Cruel Optimism and Precarious Employment: The Crisis Ordinariness of Academic Work
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Cruel Optimism and Precarious Employment: The Crisis Ordinariness of Academic Work Kate Daisy Bone1 Received: 14 October 2019 / Accepted: 18 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Precarious employment is commonplace within the University-as-business model. Neoliberal and New Public Management agendas have influenced widespread insecurity, and limited career progression pathways within academic work. Qualitative multi-case data inform this investigation of how young academic workers cope with, and justify, their precarious situations in a large Australian university. This article introduces the notion of cruel optimism to analyse the unethical exploitation of desires of precariously employed academics. This analytical engagement extends empathetic engagement with the lived experiences and rationalisations of precariously employed academic workers, paying homage to their desires and negotiations. Findings demonstrate that participants were heavily invested in working towards achieving their good life fantasy which encompassed secure employment and the recognition this provided. Cruel optimism operated as participants developed coping mechanisms to deal with the ongoingness of their troubling situation as precarious workers uncertain how to change their precarious circumstances. Participants experienced cruel optimism as they navigated through issues of identity, control, and desire, related to their present and future lives as academic workers experiencing an impasse of crisis ordinariness. Optimism directed towards the academic scene of desire motivated participants’ daily actions and informed their understandings. Ethical elements of the impasse of precarious employment are presented in relation to the neoliberal and New Public Management-oriented University context. This article provides a novel conceptualisation of how precarious employment contributes to a relation of cruel optimism among workers by highlighting how organisations exploit the desires of insecure employees for extended periods of time, contributing to an impasse of crisis ordinariness. Keywords Australia · Cruel optimism · Higher education · Identity · Neoliberal · Precarious employment · Qualitative
Introduction The higher education sector has experienced neoliberal capitalist challenges and one consequence of this is reflected in New Public Management (NPM) reforms within academia (Dougherty and Natow 2019). As the academic profession becomes increasingly underpinned by market-driven values and pressures, employees are subjected to efficiency, quality accountability and other business-oriented and corporatisation changes (Allmer 2018; Klenk and Reiter 2019). Part of this has resulted in an increasingly precarious academic workforce. * Kate Daisy Bone [email protected] 1
School of Management/Te Kāhui Kahurangi, Massey University, North Shore, Private Bag 102904, Auckland 0745, New Zealand
This article specifically explores how neoliberal and NPM reforms, leading to a lack of reliability about ways of living a
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