The Future that is my Present : Temporariness and Insecurity in Swedish Academia

Sammanfattning: This thesis explores the question of what it means to be a temporary academic worker in the business studies discipline in Sweden. It presents how academics’ temporariness translates into insecurity and how they respond to it. The research is conducted using an open design, reflexive framework, and an abductive approach. It offers a narrative presentation of the lived experiences of temporariness and a critical interpretation of the multiplicity of the translation of those experiences into insecurity, as well as the responses to it. The rich empirical narrative offers a glimpse into the variety of lived experiences of the temporary academic workers and the multitude of opportunities for social action. It advances an understanding of the relationship of different individual, collective, organisational, and professional aspects with the lived experience of temporariness and temporariness as insecurity and as precarious work. It is argued that temporary academic work can be experienced as job field insecurity – the concern of involuntary exit from the professional field that is fuelled by challenges to professional identity, membership, and organisational citizenship; epistemic uncertainty; social and financial uncertainty, lack of alternatives; and the permeating imperatives for individual responsibility, self-improvement, and forward-living. The work discusses different ways in which the subjectivities of insecurity are navigated. It is argued that temporary academic work can be experienced as precarious work in certain circumstances, but also that some elements of the profession can be invoked in order to challenge precarious subjectivities.