi-market disciplines. These structural transforma­ tions affect the working conditions, practices and relations of subjects within universities. This is also reflected in a growing academic literature reporting about the changes in the working conditions, especially at places where the neoliberal restructuring can be considered relatively advanced and has been going on for some decades, such as the UK, the Netherlands, the US and Australia (Lorenz 2012, 600). Sandoval (2013, 323-25) provides a systematic model of working condi­ tions based on Marx's circuit of capital accumulation that can be applied to different sectors. The model identifies dimensions that shape working condi­ tions in the capital accumulation process. In addition, the model includes the impact of the state's labour legislation on working conditions. • Means of production: objects (resources) and instruments (technology) of labour • Labour power: workforce characteristics, mental and physical health and work experiences • Relations of production: labour contract, wages, benefits and labour struggles • Process of production: labour space, labour time, work activity and con­ trol mechanism • Commodity: labour product • State: labour legislation

24 Thomas Allmer The model helps to systematically analyse the labour process and can also be applied to academic labour. The overall aim of this section is to introduce an overview of working conditions at universities. • Means of production: objects (resources) and instruments (technology) of labour

Resources: Resources in the academic labour process consist of knowledge, skills and practices of the human brain and hands. Technology: Technologies that are used in the academic labour process include, for example, libraries, computers, laboratories and equipment. • Labour power: workforce characteristics, mental and physical health and work experiences; we can also add unemployment.

Workforce characteristics: Important characteristics of the workforce are class, gender, ethnicity, age and disability. Altogether, there are 273,895 aca­ demics (part- and full-time academic staff and academic atypical staff) in UK higher education. In total, 37.0 per cent of full-time academic staff have contract salaries between £43,325 and £58,172. Higher proportions of male full-time academic staff (25.3 per cent) have contract salaries of £58,172 or over than female full-time academic staff (13.9 per cent). The proportion of academic females is 45.0 per cent. For full-time academic staff, the propor­ tion of females is 40.0 per cent and for part-time 55.1 per cent. Within the academic atypical staff population, 4 7.2 per cent are female. About 13.9 per cent of academic staff and 17.2 per cent of academic atypical staff are eth­ nic minorities with a background such as Black, Asian, Chinese and mixed. A disability was declared by 4.1 per cent of the academic staff and 2.4 per cent of the academic atypical staff. The average age of full-time academic staff is 43 years and of part-time academic staff 46 years. The average age of academic atypical staff is 40 years. Among other characteristics, young women with a minority background are most likely to work precariously in UK higher education (Bryson and Barnes 2000, 209). In addition, the higher the hierarchy, the fewer women one can find in higher education. For exam­ ple, 56.2 per cent of students in the UK are female, but only 23.1 per cent of the professors are women (all data for the academic year 2014/2015: Higher Education Statistics Agency 2016). Mental and physical health: Different empirical studies have reported on mental and physical health issues at higher education institutions. In a survey by the University and College Union (2014, 2), 60 per cent of the respondents showed evidence of some level of psychological distress. According to Watts and Robertson (2011), the burnout level among teaching staff at universities is comparable with 'at risk' groups such as healthcare professionals. The psy­ chological distress of academics exceeds many other professional groups and is caused by factors such as a high level of conflict between work and private

British Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism 25

life (Kinman and Wray 2013, 6). Academic and academic-related work tends to 'spill over into the home domain both physically (e.g. working at home during evenings and weekends), and psychologically (e.g. preoccupation with work problems, difficulties in sleeping, and irritability with family and friends)' (Kinman and Wray 2013, 7). Work experiences: The question of how academics experience their work­ ing conditions is an empirical one. Several authors have already conducted empirical work in this context. For example, Prichard and Willmott (1997, 313-14) ran 36 interviews with senior post holders such as chancellors, heads and deans at four pre- and post-1992 universities in the UK about their expe­ riences, consequences and changes of work. Archer (2008, 269) conducted eight semi-structured interviews with early career academics at different uni­ versities in England about their identities and experiences in higher educa­ tion. Deem, Hillyard and Reed (2007, 33) realised a large-scale project about managerialism, management practices and organisational forms at universi­ ties in the UK between 1998 and 2000. The authors carried out in phase one 12 focus group discussions with academics, managers and administrators; in phase two, 137 qualitative interviews with manager-academics and 29 sen­ ior administrators in 16 pre- and post-1992 universities; and in phase three, interviews with employees from manual workers to staff at four universities. I conducted ten semi-structured, face-to-face, qualitative interviews with aca­ demics. The focus was given to people who are employed 'atypically', such as on a fixed-term contract, casual contract, hourly paid basis and zero-hour contract, at higher education institutions in Scotland. The scripts were ana­ lysed in order to find answers to my questions about how academics perceive the existing working conditions that are shaped by political and economic contexts (see Chapter 2). Unemployment: For Marx (1976, 790), the working class consists of an active army of workers and a reserve army of unemployed. The unemployed are not a social group outside but rather part of class relations fulfilling certain functions in and therefore necessary for capitalist societies as they 'become a condition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production' (Marx 1976, 784). Firstly, the unemployed play an important role as reserve being avail­ able if needed. Secondly, the unemployed are also important ideologically in order to keep pressure on those within the production process (Marx 1976, 785). Hence, the employed and unemployed condition but simultaneously exclude each other in capitalism. The vast expansion of higher education in the last decades has also led to a massive increase in graduates and doctoral students and thereby automatically contributed to the expansion of the aca­ demic reserve army or, at least, to an expansion of a social group willing to accept precarious working conditions for a certain period in their lives, before reaching a more secure post. Universities are nowadays able to choose from a pool of mainly early career academics if needed in times of high demand (Shumar 1995, 94). The unemployed and precariously employed academics compete with each other and try to perform well for the sake and prospect of

26 Thomas Allmer employment and a more secure post. An ideological pressure and disciplinary mechanism on employed academics are in pla·ce as they could be easily down­ graded or even replaced by some from the surplus labour pool. One of the consequences of the vast expansion of post-secondary edu­ cation in North America and Europe has been the gradual establish­ ment of a huge pool of surplus researchers, instructors and laboratory assistants, drawn from the ranks of graduate students, whose prospects for permanent academic employment are scandalously low. (Dyer-Witheford 2011, 281) • Relations of production: labour contract, wages and benefits and labour struggles Labour contract: One important aspect of an academic employment con­ tract is its permanent/open-ended or temporary character. Many different forms of temporalities exist, including fixed-term, hourly paid and zero-hour contracts. A tendency of casualisation and temporality of employment char­ acterises higher education in the UK. According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (2016), 128,300 permanent/open-ended and 70,035 fixed­ term academic staff worked at universities in the UK in the academic year 2014/2015. On top of that, there were 75,560 academic atypical staff in the same year. Summing up those on a fixed-term contract and the academic atypical staff means that the majority (53.2 per cent) work on a temporary basis in UK higher education. Casualisation allows the university to test the performance of academics, strengthens Darwinian selection, reduces labour costs and allows responding quickly to changes in the education market in order to deal with low and high peaks of demand (Bryson and Barnes 2000, 193). The number of staff needed also depends on how successful a university is in terms of marketing and attracting students for the upcoming academic year. Universities compete with each other in a market of potential new stu­ dents. The casualisation of academic staff can thus be considered an outcome of applying quasi-market, neoliberal rules at higher education institutions. The university could never be sure about enrolments size or profitabil­ ity; it had to remain forever poised to take action, to stimulate enrol­ ment, to cut costs, to keep growing. The permanent flexibility this required meant that the staff had to be proletarianized and stratified into temporary part-time workers, permanent teachers and permanent researchers. (Shumar 1995, 94) Pratt (1997) highlights that employing part-time and fixed-term staff at uni­ versities has become a management strategy. Those working at a pre-92

British Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism 27 university are on research-only contracts, work part-time, have up to five years of work experience, are female and under the age of 40 as well as non-white and non-UK are most likely to be on temporary contracts (Bry­ son and Barnes 2000, 209).Temporary contracts tend to have an impact on the employee's economic security and control, exclusion from the depart­ ment,relationships with other colleagues and a lack of opportunity for career development and promotion (Bryson and Barnes 2000,217). Gulli (2009,5) highlights that the expansion of temporary staff is typical for the neoliberal discourse as it brings flexibility to the university at the cost of individual inse­ curity that can lead to anxiety,disruption,stigmatisation and loss of dignity. A contradiction between inclusion and exclusion characterises the employ­ ment of temporary staff as it is much needed and included in economic terms but tends to be invisible and exposed and therefore excluded in social and political terms. Tirelli (1999) therefore stresses that casual contracts trigger labour segmentation within the academic workforce leading to increased hierarchies and potential for conflict. Neoliberal universities tend to decrease the number of established and respected permanent staff, and increase the number of relatively powerless temporary staff. From a trade union point of view, casualisation also brings political changes that advantage the man­ agement and weaken the academic workforce. 'Faced with a restive mass of immaterial labour, university administrator's best strategy - backed by centuries of . academic hierarchy - is to ensure that regular and contingent faculty remains divided' (Dyer-Witheford 2005,78). Van Dyk and Reitz (2017) argue that universities are becoming what Bol­ tanski and Chiapello call the 'projective city'. The projective city signifies the idea of the new spirit of capitalism that is based on projects sparking tempo­ rary compression of networks, competition of project teams on the market and new work ethics and forms of employees' motivation. This refers to a firm whose structure comprises a multiplicity of pro­ jects associating a variety of people,some of whom participate in sev­ eral projects. Since the very nature of this type of project is to have a beginning and an end, projects succeed and take over from one another,reconstructing work groups or teams in accordance with pri­ orities or needs. (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007,105) Statistics confirm this trend for the Scottish higher education landscape: 72.9 per cent of the total annual research income for Scottish universities is gained from research grants and contracts such as research councils, socie­ ties,charities,corporations and EU sources (for the time being). In compari­ son,only 27 .1 per cent go directly to the universities in the form of recurrent research income as a result of the Research Excellence Framework (all data for the academic year 2014/2015: Higher Education Statistics Agency 2016) .

28 Thomas Allmer Most of these funds are project-based and competitive. Academics employed in such projects mainly work on a temporary basis. Wages and benefits: The question of wages and benefits is a relational one. Considered historically, academics have been a relatively privileged group of employees (Callinicos 2006, 24). If one compares the salary and social advantages like annual leave entitlement or pension benefits to other groups such as social and health workers, one has to admit that academics still enjoy benefits that are not, or are not any more, available in other sectors. How­ ever, there is a contingent struggle in terms of academic salaries and benefits. Callinicos (2006, 25) stresses that academics have seen their pay stagnated in real terms and declined relatively in the last century. Pay scales are also highly stratified in the higher education sector. For example, the vice-chancellor (or equivalent) at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, receives an annual salary of £343,000. In contrast, a full-time equivalent (FTE) annual salary of an hourly paid academic at the same university is £17,995 (with an assumed hourly rate of £23) (all data for the academic year 2014/2015: University and College Union 2016a). This means that the vice-chancellor earns 19 times more than an hourly paid academic at the University of Strathclyde. Similar calculations can be worked out for other universities. Labour struggles: As already mentioned, academics have traditionally been a relatively privileged group of employees, and universities were his­ torically considered communities with shared values and interests in the UK. This was also reflected in absorbed labour struggles and a weak union of higher education. Consequently, the Association of University Teachers (AUT) did not see itself as a trade union, but rather as a professional associa­ tion (Callinicos 2006, 24). In contrast, academic staff in the post-1992 uni­ versities and college teachers enjoyed less privileged conditions in the past. Their union, the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), has 'developed a much more militant tradition of trade unionism, and has tended to be led from the left' (Callinicos 2006, 25). It was supported by the fact that this union also represented college teachers, who were already confronted with a rather brutal neoliberal reorganisation. The two organisations merged in 2006 to form the University and College Union (UCU). Callinicos (2006, 36) notices that the material conditions of neoliberal restructuring in higher education in the last decades have resulted in more active trade unionism among academics in general. The University and College Union has today more than 100,00 members, and its policies include the fight against the privatisation of education, casualisation, work­ load and stress, as well as organising collective pay bargaining for academic staff. According to Harvie (2006, 21), the opposition to academic unionism is nowadays more or less opposition to neoliberalism. • Process of production: labour space, labour time, work activity and con­ trol mechanism

British Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism 29 Labour space and time: In analogy to the idea of the factory without walls from Autonomist Marxism, Gill (2010) argues that the neoliberal university can be considered academia without walls. Autonomist Marxism claims that capital tends to subsume the whole society into the production process, and the logic of the factory is extended to society (Wright 2002, 37-3 8). Society functions as a moment of production, where the border between working and spare time becomes more and more blurred (Gorz 2010, 22) both spa­ tially and temporally. The social factory is therefore a 'factory without walls' (Dyer-Witheford 1999, 80). Likewise, neoliberal universities have intensified work in terms of time and extended in terms of space with the help of digital technologies. Academics tend to have fluid boundaries between their work­ ing space and other spaces of human life and their labour and free time (Ross 2000, 23). Always-on cultures have transformed the university to fast aca­ demia. 'Ever speeded-up mobile technologies intermesh seamlessly with the psychic habitus and dispositions of the neoliberal academic subject: check­ ing, monitoring, downloading whether from BL (British Library), beach or bed, trying desperately to keep up and "stay on top" ' (Gill 2010, 237). This indicates how a technological change in the productive forces can affect the working conditions within the production process. This theoretical assumption can be underpinned with empirical data. The University and College Union has conducted several online surveys about workload and work-related stress in the UK (Court and Kinman 2009; Kin­ man and Wray 2013; University and College Union 2014, 2016b). In 2014 (n = 6,439), 79 per cent of the participants agreed or strongly agreed that they find their job stressful. Over 50 per cent indicated that their general or average level of stress was high or very high. Almost half (48 per cent) responded that they experience often or always unacceptable levels of stress (University and College Union 2014, 1-2). According to the 2016 survey (n = 12,113), academic staff work an average of more than 50 hours FTE per week. Especially, among early career academics exists a culture of long work­ ing hours (University and College Union 2016b, 18). Factors contributing to stress in higher education include, among others, the lack of time to under­ take research, excessive workloads, problems in obtaining funding, lack of promotion opportunities and job insecurity (Court and Kinman 2009, 61). Academics tend to regularly work evenings and weekends in order to cope with the high demands of their job (Gill 2010, 235) and not take their full entitlement to annual leave (Crang 2007, 510). Work activity: A tendency of narrow specialisation, routine tasks, division and standardisation of work characterises academia. Teaching and research are becoming increasingly separated (Liesner 2006, 484). Especially, casual­ ised staff is confronted with a lack of autonomy in teaching, breakdown of teaching into isolable units, decreasing authority of the individual educator, and predefined and predesigned modules and programmes that potentially lead to frustration and dissatisfaction. In analogy to the assembly line worker,

30 Thomas Allmer Hanley (2002, 30) describes this process as 'Taylorization of academic labor'. Harvie argues that school and university teachers become alienated from their work activity, an activity that does not belong to them. 'The very sepa­ ration of knowledge into more-or-less well-defined and discrete "disciplines" or "subject's" constraints the majority of teachers within "their" subject's boundaries' (Harvie 2006, 10-11). Similarly, research is becoming gradually homogenised due to 'hot topics' and increasing difficulties in obtaining fund­ ing. Lorenz (2012, 613) states that intrinsic satisfaction has been replaced by externally driven rewards. Control mechanism: Although procedures of surveillance, monitoring and audit cultures are no new control mechanisms within universities (e.g. the Research Assessment Exercise has been in place since the 1980s), nor is the university by far the only place of surveillance (see Allmer 2012), they have been taking hold significantly at higher education institutions in the UK for some years now (Burrows 2012, 357). Metrics operate at different stages, such as the institutional, national and international levels, but all of them confront the individual academic (Burrows 2012, 359). New information and communication technologies have helped to intensify and extend these procedures, which indicates the link to the means of production. An elabo­ rate set of monitoring procedures and metrics exists at universities, including grant income, citation scores, workload models, transparent costing data, research 'excellence', student evaluation, employability scores, impact fac­ tors and commercial university league tables (De Angelis and Harvie 2009, 11-14). Burrows (2012, 359) identifies that British academics are now sub­ ject to more than 100 different scales and indices. Academics are measured individually against other colleagues and grouped and measured against other groups in order to assess and rank academic values. Gill (2014, 22-24) argues that surveillance culture and audit regimes lead to a new psyche and structures of feeling at universities that include individual pressure, anxiety and threats. The proliferation of league tables triggered a culture of naming and shaming that resulted in self-surveillance. Being hard-working, self-motivating and enterprising subjects is what constitutes academics as so perfectly emblematic of this neoliberal moment, but is also part of a psychic landscape in which not being suc­ cessful . . . is misrecognised . . . in terms of individual (moral) failure. (Gill 2010, 240) 'New managerialism' is another control mechanism that has been imple­ mented at higher education institutions in the last decades. New managerial­ ism can be understood as the adoption of organisational forms, technologies, managerial control practices and ideologies from the private business to the public sector such as universities (Deem, Hillyard and Reed 2007, 24-28). As a response to the post-Fordist conditions, UK universities are becoming

British Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism 31 increasingly corporately managed. Academic professions are thereby broken up into controllable processes (Lorenz 2012, 610). The private sector style of management includes the realisation of a hierarchical organisation struc­ ture,division and standardisation of work,narrow specialisation and routine tasks in order to increase accountability and measurement by management. Prichard and Willmott (1997) highlight that universities implemented many elements of 'soft managerialism' urging academics to meet performance targets and thereby encouraging self-discipline without the need for 'hard management'. As a result of the pressure to meet performance objectives, individual resources for actively participating in the decision-making process on the institutional and school levels are becoming scarce. Yet, in effect, increased managerialism implies that the input of staff into decision-making is degraded from collegial participation to, at best, a consultative role in which staff willingly accept and support their heads of department who then managerialize the process through which resources are won and allocated. (Willmott 1995,996) Tancred:-Sheriff (1985, 384) compares the decision-making process at uni­ versities with a 'kiddie steering wheel in daddy's car' with heaps of relatively powerless committees and panels, despite formal decision-making powers. Prichard and Willmott (1997) conducted 36 interviews with senior post hold­ ers such as vice-chancellor, dean, head of school and head of department at four UK universities about their understanding of managerialism. The authors report that their interviewees 'talked of the implementation of stra­ tegic initiatives,of managing staff,of taking responsibility and even of being a small-businessman' (Prichard and Willmott 1997,313). Miller (1991,111) argues that vice-chancellors tend to act like chief executives. • Commodity: labour product Labour product: The work of academics results in research outputs such as publications and technical innovations and teaching degrees held by bach­ elor, master and PhD graduates. Many research outputs are published by for-profit academic publishing companies such as RELX (former Reed Else­ vier), Springer, Taylor & Francis and Wiley-Blackwell and appear in cor­ porate databases, such as the Thomson Reuters' Science and Social Science Citation Indexes. These industries are highly monopolised, commodify and thereby restrict access to academic knowledge,have the power to decide who is 'in' and 'out' and privatise knowledge being produced in publicly funded research institutions (Hall 2008'). Harvie (2006, 12) mentions that the work of school and university teachers results in graduates who are supposed to be bearers of a range of knowledge,skills and attributes. However,those skills

32 Thomas Allmer tend to correspond to valuable labour power skills, increasingly determined by the needs of capital. Teachers produce labour power for capital and are thus alienated from the product of their labour. • The state: labour legislation

Labour legislation: McGettigan (2013) argues that the broader vision of higher education in the UK is that the state rolls back gradually through processes of privatisation, and the remaining public areas are characterised by quasi-market regulations. Different processes, policy considerations and initiatives have been brought forward in this context (McGettigan 2013, 9): 1. 'Marketisation or external privatisation, whereby new operations with different corporate forms are allowed to enter the state system to increase competition. This might be seen as dissolving the distinction between sep­ arate public and private sectors'. 2. 'Commodification - the presentation of higher education as solely a pri­ vate benefit to the individual consumer; even as a financial asset where the return on investment is seen in higher earnings upon graduation'. 3. 'Independence from regulation - private providers accessing the student loan book are not bound by numbers controls and do not have to com­ ply with reporting or monitoring requirements nor widen participation initiatives'. 4. 'Internal privatisation - the changes to revenue streams within institutions so that for example, direct public funding is replaced by private tuition fee income'. 5. 'The outsourcing of jobs and activities to the private sector and manage­ ment consultants, which has become widespread in England'. 6. 'Changes to the corporate form and governance structures of universities'. 7. 'The entry of private capital and investment into the sector through buyout and joint ventures with established institutions'. Table 1.1 summarises the conditions of academic labour with the key ele­ ments of each of the dimensions in the capital accumulation process and the impact of the state. All these dimensions shape the working conditions at higher education institutions to a certain extent. Based on these insights, I now move on to the impact of new information and communication technologies on universities and academic labour. 3 Digital Academic Labour The academic work process is today strongly linked to the use of new informa­ tion and communication technologies such as email communication, online education and digital registers for research, teaching and administration

British Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism 33 Table 1 .1 Conditions of academic labour Capital Accumulation Process and the State

Dimension

Elements

Means of production

Resources

Knowledge, skills and practices of the human brain and hands Libraries, computers, laboratories and equipment Class, gender, ethnicity, age and disability Psychological distress and burnout Prichard and Willmott ( 1997), Archer (2008), Deem, Hillyard and Reed (2007) and Allmer ( see Chapter 2) Academic reserve army: material reserve and ideological pressure Casualisation and temporality Stagnation, decline and unequal distribution Academic unionism and opposition to neoliberalisrn Academia without walls: intensification and extension of work, always-on culture and fast academia Taylorisation: narrow specialisation, routine tasks, division, standardisation and homogenisation of work Surveillance, monitoring, audit culture, metrics and new managerialisrn Research outputs: publications and technical innovations; teaching degrees: bachelor, master and PhD graduates Privatisation (internal and external), comrnodification, deregulation and outsourcing

Technology Labour power

Workforce characteristics Mental and physical health Work experiences

Unemployment Relations of production

Labour contract Wages and benefits Labour struggles

Process of production

Labour space and time Work activity

Control mechanism Commodity

Labour product

The state

Labour legislation

purposes. The use of technologies is not a new phenomenon at universities, and one can argue that academics have always used some sort of technol­ ogy as means for their work. For example, the chalk and blackboard served for many decades as an important tool in order to share knowledge in the classroom and was later accompanied by the overhead projector. The com­ munication between university teachers and distance learning students used to take place via traditional letters sent by snail mail (Noble 2001, chapter 1)

34

Thomas Allmer

and is today fully replaced by digital communication. One can argue that educational technologies have been developed in analogy with the progress of the productive forces and reflect the historical development from agri­ cultural to industrial to informational eras in capitalist societies. Although the application of technologies at universities is not new, the use of digital technologies is a relatively new phenomenon and has generated a rapid quan­ titative expansion that simultaneously raises questions of a qualitative shift. A gradual expansion of educational technologies (quantity) led to a new digi­ tal realm at universities (quality). The application of educational technolo­ gies can thus be considered a new and at the same time old development. A dialectics of continuity and discontinuity characterises the development of educational technologies. Digital media are used for different research and teaching purposes. Here is an indicative list of different possibilities for using digital media for research: • • • • • •

Online libraries Digital books and journals Online database Online research and digital methods Digital communication Virtual networks and conferences

Here is an indicative list of possibilities for how new information and com­ munication technologies are used for teaching and learning: • • • • • • •

Virtual learning environments such as Moodie and Blackboard Digital classroom Online lecture Wikis, Blogs and online discussion boards and forums Online video chats and voice calls Online tutorial, supervision and marking Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

Digital academic labour is a specific form of academic labour that is medi­ ated through digital media.Digital and non-digital media and resources often co-exist in the work experience of academics. One might think of someone who uses Blackboard for teaching in order to upload documents for stu­ dents and supervises students via email but teaches in a physical classroom. Another example might be that researchers browse the library catalogue online but still prefer to read the hard copy of a book. Digital technolo­ gies and resources have neither displaced non-digital ones fully nor are non­ digital technologies and resources completely independent of digital ones.It is as hard to imagine an academic who is able to manage his work without the use of digital media, as it is an academic without the use of non-digital

British Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism 35 media. Different people have different degrees of blending digital and non­ digital media at their work. While the pedagogical impact of digital media is not the focus of this sec­ tion, I would like to draw your attention to the economic aspect, especially in the context of teaching. According to McGettigan (2013, 115), the total annual income of UK universities is around £30 billion, and more than 50 per cent come through teaching via tuition fees and public grants. Overseas tuition fees, that is, fees from students from outside the EU, such as China, play a crucial role in income for universities in the UK (McGettigan 2013, 117). Higher education institutions today compete in a global market fo r international students. Recruiting overseas students is particularly appealing in the UK because institutions are not bound by the same restrictions as they are with home and EU students (for the time being) - there is no cap in terms of fees and in terms of numbers. Generally speaking, there are at least three different possibilities to reach international students. 1. Foreign students come to the UK for studying at one of the universities. 2. British universities install a branch campus abroad. 3. Both remain in their home country, and teaching is facilitated via digital media. The first option seems to be the most obvious one. If we take a look at Scot­ land, there are almost 30,000 non-EU students. Considering the full-time students separately (overseas students are not eligible to study part-time), 15.1 per cent of the student population in Scotland comes from non-EU countries. At the University of Edinburgh, more full-time postgraduate stu­ dents are coming from outside the EU (3,100) than from the UK (2,435) (all data for the academic year 2014/2015: Higher Education Statistics Agency 2016). There are political restrictions in recruiting non-EU students, partly because the government has declared a target to reduce migration, which should also apply to students (McGettigan 2013, 121) and brings some uncertainty in terms of economic planning for universities, and partly because the recruitment of overseas students and the accompanied sponsor­ ship of visas bring up immigration rules and an onerous and cost-intensive administrative system for higher education institutions (McGettigan 2013, 121). This includes the proof of language skills and record-keeping of attendance and study progress. 'Alternatively, if the students have diffi­ culties coming into the country, then let's take the universities to them' (McGettigan 2013, 121). The second option is to establish satellite campuses abroad for local students being appealed to receive a degree from a (prestigious) British university. While the official claim is to strengthen international research relationships, it can be considered a further strategy to access the population of countries such as India, China and Indonesia (Ross 2009, 202). For example, the University of Nottingham opened campuses in Malaysia in 2000 and in Ningbo (China)

36 Thomas Allmer in 2004, now with some thousands of students. While there are today more than 200 overseas branch campuses mainly (co-)operated by US, UK and Australian universities, the success is rather limited, and the business strategy can be considered highly risky (McGettigan 2013, 122-23). The third option is to offer courses and programmes being delivered by means of digital media (online distance learning). From a technical point of view, online teaching requires teachers and students with some hardware (computer and headset), software (as listed above), and Internet access, and the university mediates this relationship. Online distance learning is techni­ cally independent of space and time for both teachers and students as they can theoretically work from anywhere. Those programmes have been pri­ marily brought forward by major higher education institutions such as the Open University and the University of Edinburgh in the UK and Stanford University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technol­ ogy in the US. Because neither the student must come to the foreign country, avoids being confronted with immigration regulations and saves money for travelling and relocation nor has the university to invest in new campuses abroad, digital teaching can be considered a very promising business strategy in recruiting more overseas students, although it also attracts UK and EU students. The three different possibilities are not a linear historical development, where one attempt replaced the other but rather a complex and contradictory field of changing strategies, and economic ups and downs in the higher edu­ cation market. These practices coexist simultaneously, but digital education seems to be the most promising strategy at the moment. The Higher Educa­ tion Funding Council for England (2009, 7) is quite clear on this matter: 'Effective use of technology . . . can also help institutions in . . . attracting overseas students . . . Distance learning . . . will . . . assist with the recruitment and retention of (international) learners'. For Marx, the mode of production is based on productive forces (means of production and labour power) and relations of production (property rela­ tions). The productive forces are a system of living labour forces and facts and factors of the process of production that cause and influence labour (Leisewitz 1990, 939). The relations of production constitute social relations between human beings and specify who produces and who owns property (Krysmanski 1990). If we take a look at the mode of production at universi­ ties, one can see that the productive forces and relations are changing in the realm of digital education. Productive forces: Although digital education causes new costs (e.g. for licence fees of digital software), universities are able to reduce the means of production such as buildings, equipment and facilities as they are outsourced to individuals and the private sphere. While students visit lecture halls, semi­ nar rooms, laboratories, libraries and so on operated by the university for bricks and mortar campus teaching, students visit a virtual space but are

British Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism 37 physically in a private or other space of human life with an electronic device in the age of digital education (van Mourik Broekman et al. 2015, 22-23). In addition, the university must invest in technologists who establish and main­ tain digital learning environments, but digital education potentially reduces labour costs in the long term due to reproducibility. One can imagine an online module conceptualised to watch recorded lectures by research-inten­ sive professors and receive tutorials and supervision by cheap labour power such as teaching fellows and hourly paid lecturers (Noble 1998). Different universities have different digital practices, but online distance learning can reduce labour power as lectures can be easily recorded and replayed, accom­ panied by some individuality. 'The marriage of corporate culture, higher education, and the new high-speed technologies also offers universities big opportunities to cut back on maintenance expenses, eliminate entire build­ ings such as libraries and classrooms, and trim labor costs' ( Giroux 2002, 447). Due to the reduction of the productive forces, digital education can both provide a cost-efficient alternative and bring flexibility for universities in order to be able to respond quickly to changes in the higher education market in terms of demand (Massy and Zemsky 1995). An online module can be theoretically provided very quickly due to reduced material necessities and thus makes it likely to react appropriately to economic ups and downs on the student market. Relations of production: Digital education poses new questions of intel­ lectual property rights. Because ownership tends to follow authorship in cop­ yright law, teaching staff traditionally owned their course material (Noble 2001, 38). This has been a long-established tradition and right at universi­ ties. If academics left university, they had the right to take teaching material with them and were able to use it for other purposes because it belonged to the creator of educational content. As argued above, digital education can only reduce labour power and costs if content can be recorded and reused (reproducibility). One could imagine a situation where a university aims to use recorded lectures and stored communication for an online module being originally developed by teaching staff, not working for this institution any­ more. In case the university is not licensed to use this content, it could end up in either legal or economic problems. Higher education institutions thus have a strong interest in getting the intellectual property rights and licences of the developed teaching material. Universities must control the copyright. Different countries do have different practices, but it seems as the US higher education market is the most advanced in this context at the moment (Noble 2001, chapter 3). 'Ivy League schools have, in fact, developed some of the most aggressive and sophisticated examples of commercial online education' (Werry 2002, 35). Noble (2001, 38) argues that research has already been commodified, but with digital education, course material follows a similar pattern. For research tasks, employees are contractually required to assign the patent rights to the university as a routine condition of employment.

3 8 Thomas Allmer Similarly, employees might be forced to assign the copyright and licence of course material stored on PCs, websites and courseware as a routine con­ dition of employment in the realm of online teaching. This transforms the nature of teaching and the relationship between higher education institutions and their employees. Like the commercialization of research, the commercialization of instruction entails a fundamental change in the relationship between the universities and their faculty employees. Here faculty who develop and teach face-to-face courses as their primary responsibility as educa­ tors are transformed into mere producers of marketable instructional commodities that they may or may not themselves 'deliver'. (Noble 2001, 38) Digital education and technologies have an impact on the working condi­ tions of academics. If we reconsider the different stages of the capital accu­ mulation process, as outlined in the previous section, one can see the risk that conditions of labour are being intensified and extended in the realm of digital media; to name but a few, the blurring of working space and other spaces of human life, the blurring of labour and free time, fast academia, always-on cultures, deskilling, casualisation, electronic monitoring, digital surveillance, social media use for self-promotion, and new forms of intellec­ tual property rights (Noble 1998; Gregg 2013; Lupton 2014, 79-83; Poritz and Rees 2017, 68-82). One could argue that digital education and technologies widen access for people from poorer backgrounds, women, ethnic minorities and the disabled and thereby provide inclusion, equality of opportunities and social justice. For example, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (2009, 7-8) promotes that technologies enhance learning and teaching that open access and opportunity and bring equality of access, inclusion, flexible lifelong learning and international mobility. The argument that new tech­ nologies in education automatically bring enhancement can be considered a techno-optimistic and techno-deterministic view that tends to ignore the social sphere and sees technology as being independent. of its social context (Bayne 201 5, 5). For example, it is difficult to imagine how digital edu­ cation should widen access fo r people from poorer backgrounds if such programmes tend to be rather expensive with similar fees as their offline companions. Digital education can bring advantages for disabled people, being able to study at their own pace, but might involve the risk of new forms of social exclusion. Noble (1998) draws a possible future where digital education will become second-class education, while traditional on-campus teaching will become the exclusive privilege of the rich and the powerful the poor get a computer, the rich get a computer and a teacher. 'In the case

British Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism 39 of distance education, however, the digital divide is turned on its head, with the have-nots being compelled to take their courses online while the haves get to do it in person' (Noble 2001, 90). In a similar vein, Giroux (2002, 448-49) argues that a class-specific divide begins to appear in which poor and marginal­ ized students will get low-cost, low-skilled knowledge and second rate degrees from online sources, while those students being educated for leadership positions in the elite schools will be versed in personal and socially interactive pedagogies in which high-powered knowledge, criti­ cal thinking, and problem-solving will be a priority, coupled with a high-status degree. Universities are keen on promoting that their offered online programmes are internationally recognised degrees and of equal value to on-campus pro­ grammes, but the risk still exists that employers tend to favour on-campus degrees when it comes to the recruitment process (Linardopoulos 2012; Fogle and Elliott 2013 ). Given the fact that digital technologies in higher education are still in a relatively early stage, the development of the cohort in terms of social background is difficult to predict and remains an empiri­ cal question. However, it gets clear that online education fits neatly within the neoliberal agenda. An increasing need for a highly qualified, skilled and trained workforce characterises contemporary capitalism that leads to higher pressure on further education and lifelong learning processes. People tend to live under stressed and tightened circumstances, fulfilling several tasks and commitments, such as full-time jobs, and family and social relations at the same time (Hartmut 2013). Digital education helps to compensate fo r this dichotomy by offering a higher education qualification in a very flexible route as it tends to be independent of time and space. Digital education can thus be considered a response to neoliberal conditions.

Conclusion and Alternatives Based on a critical social theory approach and moving from the abstract to the concrete level, this chapter has engaged with the history and context of universities, dealt with the forms and concepts of academic labour and provided a systematic analysis of working conditions at higher education institutions. It has furthermore discussed the impact of new information and communication technologies on academic labour. According to Winn (2015, 4, 10), the academic labour studies literature tends to deal with historical, theoretical and critical questions inadequately. The aim of this chapter has thus been to contextualise universities histori­ cally within capitalism and to analyse academic labour and the deployment

40 Thomas Allmer of digital media theoretically and critically. The key arguments can be sum­ marised as follows: • Historical context: The post-war expansion of the university can be con­ sidered a medium and outcome of informational capitalism and as a dialec­ tical development of social achievement and advanced commodification. • Academic labour: Academic workers and students are part of the knowl­ edge workforce producing the commons, indirectly creating surplus value and exploited by capital. Academic labour is a specific historical form of academic work. Academic work is part of informational work that is part of cultural work. A broad definition of university labour, taking into account all different forms of work that are directly and indirectly involved in the creation and sharing of academic knowledge, can inform political solidarities between different groups within universities. • A theoretical model of working conditions helps to systematically analyse the academic labour process and provide an overview of working condi­ tions at universities. The following dimensions shape the working con­ ditions at universities: resources, technology, workforce characteristics, mental and physical health, work experiences, labour contract, wages and benefits, labour struggles, labour space and time·, work activity, control mechanism, labour product and labour legislation. • Digital media: The academic work process is today strongly linked to the usage of new information and communication technologies. A dialectics of continuity and discontinuity characterises the development of educa­ tional technologies. Digital academic labour is a specific form of academic labour that is mediated through digital media. The deployment of digi­ tal media has an impact on the working conditions of academics, includ­ ing the blurring of labour and free time, fast academia, and electronic monitoring. I recently conducted interviews with precariously employed academics in Scotland (see Chapter two). One of the results indicates that people value and see the importance of solidarity, participation and democracy. A young researcher tells me that speaking to other precariously employed academ­ ics helps to understand patterns of anxieties. She feels it might be better to organise those who are in similar situations and take some agency, instead of feeling alone and powerless: There is an awareness that there is loads of us in the same position which is the only comfort about it. I think it does get to the point where you just have to take some agency . . . .Maybe we should try and use that, the people who are in a similar position to me, we should actually . . . rather than just feeling like we are alone, we should do something about that, instead of just waiting about. (Participant 8)

British Academic Labour, Digital Media and Capitalism 41 This advances the question about political potentials, challenges and strate­ gies.Wright (2010, 304) distinguishes between three visions of social trans­ formation that correspond broadly to the anarchist, social democratic and revolutionary tradition. The anarchist tradition revolves around social move­ ments, aiming to build alternatives outside of the state; the labour movement typically plays a particularly central role in the social democratic tradition, struggling on the terrain of the state; the revolutionary tradition is connected to the Marxist tradition, attacking the state and confronting the bourgeoisie. These strategies should be brought together not only to 'envision real uto­ pias, but contribute to making utopias real' (Wright 2010, 373).In order to avoid pitfalls of co-option and marginalisation on a political level, Wright's vision of the anarchist, social democratic and revolutionary tradition can be connected to the three sections of this chapter: digital media, academic labour and historical context. Although the deployment of digital media at universities entails the risk that conditions of labour are being intensified and extended, new information and communication technologies can also help to create critical, counter-hegemonic education alternatives outside of the university (anarchist tradition). A broad definition of university labour and systematic analysis of working conditions points to the need of strug­ gles on the terrain of the university (social democratic tradition). A historical contextualisation of the university within capitalism indicates that the strug­ gle for better universities should aim beyond criticising neoliberal develop­ ments and restoring Fordist configurations (revolutionary tradition). • Digital media - anarchist tradition: Managing the progressive potentials of digital media, we need to establish and engage in critical education alternatives outside the university campus. This could involve open educa­ tion movements (Winn 2012), open access and copyleft resources (Hall 2008), creative and digital commons, and the Wikiversity (van Mourik Broekman et al.2015). • Academic labour - social democratic tradition: We need to reclaim the university as a site of struggle for all university workers, including aca­ demics, students, clerical, technical and manual workers. This requires solidarity, collectivity, participation, democratisation, resistance, opposi­ tion and unionisation (Bailey and Freedman 2011) and can inform politi­ cal solidarities between different groups within universities (and to find, for example, commonalities between outsourced cleaners fighting for sick pay, leave entitlement, pension scheme and hourly paid academic staff at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies3 ) . • Historical context - revolutionary tradition: We need to connect the strug­ gle at universities with the global struggle against capitalism.As stated in the introduction, modern universities have always been part of and embed­ ded into capitalism in political, economic and cultural terms. 'The strug­ gle for better universities can't be separated from the movement against global capitalism itself' (Callinicos 2006, 7).

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These various directions and strategies should be brought together to find commonalities of different struggles and contribute to making utopias real. Notes 1 According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (201 6), atypical contracts meet one or more of the following conditions: (i) 'are for less than four consecutive weeks - meaning that no statement of terms and conditions needs to be issued', (ii) 'are for one-off/short-term tasks - for example, answering phones during clear­ ing, staging an exhibition and organising a conference. There is no mutual obliga­ tion between the work provider and working person beyond the given period of work or project. In some cases, individuals will be paid a fixed fee for the piece of work unrelated to hours/time spent', (iii) 'involve work away from the supervision of the normal work provider - but not as part of teaching company schemes or for teaching and research supervision associated with the provision of distance learning education', and (iv) 'involve a high degree of flexibility often in a contract to work as and when required - for example, conference catering, student ambassadors and student demonstrators.' 2 The term 'ancient' means in this context rather old as these universities were founded in the Middle Ages. For example, the oldest British university, Oxford, was founded in the 1 3th century. 3 As shown in the documentary 'Limpiadores' (2015) by Fernando Gonzalez Mitjans, see www. youtube.corn/watch?v=Up b3 OK-jclM

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2

Precarious, Always-on and Flexible How Temporarily Employed Staff Experience the Working Conditions at UK Universities

Introduction The economic and political transfo rmations of universities in recent decades have attracted criticism. This is also reflected in a growing academic litera­ ture investigating those changes in the context of neoliberalism and the rise in the interweaving of private and public providers. Within universities, a new entrepreneurial and managerial spirit has been carefully fostered and produced that has resulted in the implementation of market-driven rules and competition (Deem, Hillyard and Reed 2007). It is argued that educational institutions nowadays aim to respond to market demands, whereby the pub­ lic character of education tends to fade away (Peters 2003). Higher educa­ tion (HE) institutions compete in a global market for international students (McGettigan 2013, 1 17). Critical scholars speak about 'academic capital­ ism' (Slaughter and Leslie 1999), the 'corporate university' (Giroux 2002) and 'Uber.edu' (Hall 2016). These structural transformations have had sev­ eral impacts on the working conditions, practices and relations of subjects, including, to name but a few, the intensification and extension of work, the blurring of work and free time, casualisation, precariousness, self-exploitation and self-marketing. How these conditions are experienced by different sub­ jects is open to debate. While the experiences of work in other sectors such as the cultural and creative industries are well documented, there is still a lack of understanding of labouring subjectivities in academia as well as a lack of analysis of how the existing conditions are experienced by academics ( Gill 201 4, 1 2-13). This chapter strives to find answers to the following question: How are the existing working conditions and practices at universities perceived and experienced by precariously employed academics? I address this question based on qualitative interviews with academics who are employed precariously at higher education institutions in Scotland. The following section presents the methodology of the empirical research that was conducted. Then, some findings of the study are presented and dis­ cussed in relation to working conditions, digital media, impact on teaching DOI: 10.4324/9781003129776-4

48 Thomas Allmer and research, as well as politics and potential change of higher education. The chapter concludes with a summary and a discussion of the further impli­ cations of the study. 1 Methodology This chapter draws on a small case study in which I conducted ten semi­ structured, face-to-face, qualitative interviews with academics. The focus was on people who were employed 'atypically', such as on a fixed-term contract, a casual contract, an hourly paid basis or a zero-hour contract at higher, education institutions. The participants were chosen from nine different uni­ versities (five pre-1992 and four post-1992) across Scotland, using a quota sampling strategy (Lune and Berg 2017, 39). The variables used to estab­ lish the quotas included gender, educational level, HE institution, terms of employment and age. The interviewees were found through university web­ sites, had no personal relationship with the interviewer and were approached directly via email. The interviews took place in offices, university rooms and cafes in 2016. After individual consent, the interviews were audio-recorded and fully transcribed. Participants had the freedom to withdraw at any stage during the interview. All data were stored securely and treated confiden­ tially and anonymously. The interviews lasted between 50 and 100 minutes. A copy of the transcript was sent to the participants for further comments and final approval. The scripts were analysed with the help of content analy­ sis (Krippendorff 2004; Lune and Berg 2017) in order to find answers to my questions about how academics perceive the existing working conditions that are shaped by political and economic contexts. The sociodemographic profiles of the respondents are given in Table 2. l. Several authors have already conducted empirical work in this context (e.g. Prichard and Willmott 1997; Deem, Hillyard and Reed 2007; Archer 2008; and Norkus, Besio and Baur 2016). My study aimed to add to this body of knowledge by focusing on academics who are employed precari­ ously at HE institutions using an in-depth analysis of meanings, identities and experiences of individuals that favour a qualitative, instead of a quanti­ tative approach (Gray 2004, 22). 2 Analysis and Interpretation In the following, I will present and discuss the findings along with working conditions at universities, digital media, impact on teaching and research, and politics and potential change of higher education. 2. 1 Working Conditions at Universities

This section presents and discusses some findings regarding job insecurity, workload, management, control mechanisms, mental and physical health and gender.

Precarious, Always-on and Flexible 49 Table 2.1 Sociodemographic profiles of the respondents Gender Citizenship Educational level Job description Subject area Higher education institution Mode of employment Terms of employment Age

Six women, four men Seven British, one German, one Austrian, one Belgian Ten doctoral degrees One teaching fellow, eight (postdoctoral) research fellows/(postdoctoral) researchers/research associates, one lecturer One education, one politics, two social studies/ sciences, one psychology, two sociology, one informatics, one economics, one health sciences Six pre-1992 universities (two Russell Group universities), four post-1992 universities Seven full-time, one part-time, two hourly paid Nine fixed-term (one currently on leave), one 80% fixed-term/20% open-ended Youngest 33 years, oldest 56 years, average 42 years

2.1 . 1 Job Insecurity

Asked how much they consider job insecurity in their current post, partici­ pants mentioned concerns and worries about their insecure situation and reported feelings of precariousness, lack of prospects, increasing competition and the need to make multiple job applications. Most of the participants were concerned about the insecure nature of their jobs and aspired to eco­ nomic security. 'I really wanted a more secure position', claimed Participant 2. This view was echoed by Participant 6 who said that 'I would rather have a permanent position and stop wondering where I will be in five years'. A post­ doctoral researcher emphasised that her insecure job situation was depress­ ing, making her feel devalued and affecting her self-esteem. Another female researcher told me that she could not concentrate on her work anymore due to her insecure job situation. The precarious nature of the job worried her and was constantly in her head:

At the moment it is just the insecurity, the precarious nature . . . when it gets to next year, what if I don't get anything, it is that worry. Con­ stantly in your head, that worry. (Participant 8) Interviewees also reported feelings of precariousness and described inad­ equate payment and economic insecurity. A teaching fellow, who was the course organiser of a large programme at his school, told me that teach­ ing fellows are paid in grade seven although many of them have responsi­ bilities and commitments intended for staff in grade eight, including being a course organiser, lecturer or programme director. He continued by saying

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that teaching fellows do grade eight work, without receiving appropriate contracts or salaries (these grades refer to academic roles and profiles at Brit­ ish universities) . A young academic mentioned that her previous departments wanted her to fulfil tasks without getting paid: The other departments I had been working for were still wanting me to do lectures and marking but weren't going to pay me. There came a point where I said 'no'. 'No, I am not doing this any more'. They interviewed me for a teaching fellow job, didn't give me the job, but still wanted me to do the odd lecture and the marking for it . . . but not even offering me the hourly pay. (Participant 2)

One hourly paid lecturer had two other jobs in addition to her main one in order to have some financial security and to be able to work within higher education. She described her plans to write journal articles during the unpaid summer holiday in order to make her more appealing in the academic job market. Interviewees also claimed that preparation time for teaching was not adequately compensated within their pay. Interviewees described being confronted with a lack of knowledge, confusing information and a lack of prospects in their jobs. A teaching fellow was confused about his prospects within the institute: All through January, February, we were told 'it is looking great, they are going to make everybody permanent, there is a real move to get rid of these temporary contracts' and then they told us the complete opposite. (Participant 1)

A female research fellow said that she felt terribly insecure and did not know what would happen after her current grant had finished. An hourly paid lecturer was aware that she would not get any information about the con­ tract extension until shortly before the start of the next semester. A contract researcher told me that she felt insecure in terms of not knowing when and where the next contract might come from, not knowing what percentage of a full-time equivalent position she might be able to secure and not knowing when a particular project might start. Interviewees felt the drive to be compet­ itive and hard-working at all times by the temporary nature of their work and the related insecurity. For example,a research fellow told me the following: I could just go 'no', but I am in a temporary position and I want you to keep me and I want . . . 'we can't let her go, she has won the best lecturer awards three years in a row'. (Participant 2)

Precarious, Always-on and Flexible 51

Simultaneously, these respondents were aware of, and worried about, the competitive atmosphere among staff. Interviewees told me that competition and pressure for permanent posts and secure jobs were constantly getting higher,which they found difficult on an individual level. A younger academic justified his conformism with his insecure position: No, I cannot say, I never say 'no'. I am relying on other people . . . my future is in their hands. (Participant 1 0)

Participants mentioned their fears and worries about being unemployed and the risk of being made redundant as an academic. A teaching fellow made the case that if student numbers were to drop at his school, fixed-term aca­ demics, including him, would be the first to be made redundant. A young researcher described how she had found it really worrying to be unemployed after she had finished her PhD. Many interviewees said that they were con­ stantly screening the job market and applying for new jobs. A fellow at a Russell Group university mentioned that as a fixed-term academic you are constantly looking for something else. 'The longer we are teaching fellows, the less research output we generate so the harder it is to compete with the people who are outside,who are already in lectureship posts' (Participant 1). Others complained that finding a new job was time- and energy-consuming, tiring and humiliating: Oh it is just time wasting. It is tiring. It is . . . I don't know if I can say, it is humiliating at the same time . . . And if it is not writing applications for jobs, it is also writing applications for projects and I just want to do something else. (Participant 6)

Participants also described how difficult it was for them to find the time to write job applications and prepare for interviews properly. 2. 1 .2 Workload

Many participants reported overload and overburden in their working envi­ ronment. A teaching fellow mentioned that he has to write feedback for more than 20 dissertations in addition to a heavy teaching load. He continued by saying that supervising personal tutees was also a major task. Another inter­ viewee told me that working on hourly paid contracts in different depart­ ments at the same time was the hardest work she had ever experienced: Because I was trying to work in several different departments, because I didn't have a salary, I was paid by the hour, and I was course

52 Thomas Allmer coordinating and getting one hour paid for preparation time . . . I think that was the hardest I have ever worked. (Participant 2) A project researcher was confronted with a high workload in her project and felt particularly pressured because she had to deal with a double load of having a baby and working full-time. An older academic at a post-1992 university told me that people were overloaded, overburdened and tended to be workaholics, but the older she got, the less she was willing to work overtime. A young researcher was aware that he worked 'more than normal' (Participant 6) but considered this to be essential. Another interviewee men­ tioned that there were highs and lows in terms of workload in her projects but pointed out that this is hard to control by oneself as a contract researcher. She went on to say that 'you permanently rely on other people'. A lot of the participants complained about work pressure and a high level of stress. As a teaching fellow recounted, a lot of pressure is generated by the fast turna­ round time of assignments. He added that it was considered normal to work overtime at the school where he was employed. Everybody does more and there have been occasional messages in meet­ ings that it is kind of normal to do more, etc. Which is quite stressful, because you are already struggling to do more and then you are being told,