Some days won’t end ever and some days pass on by
Workin for a Livin – Huey Lewis & The News
I’ll be working here forever, at least until I die
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t
I’m supposed to get a raise next week, you know damn well I won’t
So much of working life is about cycles. This is very evident in education with the pattern of the year. Depending on context— all sorts of things from career stage to how busy you are —the rate of repetition of that cycle can feel fast and slow, they can feel never ending or they pass on by. The phases of term can feel ‘new’ and it can feel like deja vu. The cycles of academic work and their apparent familiarity can be reassuring.
One of the many rituals of a point of ‘new’ beginning, of a year, a term or a project, is convening or attending meetings in which we have to (re)introduce ourselves and say something about who we are – which is, in a professional context like academia – inevitably about the work you do. The expression of identity in terms of a job is nothing new of course, there’s a reason we have so many surnames like Smith and Tailor. Even so, these moments can carry all sorts of subtext, both implied and imagined. Introductions can serve as ways to get to know people, they can connote an identifying of how we belong and they can be about asserting forms of authority. What unites all of those functions is the way in which we communicate how we are what we do.
Lots of the ways in which we make ourselves legible to others, in professional contexts, is by applying labels to ourselves. Sub-disciplinary labels, e.g. what ‘kind’ of ‘geographer’, theoretical or political commitments,—e.g. ‘left’, ‘post-‘ something, ‘critical’ or ‘radical’–and particular roles—e.g. ‘Chair’, ‘Associate’, ‘Pro-‘ or ‘Vice’ something, ‘Director of’ something—all freight various sorts of meanings for different audiences, within an institution, within wider academia and to non-academics. That legibility can be a source of pride and a source of anxiety; we are somebody with a title, what are we without?
How we identify ourselves as academics in relation to work and the ongoing wrestling with working ‘above and beyond’ for recognition, for impact and perhaps for self-affirmation carries the connotation that academic life as a form of vocation. If I had more time I would look up and read around studies of vocation and how people variously negotiate it, sadly, I don’t. Even so, while ‘vocation’ is a theologically laden term, it is noteworthy that sociology in particular and related disciplines (not least social policy and social work) have a history, dating at least to the time of Weber, of reflection on the study (teaching, learning and research) of social sciences as a form of vocation. If there is a ‘vocation’ in contemporary academia it is very much bound up with ‘career’, which is a pronounced divergence from the religious connotations of vocation.
Throughout this post I have used a plural pronoun, ‘we’, and yet much of what I have described is individual. There is an elusive (ongoing) play between ‘our’ and ‘my’ success. The kinds of work-based identity performance that I am suggesting here are, mostly, individualised. I think, there’s an interesting double bind to this: on the one hand many academics want recognition and they want to ‘succeed’ and, perhaps, feel part of ‘successful’ departments and institutions (with varying meanings, measures and values of ‘success’); on the other hand: the systems for recognition, the associated metrics, roles and awards, are all geared towards individuals. We (some of us) want to work in stimulating collective research ‘environments’ (in the language of the REF) with colleagues but are encouraged and incentivised to compete with those same colleagues.
Vocation can be thought otherwise. Not necessarily in grandiose terms, but perhaps in an ordinary sense – there are, of course, many different ways to make contributions to knowledge, across the full gamut of activities that academics do. ‘My’ success need not be at the expense of ‘yours’.
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Ironically, this post has taken three separate attempts at writing due to all of the other things going on relating to the ‘start of term’, which seems to spread further into the term now than ever. So much changes to apparently remain the same.