Flexible and fixed times working in the academy

摘要

In the daily practice of the academy, it seems to me one thing is increasingly the terrain of dispute, anxiety and stress. Time. Colleagues want more time to research, do not have enough time to read, are working too much of their time, cannot fit the job into the time available, cannot spend enough time with students who need them, have to spend too much time with students who do not appreciate them, get riled by parents who assume they have long vacation times, and so on. The litany is familiar and long. I was prompted to reflect a bit more specifically on what is going here by a couple of events arising from structural developments in the British university system. Firstly as part of 'transparency audits', I had to do my annual time-use survey exercise. This records broad headings of activities so the university can allocate overhead costs on research and teaching. It is a simple post hoc exercise of dubious reliability, but one that tries very hard to talk in proportions of time rather than total amounts. Second, my university has just managed to implement a national staff-regrading structure agreed, after some acrimony, two years ago across all British universities. All jobs were reevaluated, from porter to professor, measured against a variety of skills, and placed on one grand scheme of job categories. This July, one month before the final deadline allowed in the national agreement, my institution managed to send out the notices of our new gradings and related conditions of employment. The portion of the conditions that struck me was the brevity with which it could detail expectations of work for academics. Unlike complex formulae and discussions for hourly paid staff, for academics it mandates: "a nominal working week of 35 hours per week, [where] the hours and days are not strictly defined as it is expected that employees on these grades will manage their own time to ensure that all duties and responsibilities are fully completed, where this involves additional time either at work or away from the workplace no enhanced rates of pay will apply." On the face of it, this seems not merely a typical statement of being a salaried employee but the sort of positive flexible arrangement many employees in other sectors would crave. So why then is there all the angst? Part of the answer is in the combination with the definition of the duties and responsibilities that must be "fully completed". So as I am in an 'old' university, my contract defines these as "such teaching, research and administration as the Vice-Chancellor or Chair of Board of Studies may from time to time specify". So between these two phrases, we are presented with the ambiguity and flexibility of academic time: an open-ended set of tasks and an indeterminate time period. I want to use some reflection on the temporalities of academic work to raise issues that perhaps speak to other forms of work and indeed to how we need to think through temporalities.