The shifting rhythms of academic work

Popular rhetoric surrounding the transformation of academia around the globe often draws on a set of dichotomous discourses, characterising organisational change as inciting a clash or struggle between opposing conceptions of the academy and its workers: scientific versus corporate values (Winter, 2009); collegial versus managerial work control (Parker & Jary, 1995); fast versus slow productivity (Berg & Seeber, 2017; Pels, 2003); instrumental versus substantive goals (Osbaldiston et al., 2016); and high modern versus post-modern knowledge orders (Delanty, 2001). Here, I seek to narrow in on a key battleground for the politics of academia, namely the temporal ordering of scholarly work. The perception that academic workers are under more pressure than in the past and that this pressurisation is leading to widespread negative consequences has become near doxic among critical higher education scholars. This paper outlines the politics at the heart of time ordering in academia, which I describe as a chronopolitics of academic work (Vostal, 2016, p. 170ff). (DIPF/Orig.)