The ‘Work-Work Balance’ in higher education: between over-work, falling short and the pleasures of multiplicity

ABSTRACT

The neoliberalization of higher education in western countries has led to work intensification, projectification, and work-life balance issues for academics. This article draws on interviews with Digital Humanities practitioners in higher education conducted in 2017–2018 in three Nordic countries to introduce the concept of the ‘work-work balance’, an under-researched phenomenon in contemporary academe. The term ‘work-work balance’ refers to the ways in which workers in higher education seek to balance conflicting concurrent work demands made on them. Four such work scenarios emerged from the data: the 50/50 split across different jobs; working across multiple projects simultaneously; occupying multiple functional roles; and conflicting demands within one job. The article argues that work-work balance, or rather imbalance, issues result in the inability of higher education workers to meet the demands put upon them. This raises questions regarding the role of HEIs and research funding regimes in the generation and maintenance of work-work balance scenarios and suggests that work-work balance issues need to be researched further as well as requiring urgent attention from HEIs and research funders.

KEYWORDS:

• Work–work balance
• conflicting job demands
• mosaic work portfolio
• projectification
• digital humanities

Introduction

In December 2020, a female colleague sent me the following email:

My work situation is quite impossible, and I have to step back from [a joint project] as I have no time to do a good job. I am really sorry about this. Working in a large number of research projects on a small % is not working for me. And I have realised that next year looks even messier than this year due to circumstances such as a colleague on parental leave, two new PhD students and too few teachers in my area.¹

The colleague in question, working as a section head with large numbers of staff in a computing sciences area, and involved in many projects, had recently also taken on a university-wide role around equality issues. She was, without question, hugely over-worked and her email was, in that sense, no surprise. It also highlighted an issue that I have become increasingly aware of in my six years of working in Sweden and collaborating with academics in the Nordic countries. This is what I term the ‘work-work balance’ issue which I address in this article. I understand the work-work balance to refer to the ways in which workers in higher education seek to balance conflicting concurrent work demands made on them.

For the purposes of this article the key sentence in the email quoted above for exploring questions of work-work balance is ‘Working in a large number of research projects on a small % is not working for me’. This kind of working I have found to be quite common in Swedish higher education. But it was not something I had come across in my decades of working in UK higher education, for example. However, I also recognize that this may be a function of having been at home in the Humanities and Social Sciences rather than in STEM subjects. My collaborator whom I shall call Pernilla had only 10% working time in the project from which she was withdrawing. 10% working time amounts to 4 hours per week in the Swedish higher education system – not much time to engage in research when project work also includes meetings, conferences, publications, etc. She also had varying percentages in other research projects as well as her functional, admin and teaching roles within the university.

This kind of ‘portfolio’ or ‘mosaic’ job composition (see Griffin 2019) is not unusual in Swedish higher education and may be common elsewhere. It surfaced noticeably, though unbidden, in semi-structured interviews I conducted with Digital Humanities practitioners in higher education in the Nordic countries in 2017-18. These interviews were concerned with the institutionalization of digital humanities in higher education in these countries. But without being specifically asked about it, ‘work-work balance’ issues were directly raised by 14 of the 30 interviewees. In this article, I, therefore, draw on that material to explore how work-work balance issues manifest themselves among these higher education academics, how they impact on these academics, what the reasons underlying work-work balance concerns might be, and what its implications are for HEIs and research funders.

The aim of this article is, then, to open up a debate about the phenomenon of the work-work balance. It is an issue that remains largely unaddressed in contemporary higher education research but which deserves our attention as we face mounting and diverse work pressures that threaten academics’ ability to work in a sustainable manner (Bryson 2004; Guthrie et al. 2018; Morrish 2019). In the following I shall begin by briefly discussing the much more commonly used and familiar term ‘work-life balance’ which the term ‘work-work balance’ references. Here I shall also clarify how this study is distinct from the issues commonly raised around mid-career academics. I shall then outline the higher education employment situation in the three Nordic countries involved in this study, and the situation of DH in those countries. Following this, I shall provide details of the data on which I draw and my methodology. This is followed by a discussion of the forms work-work balance issues took among my interviewees, and their effects and implications both for the academics themselves and for organizations such as higher education institutions and research funders. Finally, I shall suggest future directions for research on the work-work balance.

The work–work balance: an unexplored phenomenon

The arrival of new public management, audit cultures, notions of the ‘entrepreneurial’ university, and neoliberal working conditions in higher education in western countries from the 1990s onwards has been accompanied by a slew of publications on its impacts on academe and academics (e.g. Deem 2003; Ekman, Lindgren, and Packendorff 2018; Kenny 2017; Kivistö et al. 2019; Lundström 2018; Slaughter and Leslie 1997; Strathern 2000). These impacts include prominently the notion of ‘work intensification’ (Kenny 2017), issues around ‘workloads’ (Kenny and Fluck 2018; Oleksiyenko 2018), questions regarding the ‘work-life balance’ (Lester 2015; Lewis, Gambles, and Rapoport 2007; Nikunen 2012; Toffoletti and Starr 2016; Ylijoki and Ursin 2013), as well as questions of time management and the acceleration of work pace (Guzmán-Valenzuela and Barnett 2013; Ylijoki 2015), mounting stress among higher education workers (Berg, Huijbens, and Gutzon Larsen 2016; Chandler, Barry, and Clark 2002; Winefield 2000), and the precarity of academic work as a function of the rise in fixed-term contracts (Murgia and Poggio 2019; OECD 2021; Ullrich 2016). In these texts, academic work is described as ‘complex’ (Kenny 2017: 900) and ‘demanding in terms of effort, as well as time’ (Santos and Cabral-Cardoso 2008, 442), with consequences for academics’ work-life balance.

The phrase ‘work-life balance’ has gained significant traction since the late 1990s, with steep rises post-2000. The phrase is, as others have also argued, a ‘misnomer’ since it actually refers to an imbalance which workers in contemporary work cultures struggle with (Emslie and Hunt 2009; Ylijoki 2013; Wullf-Wathne 2020) that references ‘a widely felt need to prevent paid work from invading too much into people’s lives’ (Lewis, Gambles, and Rapoport 2007, 361).

In discussions on the work-life balance, sometimes also perhaps more aptly termed work-life conflict (Dorenkamp and Süß 2017), ‘work’ appears as a unitary category and is identified with paid work, career, and men, whilst life, also a unitary category, is identified with family, care work and women. Hence much of the related literature is concerned with how much each (usually heterosexual) partner in a given relationship contributes to the ‘life’ dimension of the ‘work-life balance’, and to what extent and how ‘life’ impacts on ‘work’. This is constructed as a conflict between the demands of work and the demands of family and care, a conflict carried out between women and men in which women lose (sees Arlie Hochschild’s groundbreaking work on this 1989, 1997; Rafnsdóttir and Heijstra 2013). As Nikunen (2012, 128) puts it: ‘Tenure-track and managerial positions are arranged as if academics had no responsibilities other than to the academy’. She cites one female researcher with a sick child who was supported in needing to be away to care for the child but with the understanding that she would do her work regardless. No mention was made of the father or of re-distributing any work.

When one considers the detail of what is involved in questions of work-life balance, the underlying issues appear to be about a work-work (im)balance, as the following quote demonstrates:

Bill Denton and Vicky King, male and female executives, fit a larger pattern. According to a 1990 Amerco survey, top-payroll men like Bill put in slightly longer hours than did their female counterparts, but adding together work at office and home, the ‘Bills’ put in 75 h a week while the ‘Vickys’ put in 96. (Hochschild 1997, 76)

Viewing the work-life balance as a work-work balance issue not only highlights what feminist campaigns since the mid-twentieth century have argued, namely that housework is work, but it also points to the fact that the demarcations employed for the two domains are to some extent false.

In this article I understand work as a purposeful activity involving mental and physical effort to achieve a particular end. Since the focus is on work in academe, which can take many forms, I use the term here to refer to four different versions thereof that inter-relate: (a) waged labour in the university, (b) designated jobs (e.g. being a lecturer, a technician), (c) functional administrative roles exercised by academics (e.g. being a director of studies), and (d) academic tasks (e.g. reviewing, teaching, attending meetings).

The literature on work-life balance issues, like the literature engaging with ‘the neoliberal university’ (e.g. Acker and Wagner 2019), largely constructs work as a single entity which may be stressful or precarious (Standing 2011) but which appears to refer to one job at a time, whether temporary or full-time. When Ylijoki (2015), for example, discusses project time she views it in terms of ‘moving from one project to the next’ (102), not in terms of multiple simultaneous projects. Similarly, Brew et al. (2018, 2302) discuss academics’ navigation of ‘complex demands’ within a single job envelope. Bramlage et al. (2019) talk of ‘unzumutbare Aufgaben’ (unreasonable tasks) but again with an implicit underlying assumption that these are allocated within one job, resulting in ‘Rollenoverload’ or role overload.

Even so, work-work balance issues become visible in many authors’ asides that hint at the difficulties of managing those complex demands. Ylijoki (2013, 243; emphasis added) mentions that ‘today’s academics face growing and often conflicting expectations, pressures and demands’. Ullrich (2016, 390) states that many temporary contracts are also ‘geteilt’ (split) but offers no further details. And Acker and Wagner (2019, 65) for instance state that ‘academics are … expected to display an ever-rising record of grant-getting, project-managing, output-publishing and impact-demonstrating, often while also taking on a full complement of teaching and administration’. Acker and Wagner’s list here does not even include often ‘invisible’ tasks such as reviewing for journals and publishers, or indeed being a journal or series editor, sitting on appointment committees inter/nationally, evaluation and assessment panels of research funders, mentoring, examining externally, writing reports for government bodies, etc. – all of which is also work, often unremunerated, and almost wholly unacknowledged. But the ‘ever-rising record’ they refer to hints at the work intensification that produces one kind of work-work balance issue. As I shall indicate below, however, this is only one version of this issue which I encountered. Concurrent conflicting demands can come about as a consequence of different kinds of work scenarios, as I discuss below.

There is a significant literature on mid-career academics, or the ‘Mittelbau’ as it is known in German-speaking countries (e.g. Brew et al. 2018; Holderberg 2020; Israel 2020; Metz-Göckel 2016; Pürschel and Rüger 2016; Schneickert 2019). This literature is relevant here because about half my respondents could be described as mid-career academics although professors, associate professors and postdocs were also among my interviewees. The point is that the issue of the work-work (im)balance affects not just mid-career academics but also those in more junior (see Caretta et al. 2018) and more senior positions. Nonetheless it is important to note that the ‘Mittelbau’ literature testifies to the work intensification that mid-career academics have experienced over the past twenty years or so, its attendant stresses (e.g. Allmer 2018; Smith and Smalley 2018), and the various coping strategies mid-career academics adopt, as well as the costs involved in these work situations (e.g. Brew et al. 2018; Coate, Kandiko Howson, and de St Croix 2015; Torka 2019). To contextualize these, I shall now provide a brief overview of the situation of the academic profession in the Nordic countries, and of Digital Humanities.

Nordic academe and digital humanities

Nordic academe, like the rest of Europe, has been subject to the restructuring and reforms of the 1990s that have led to the characterization of contemporary academe as neoliberal (Pinheiro, Geschwind, and Aarrevaara 2014, 2019), defined by ‘the 5 Cs: corporatisation, casualisation, commodification, contractualism and compliance’ (Reay 2004, 33). Whilst the Nordic countries do not suffer from the same extreme direct audit/surveillance cultures in academe that have afflicted Anglophone countries through technologies such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF – see https://www.ref.ac.uk) or the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF)², they have nonetheless also seen the ‘move away from core basic funding for research institutions to allocation via competitive mechanisms’ (OECD 2021, 15) and to a diversification of funding sources that has also entailed the increased casualization of staff through ‘non-standard employment’ which is ‘fixed term and without permanent or continuous employment prospects’ (OECD 2021, 15). This results in a ‘research precariat’ of people in ‘permadoc’ positions (note the reference to permafrost here), as the OECD (2021, 33) puts it. Unlike in Germany, where fixed-term employment in academe is capped at a specific number of years, in the Nordic countries academics can spend their entire career moving from one or multiple simultaneous research contracts to another/others. As elsewhere, the diversification of funding sources and a concomitant rise in atypical academic units (i.e. forums, ‘virtual centres’, ‘labs’ in non-hard/natural science areas, etc.) within universities has also increased precarity there. Already in 1998, Etzkowitz and Kemelgor argued that centres ‘represent less of an institutional commitment than departments: they need no permanent staff’ (1998, 272). As a university tactic ‘in [the] academic struggle for funds’ (274), ‘centres are temporary bodies that may close if funds run out’ (277).

This reality has blighted new developments in academe, including the Digital Humanities. Digital Humanities conjoins disciplinary domains (Humanities) frequently populated by women, with technologization, an arena commonly associated with men. It includes a wide range of activities from the digitization of databases, digital language corpora analyses, investigations of born-digital materials (e.g. blogs, twitter, social media), and the construction and uses of AI and machine learning in many different contexts. To date (2021) DH is characterized by its provisional organizational position within academe; across Europe DH exists almost exclusively in research centres, networks, laboratories, and projects (see Nygren et al., 2015;Golub et al., 2016). In the USA DH has become much more institutionally established (Zorich, 2008). According to Griffin (2019), DH has five specific traits:

1. it constitutes contested academic terrain – there is a lively debate as to whether is it a discipline, a perspective or a methodology (see e.g. Gold, 2012);

2. it is multi- or interdisciplinary domain, meaning that working in DH almost always involves collaboration with multiple persons from diverse fields;

3. professional roles within DH are not (yet) fixed; neither is the nomenclature regarding those roles because standard academic classifications (e.g. professor, lecturer, etc.) do not cover all the professionals involved who also importantly include ‘service’ personnel such as technicians, programmers etc.;

4. it is atypically institutionalized (i.e. not as a department) so that it is organizationally and operationally often marginalized;

5. significant numbers of contemporary DH practitioners are autodidacts because the discipline had not yet been established during their student years.

All this makes for a precarious institutional position. And whilst the Nordic countries have had significant varieties of funding opportunities dedicated specifically to Digital Humanities research³ in recognition of the importance of embedding technological advances in academic research both as content and as method/practice, this has not been matched by greater institutional stabilization. This is evident in the empirical data discussed below.

Methods

In 2017–2018, I undertook semi-structured one-on-one interviews with 30 Digital Humanities (DH) practitioners (17 women, 13 men) working in higher education in Sweden (n = 17), Finland (n = 7) and Norway (n = 6). These interviewees were purposively sampled through DH webpages in higher education institutions in the countries in question and through national research funder websides detailing projects in DH. Potential interviewees identified through this process were emailed directly to solicit participation; everyone who was approached agreed to be interviewed. The purpose of the study was to understand these DH practitioners’ work life experiences in a tech-dominated emerging academic field. The interviews were based on an interview guide which covered areas such as their current post, their employment histories, their professional development, mentoring, formal technology training, issues of gender in their field, and ways of updating themselves professionally.

All interviews were conducted in English face-to-face, most offline but some via skype. They were audio-recorded with the permission of the interviewees who were given information sheets about the study and had signed consent forms, allowing the use of their anonymized interviews in subsequent publications. The interviews were transcribed and uploaded into NVivo 11 Pro for coding which was partly inductive (based on the interview guide questions which had directed the interviewees towards talking about working in DH) and partly deductive. A thematic analysis, following Braun and Clarke (2006, 2012), was undertaken, and this has been reported on elsewhere (Griffin 2019). The theme of the work-work balance, which is the focus of this article, emerged deductively from the data.

When repeatedly re-reading the interviews as part of the coding process, I found that of the 30 interviewees, 14, i.e. almost half, had mentioned work-work balance issues explicitly. This suggests that it is a significant issue affecting half the interviewees sufficiently for it to surface unbidden. It implies that such issues might be much more widely experienced, and anecdotally I would certainly underwrite this. It suggests that a systematic study of this phenomenon needs to be undertaken. The fact that half my interviewees mentioned work-work balance issues made me decide to investigate this further. The work-work balance issues that surfaced were associated with four particular work scenarios, disentangled here for analytic purposes, although in reality, these scenarios could operate in parallel. These scenarios articulate the conditions under which the interviewees experienced work-work balance issues, and they are important because changing those scenarios to improve the work-work balance requires different solutions. For instance, there is a major difference between experiencing work-work balance issues where multiple employers and contracts are involved, compared to suffering from work overload within one employment contract. One of the four scenarios was the 50/50 split, where an academic worked in two jobs simultaneously, usually involving different employers and sites. The second is related to working in, or multi-tasking across, multiple projects. This usually also involved multiple contracts. The third one was about occupying multiple functional roles, and the fourth one centred on simultaneous conflicting demands within one job, i.e. the impossibility of executing all admin, teaching and research demands.

Table 1 provides an overview of the interviewees, indicating their pseudonym, age, sex, Nordic location (S = Sweden, F = Finland, N = Norway), their occupation, and the nature of their work-work balance issue. The phrase ‘DH centre’ is used to designate centres going by different names in the HE institutions where the research took place. It is used because otherwise the research sites might be too readily identifiable, given the small number of HE institutions in the Nordic countries overall.

Table 1. Work–work balance issues among Nordic higher education DH practitioners.

Pseudonym	age	sex	Nordic location	Occupation	Work–work balance issue
Per	39	M	S	Artistic director, DH centre; cultural developer	50/50 split; multiple functional roles
Jens	40	M	S	Systems developer	50/50 split
Dirk	50	M	S	Lecturer, assoc prof	50/50 split
Michel	52	M	N	Lecturer; director of archive	50/50 split
Marta	50s	F	S	Director, DH centre; prof	50/50 split; multiple functional roles
Nina	36	F	S	Assoc prof	50/50 split
Elsa	46	F	S	Postdoc	Multiple projects
Britta	48	F	S	Director of studies	Multiple projects
Berit	42	F	S	Collaboration manager	Multiple jobs/projects
Anna	40	F	S	Researcher	Multiple projects
Martin	43	M	F	Researcher	Multiple projects
Anders	40	M	F	Assoc prof	Multiple projects; multiple functional roles
Sven	46	M	S	Director, DH centre	Admin/teaching/research conflict; multiple functional roles
Knut	40s	M	N	Prof	Admin/teaching/research conflict

Source: interviews conducted by the author, 2017-18.

Since the interviewees had originally been identified through purposive sampling with the main criterion being that they were working in or with Digital Humanities, the majority of the participants but not all were mid-career as is evident from Table 1. Hence within this sample, the work-work balance issues were found predominantly among mid-career academics.

In the following I shall outline how the interviewees talked about their work-work balance issues before discussing what the effects and implications of these experiences might be.

The 50/50 split

It was mainly men who described a 50/50 split in their working lives, mostly involving permanent positions. Dirk worked 50% in a department of linguistics and 50% in a DH centre. He had been doing this for ten years. He said: ‘I work in two different places basically. And … I have all these collaborations and ehm, the things that people work on, they are so different from each other’. For him the biggest problem was ‘time and energy’. As he said:

sometimes it’s difficult because on paper like I need to work for a project maybe like one day a week, and it’s not always like I can do that … exactly how much of my time goes on all these different things, it’s very difficult to say.

Jens similarly described how he had

this [DH centre] employment for 50% and 50% at a [cultural institution] … it means that I have less time … I often can go back and forth … but in the end you want to give the same time to both places and it also means that kind of administrative meetings and that kind of thing, I have double of that.

Travel between two different sites and the multiplication of meetings were just two of the time-consuming dimensions of such working. The only woman to talk in terms of a 50/50 split, Marta, was a professor who was both head of a DH centre and a professor of linguistics. She found that ‘I mean, I’m supposed to be a sort of professor of linguistics, half of the time, and that’s obviously not possible [laughs a little], … I don’t know 15% of the time or something’. Despite having contracts that stipulated working 50% in one capacity and 50% in another, these interviewees found this demand impossible and invariably privileged one role over another. Marta, for instance, had been awarded a major grant but had been unable to make use of it: ‘I mean, under normal circumstances, if you are given a grant of that size … you’re bought out of admin duties and so on, but because of the nature of the directorship … that sort of hasn’t been possible’. She had no opportunity to ‘compromise’ between the two jobs as McIntosh et al.’s (2019) research suggests academics in the UK do; rather she simply could not do certain jobs.

Working across multiple projects

Working across multiple projects, usually on multiple, temporary contracts, was common among both women and men. Often this also went together with having co-percentages of diverse sizes in different projects to make up a living wage within a mosaic work portfolio. It usually involved complex financial arrangements as well as being split across different sites, and problems with identifying one’s professional location. Anna, for instance, said:

I usually say that I am a researcher at the faculty because I work with almost all departments but my position is at the [DH centre] … I’m involved in different research projects … so I’ve some projects with the department of language studies, with cultural media, and ethnology, and right now my position is financed 50% from the centre of [ethnic identity] studies.

Anna positioned herself as part of ‘the faculty’ rather than any department to colleagues who found it difficult to ‘locate’ her because of her numerous, diverse, concurrent commitments. She seemed to have no ‘academic tribe’ (Becher 1989) to which she belonged. Nina said that working in a DH centre was

25% of my time. On the rest, I’m doing my own work. I have 50% of my own money, you know how it works in Sweden … One collaboration didn’t work, two collaborations didn’t work out but I have like maybe fifteen now.

It is almost impossible to imagine what having 15 collaborations actually means in work terms. And it is perhaps not surprising that several did not work out. Dirk mentioned having ‘maybe 20 collaborations in parallel’. The effect, for some, was that their relation to the institution/s which employed them were equally fractured. As Nina put it: ‘my loyalties towards [my] university are very, very fragile’.

Having multiple functional roles

Both women and men had to deal with multiple functional roles. Anders, for example, said: ‘I just got starting this February an associate professorship at [university], so, eh, that means I continue working on [DH project elsewhere] but I also have other responsibilities on top of that’. Such additional responsibilities might mean that eventually the academic would give up one or other of their functional roles because, as Berit for instance, said: ‘I actually ended my daytime work with the dance [teaching dance] because it was difficult to combine’. Jens found himself saying ‘I can’t attend to this because at this week I need to be at the other [job], … in the long run it gets a bit too much, yeah’. More common than giving up a functional role was to say, as Marta did, ‘I don’t get much sleep because my symbolic, my symbolic value is huge, right, so I am a woman, tick and I am a woman in humanities who deals with tech, tick, so I sit on millions of committees, right?’ But trying to do justice to multiple functional roles often meant short-changing one in favour of another whilst feeling bad about the whole thing. Michel, torn between his teaching position and his role as archive director, told me that his teaching role meant that:

I have no time to follow up our contract with Oxford University Press, I have no time to follow up the partnership with Trinity and the Austrian National Library, I have no time to supervise or assist our [visiting researchers] … I cannot, that’s a bit of a conflict because I cannot do certain things for the department which it wants me to do because I simply have to catch up with the archives, yeah.

The effect of trying to manage multiple simultaneous functional roles meant in all cases that some tasks simply were not done, and that the academics in question invariably felt conflicted about this (see also Berg, Huijbens, and Gutzon Larsen 2016; Loveday 2018).

Multiple demands within a job

Coping with what is sometimes described as ‘competing demands’ in the workplace (McIntosh et al. 2019) constitutes one of the more commonly explored work-work balance issues although not labelled as such, mainly within an Anglophone context (e.g. Brew et al. 2018; McIntosh et al. 2019). One might describe this as an issue of intra-job work-work balance. Knut had a professorship, supposedly giving him 50% teaching and 50% research time. However, in reality, the fact that a colleague had got a big grant and was suddenly not available for teaching meant that he had to pick up some of that work (‘I’m doing a bit more teaching than usual’) and that additional admin demands were encroaching on his working time. Knut was not overly bothered by this, but in Sven’s case, the situation looked very different. As he put it:

I don’t have time to do my research, which I have 50% research; I don’t have time to do it. Well, so, stepping down from the directorship is one possibility to continue within academia. Another possibility is to leave, do something else … it’s been some rough years, has been a really good education in university structures and university management.

Sven was disillusioned with the way in which his job had made certain aspects of it, in particular research, impossible despite a job description that required him to conduct research 50% of his working time. Not being able to work to one’s job description was thus for some a significant problem, one that might lead staff to leave the academy.

Discussion

The effects of the work–work imbalance: counting the costs

Just as the work-life balance is really about the work-life imbalance and conflicting demands, so the work-work balance was in fact about its imbalance and conflicting demands. As Marta said: ‘having two jobs is never a good idea’. Per, too, was very clear that ‘It’s always been hard, you have like two fifty-fifty, it never becomes two fifty-fifty. Sometimes it’s seventy-seventy, and sometimes it’s less and more so’. This imbalance came in several guises, and was experienced in at least three different ways: as a ‘seesaw’ where the academic invested more in one and less in the other (part) of their job/s as a way of trying to balance them out in a constant juggling act; as overwork on all fronts which however was experienced as never fully doing justice to any of the multiple job demands (the ‘seventy-seventy’ syndrome); and as a process of ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ or ‘compromising’ (McIntosh et al. 2019), i.e. deciding to preferentialize one (part of one’s) job over another.

Only three interviewees, all men, spoke positively about this work situation, and all in the same way. Martin enjoyed the variety of working on many different projects – a work situation he would not have had in private industry, as he said. Dirk, more ambivalently, said that ‘in a way it’s nice that I learn much from, about many different things’. But he then immediately qualified this by saying ‘on the other hand, it can be difficult sometimes, having to switch from one topic to another on the same day and I cannot … ’ Jens mentioned working with ‘exciting new technologies and doing things that were impossible five years ago … really cool thing’. But these men were in the minority and even their enthusiasm was dampened by the recognition that having to deliver on multiple fronts was well-nigh impossible.

Overall, the work-work imbalances the interviewees faced had a whole range of consequences, not only for the academics concerned but also for the work itself, the institutions and the funders. At the level of the individual, there was a sense that ‘nobody can keep track of [multiple projects] so it’s … all on paper. [coughs]’ (Dirk) The unease manifested in the cough and the relegation of the work regime to a paper exercise signals the difficulties Dirk had in doing justice to the work demands he faced. Jens found it hard to move across projects, partly because it was difficult to re-focus and partly because there was never a ‘cooldown period’ as he called it. In the case of the colleague I quoted at the beginning of this article, her withdrawal meant that, among other things, she would not co-write a book chapter that had actually already been commissioned and for which a contract had been issued. Nina said that the collaborations that did not work out failed to do so ‘because I didn’t chase them enough. Because it required a lot of work from me … and I had other things to do so’. Nina was a relatively junior researcher and represented the other side of the coin articulated by Marta, the professor, who, having no time to do her research, said that ‘a lot of my research gets done by proxies’, here meaning PhDs and postdocs. Nina herself was a proxy for an ‘old male professor’ about whom she complained vociferously for simply dumping work on her but wanting to take all the credit (see Griffin 2021).

For early and mid-career researchers being caught in the cycles of repeatedly having to apply for funding, or being simultaneously part of (multiple) research funding applications, inevitably means that they are constantly casting about for the next project, and often leave ongoing projects that only have a year or so to run, prematurely. Sometimes they do not even start a project that has received funding because another one comes along with a longer run-time, a greater percentage time, or in a more prestigious institution. In other words, commitment to the work at hand suffers under these conditions (see Sennett 1998). This is also the case if they simultaneously service several projects, and end up having to try and carve up their time to fit in with the diverse demands of different projects. Alternatively, if they have not managed to finish project work and a new project is starting they may find themselves in the position Elsa described:

I don’t think I expected it to be this difficult … part of it is that I am sort of still a member of two Academy of Finland research projects from before … I am not funded in those projects [anymore] but I still have to participate in them … it is mostly about the pull between the old projects and now the new one.

Struggling with the often irreconcilable work-work imbalances they experienced, the higher education workers I interviewed found this situating ‘really taking a toll’ (Jens). Britta thought that her mosaic work portfolio meant that she ‘had a hard time competing with others’ for jobs. Berit, who had been a project manager in a university institute as well as having her own company, actually went bankrupt before becoming a collaboration manager for another, large public university. Some work simply did not get done as Nina said. Others complained about the attendant amount of admin they had to do, as every job entailed significant paperwork as well as multiplicities of meetings that nobody accounted for. Time management, as discussed by Ylijoki (2013), was also a significant, much-mentioned issue though from the perspective of servicing a multiplicity of demands and their sheer amount, rather than that of the acceleration of time per se. All the work demands could, then, quite simply not be treated in an equal way. And the impossibility of this could lead to academics not only abandoning some of their work but also, eventually and occasionally, leaving academe altogether. The academics in question were all desirable employees, often with very high levels of technology-related skills, but they frequently found themselves pushed to the limit.

Overall then, the effects recounted by the interviewees were largely described in terms of work-related impacts: failing to do or complete work, not giving enough time and attention to the work one had to do, the uneven distribution of self as resource, failure to complete projects, lack of time for recuperation, feeling disillusioned with work and seeking to leave academe. A systematic study exploring these effects in greater detail, including the health and career effects on those concerned, and their gendered dimensions is therefore highly desirable.

Reasons for work–work imbalances

The impact of higher education reforms on academia and academics in the Nordic countries, in particular restructuring and changing funding regimes, has been variously documented (Bégin-Caouette, Kalpazidou Schmidt, and Field 2017; Pinheiro, Geschwind, and Aarrevaara 2014; Pinheiro et al. 2019). The confluence of economic crises leading to reduced public funding for universities, a resultant greater competition for grants, and more demand by universities that academics generate external funding, on the one hand, and the technologization of universities on the other with a concomitant greater devolution of a diversity of tasks to academics, together with the ‘projectification’ of universities (Ylijoki 2015) has brought with it changes in university funding (Frølich et al. 2010). These changes from ‘input-based’ to ‘output-based’ or performance-based funding (Frølich et al. 2010) have resulted in a ‘culture shift in the Nordic countries’ (Bégin-Caouette, Kalpazidou Schmidt, and Field 2017, 795) where academic work including in the social sciences and humanities is increasingly dominated by fixed-term contracts, project funding, and restructuring designed to create ‘lean’ organizations (Balzer, Brodke, and Kizhakethalackal 2015; Cano, Murray, and Kourouklis 2020).

Unsurprisingly, funding issues and restructuring were frequently cited by my interviewees as explanations for their particular work situations. Those involved in multiple projects were not always principal investigators (PIs) in these and even if they were, had small percentages of their work time (the minimum was usually 10%, the maximum 50%) within the projects. This situation itself provoked the need to be part of multiple projects so as to make a living. Working in multiple projects often added up to much more than 100% work time: involvement in 15 or 20 projects, as was the case with Nina and Dirk, at the minimum of 10% still amounts to 150% or 200% of work time. It is obvious that this constitutes an impossible work situation. However, in Sweden neither institutions nor funders make any serious attempts to address this issue by, for example, requiring confirmation that the applicant actually has the time in their work schedule to do the research. Instead the ‘winner takes all’ syndrome in funding allocation prevails where ‘the same few researchers … obtain grants from multiple organizations, resulting in a '“fat-cat” syndrome’ (Bégin-Caouette, Kalpazidou Schmidt, and Field 2017) and impossible workloads. The assumption appears to be that successful funding applicants will ‘farm out’ work to others who will be employed in a temporary manner to pick up the slack, the ‘proxies’ Marta referred to. However, if one considers that the application was approved on the scientific and other merits of the grant holder, one has to wonder if this is appropriate. Farming out research in an ad hoc manner privatizes, at secondary level, research funding allocation by allowing successful applicants to do as they see fit – something that is inevitable when academics apply for grants even if they are already over-committed in terms of workload. At the same time it becomes a way of generating temporary, insecure employment.

Some implications of work–work imbalances: considerations for higher education institutions and research funders

The data above show that those who experience work-work balance issues suffer a variety of effects, including problems with time management in relation to the multiplicity of their concurrent demands; a lack of a sense of belonging as their distributed work-life fragments across time and space; issues with completing projects, tasks and jobs which are left undone; and feelings of under-performance even as people work ‘seventy-seventy’ or more on a vast range of collaborations. Although I did not ask about health and wellbeing, work-work balance issues may be one reason why the highest sickness absence rates in the Nordic countries, and particularly in Norway, Sweden and Finland, are in the ‘public administration, education, and health’ sector (Vester Thorsen et al. 2015, 20). The question both higher education institutions and research funders have to ask themselves is if this drive towards mosaic or portfolio careers is a productive, fair, efficient and effective use of public resources and of higher education workers. At present, at least in Sweden, many research funders do not have particularly stringent audit routines regarding the outcomes of projects. This is not invariably so in all Nordic countries or among all Nordic funders but it is quite common. If outcomes were more specifically followed up, the problems regarding non-completion of projects would become more evident. This might prompt funders to ask questions regarding, for example, the distribution of funds. Similarly, a proper audit of higher education workers’ workloads, currently in my experience only perfunctorily exercised, would surface the issue of the multiplicity of projects, roles and tasks that workers facing work-work balance issues are exposed to, and might make institutions re-think project, task and role distributions to enable workers to actually complete the work they are contracted to do and to intervene in the contracting of work beyond a reasonable workload limit. Research funders have an important role to play here: it could be argued that the over-allocation of research funds to individuals who have no time in their schedule to undertake the work not only places an inappropriate burden on those individuals but it is also not an appropriate distribution of research funds as such. This is because it deprives other researchers of gaining research funding in a context where such funding is already very competitive and because it abdicates funders’ responsibility for ensuring the best use of their funds. Short-term farming out of research to precarized junior staff is not a way of ensuring the best research results or best use of public funds. Additionally, there is the issue of generating a work culture where overwork, a sense of inadequacy among staff, and non-completion of work are a not uncommon occurrence. About forty percent of my interviewees talked about not completing projects or tasks. This cannot be desirable.

Future research

It is then necessary to undertake much more and more systematic research on the issue of the work-work balance. The first and possibly most obvious work is to find out quite how common the phenomenon discussed in this article is across higher education disciplines, institutions and countries. The research presented here was carried out within the parameters of a newly emerging area of higher education that remains under-institutionalized and is often positioned on the margins of mainstream academe, hence vulnerable (see Griffin 2019, 2021). Work-work balance issues as discussed here may therefore be particular to newly emerging fields of certain kinds. This remains to be explored. It also remains to be explored to what extent this is a specifically Nordic phenomenon, and to what extend it characterizes higher education more widely. I am mindful, for example, that in Mozambique where I have a project, many higher education workers have another, often main job, even though employed full-time at the university, through which they earn their living wage, since academics in that country are poorly paid. This impacts on, for example, academics’ actual presence in the university – it is ‘understood’ though not officially acknowledged that the frequent non-availability of academic staff in the university is ‘acceptably’ excused by their other, non-academic, private, income-generating activities. This is just one other version of what constitutes work-work balance problems which are likely to vary across high-, middle- and low-income countries.

Second, the four work-work balance scenarios discussed above (the 50/50 split; multiple concurrent project work; multiple simultaneous functional roles; role overload) may not exhaust the typology of such scenarios. More research needs to be undertaken to investigate this.

Third, much research remains to be undertaken to understand how funding regimes, institutional cultures and practices, and higher education policies impact on work–work balance concerns.

Fourth, the data above deal mainly with mid-career academics. The question, therefore, is whether the work-work balance issues addressed here are the same across the life cycle of an academic’s career, or change over that professional life course. There are also unresolved issues regarding the extent to which demographic patterns related to sex, age, partnership status, etc. play a role in the experiences reported here. Only men, for example, reported enjoying the multiplicity of projects they were engaged in. Further, overall more men (n = 8) than women (n = 6) raised work-work balance issues as a concern. What does that imply for women’s relation to their work? In other words, there is a question as to how gender impacts on work-work balance issues. And, of course, associated with that, there is the question of how work-work balance issues relate to work-life or work-family ones. But one thing is clear: work-work balance issues are a serious problem in academe.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by NordForsk [grant number 81520].

Notes

1 The colleague gave permission for me to use this quote by email on 20 January 2021 at 12:59.

2 See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-review-of-tef-report, accessed May 1, 2021.

3 See https://wasp-sweden.org, for Sweden, for example; https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/helsinki-centre-for-digital-humanities for Finland, and https://www.ntnu.edu/dariah/nordic-hub for Norway, accessed June 24, 2021.