Research and precarity

Abstract

This chapter establishes a theoretical framework for the analysis of empirical evidence, explaining the development of precarity in academia through mobilizing the ideas of ambivalence and liminality, with additional consideration of the cruel optimism phenomenon in certain circumstances. The discussion enables my research, and my understanding of precarity, to be understood as a continuance of an existing phenomenon in universities rather than a new or novel development. This extends to noting some of the key dynamics that sustain precarity, in particular, in a perspective influenced by Merton and Barber’s (1978) account of ‘Sociological Ambivalence’ in scientific institutions, the idea that a university workforce is divided between a small core of secure employees and a larger periphery that includes most researchers, with the former able to exercise control over the latter through the perpetuation of fixed-term contractual status.