Paying dearly for privilege: conceptions, experiences and temporalities of vocation in academic life

Abstract

This paper explores the forms of lived time that characterise a vocational relationship to academic work. Drawing on interviews and surveys with over 30 academics who have left the profession early or have given up looking for ongoing academic work, it paints a portrait of vocationalism as a double-edged sword. The research found that despite widespread disaffection and disillusionment, academics overwhelmingly consider their profession to be a ‘vocation’. A vocational relation to work implicates temporality and embodiment in particular ways. Vocation is, as David T. Hansen argues, not merely an attitude, idea or feeling of commitment, but a mode of being enacted through practice. It relies on big temporalities (legacies from the past; visions of a collective future) and on particular configurations of lived time (or what Sarah Sharma calls ‘temporal architectures’). It typically produces a sense of purpose, meaning and satisfaction, while also being open to exploitation by managers.

Keywords:

• Vocation
• calling
• academic labour
• university
• temporality
• time

Notes

1. I am grateful to Tai Peseta for the invitation that prompted this research and for her assistance with recruitment. Thanks also to Karen-Anne Wong for assistance with interviews, and to Julie-Ann Robson for technical assistance and other support. Interviews were carried out with ethics approval from the University of Sydney. My sincere thanks to all participants and to the many others who offered but were not included.

2. There has been a revival in this scholarship of the word ‘calling’, presumably to differentiate it from the other meaning of vocational as related to employment.

3. This is not to say it is totally absent. The double-edged and exploitative nature of vocation was a central point of Bunderson and Thompson’s 2009 study of zoo-keepers. Duffy and Dik also mention it in their meta-study, noting that some scholars of vocation have explored the ‘dark side of calling’ (2013, 433). But the psychological literature that I have seen tends to proffer such critiques as an aside. Hagmaier and Abele, for example, mention the possible thwarting of a sense of vocation in just one sentence, with a parenthetical list of ‘external or internal constraints’ (2015, 369) that may prevent a person from living out their calling.

4. Unfortunately this has to remain as an empirically untested concern. As I have noted elsewhere (forthcoming), this study was conceived as a very small-scale exploration, so I did not set out with any recruitment or interview parameters that might test or reveal empirical propositions about just who is leaving the academy.

5. I myself left a permanent academic job many years ago, with no inkling of what I was going to do next. When I told a colleague that I had just resigned, his immediate response was ‘You could go back and tell them you’ve changed their mind. It’s not too late’.