Policy Press

Sociology, sociologists and their time

Higheredjobs.com is a US-based website that advertises work at universities around the world. It publishes advertisements for employment in eacademic, administrative and executive roles across all disciplines. Most of these advertisements come from universities in the USA, but a wide range of international postings can also be found. As such, higheredjobs.com offers useful indications as to the state of the international academic job market. Taking this into account, consider the following advertisement for a position in sociology at Leeds University in the UK. Published on January 2, 2020 and online for two weeks after this date, the advertisement reads as follows:

Location: Leeds - Main Campus
Faculty/Service: Faculty of Business
School/Institute: Leeds University Business School
Grade: Grade 7
Salary: £33,797 to £40,322 p.a. pro rata
Working Time: 25% of full-time equivalent
Contract Type: Fixed Term (for 6 months due to funding)
Reference: LUBSC1456  

Are you an ambitious researcher looking for your next challenge? Do you have a research background in employment or industrial relations, sociology of work, sociology of social inequaities [sic] or other fields related to work and employment? Do you have an interest in platform work? Do you want to further your career in one of the UK's leading research intensive Universities?

The Centre for Employment Relations Innovation and Change (CERIC) is a leading research centre investigating the changing nature of work and employment and employment relations. It houses a critical mass of internationally regarded researchers that produce intellectually challenging work with genuine policy and practitioner impact. CERIC is looking for a research assistant to support Dr. Vera Trappmann in her research with labour protest among academics in Germany and the UK.   

To explore the post further or for any queries you may have, please contact:
Dr Vera Trappmann
Tel: +44 (0)113 343 1119; email: V.Trappmann@leeds.ac.uk”

What is concerning here is the obvious and striking contradiction between the substance of the academic work to be conducted by the prospective employee and the terms of employment on offer. The new researcher at Leeds University will participate in sociological research on labour relations and, specifically, labour protests at British and German universities, at a time when stable academic employment is increasingly scarce, earning a living as an academic is increasingly difficult, and short-term and part-time contracts are becoming an increasingly important source of employment for academics across increasingly long spans of their careers (1, 2, 3). However, the terms of employment on offer entail short-term work of only half a year, at a salary that will amount to only one quarter of a full-time wage.

This is what is meant by ‘precarious employment’ – work that lasts for only short period of time and that does not yield a salary sufficient for daily life, let alone long-term planning for the future. In the UK, such employment is not uncommon for academics after the completion of their doctorates. Previously, perhaps until some point in the 2000s, a doctorate was seen as a point of entry into a long-term academic career, and PhD graduates might expect that they would transition from their doctoral studies into a lectureship, with perhaps one or two years of postdoctoral research in between. This is no longer so – British universities today graduate far more talented scholars with PhDs than could possibly find stable academic employment. The result is that many of these scholars will need to get by for long periods of time on precarious employment of the sort described above, often working in multiple teaching jobs in different and far-away locations at the same time (1, 2, 3). Such working patterns will in turn diminish these scholars changes of ever finding regular, stable, long-term work as lecturers, as they will have little time and few opportunities to do research, to publish, to acquire research funding, and to pursue all the other markers of scholarly accomplishment that are required for appointment as a lecturer. In other words, those who do not immediately find stable employment after earning their doctorates risk falling farther and farther behind their peers who do. In addition, academics do not compete with each other for jobs on a level playing field, according to the scholarly merit, however defined, of their work. Inequalities, for example of race, ethnicity, nationality, and gender, persist, with significant consequences for who gets jobs, who keeps jobs, and so forth (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).

Why should this matter to you as a sociology student? It should matter because the pattern of precarity, competition, and intense stratification of opportunities sketched above extends to contemporary academic sociology, both in the UK and in many other academic systems around the world. It has significant consequences for how you are taught, who you are taught by, and what you are taught about. For example, the under-representation of scholars from non-white ethnic groups at universities and the barriers the anti-immigrant hostile environment entails for foreign academics seeking to come to and remain in the UK might have significant consequences for British sociology: it might become more parochial, less concerned with international, rather than local British, social developments, and less interested in topics such as, say, the implications of colonialism, empire, and post-colonialism for societies around the world.

The ‘big point’ to be taken from this is that sociological ideas, themes, concepts, theories, and areas of enquiry, in any one place and at any one point in time, are defined by who gets do sociology, within the institutional constraints and inequalities of their time and location. Just as sociological labour today may be unequal and exclusionary, inequalities have defined sociology across its history. In order to make full sense of sociology, you also need to become a sociologist of sociology.


Further reading

We have discussed this issue in further detail in chapter 10 of Imagining Society.


Task

  1. Explore the biography of the German sociologist Georg Simmel. How was his sociological work affected by the social inequalities of his time?

  2. Look up the names of early, ‘classic’ sociologists in any one sociology textbook and draw up a list. Most likely, this list while predominantly comprise male sociologists. If so, what might be some of the reasons for this? In order to answer this question, you will need to do some further reading and background research of your own.