‘Luck, chance, and happenstance?Perceptions of success and failure amongst fixed‐term academic staff inUKhigher education’

Abstract

What does it mean to attribute success to 'luck', but failure to personal deficiency? In 2015/16, more than 34 per cent of academic employees in UK higher education institutions were employed on temporary contracts, and the sector itself has undergone a substantial transformation in recent years in terms of expansion, measurement, and marketization. Based on two waves of interviews conducted with fixed-term academic employees at different career stages, the article explores the narrativization of success and failure amongst staff working at the 'sharp end' of the so-called neoliberal academy. Arguing that precarious employment situations precipitate the feeling of being 'out of control', the majority of the participants' narratives were characterized by a distinct lack of agency. The paper explores the recourse to notions of chance and the consolidation of 'luck' as an explanatory factor in accounting for why good things happen; however, in tandem with this inclination is the tendency to individualize failure when expectations have been thwarted. While accounts of fixed-term work are suffused with notions of chance and fortune, 'luck' remains an under-researched concept within sociology. The article thus concludes by considering what the analysis of 'luck' might offer for a fuller, politicized understanding of processes at work in the contemporary academy.

A Sociology of Luck

“…Other published discussions of luck are difficult to find. With the exception of a recent study (Loveday 2018) demonstrating how one tenuous labor market encourages those who find employment to attribute their success to luck, there is an absence of qualitative studies of luck. Although there are prominent surveys, including the World Values Survey and the General Social Survey, that ask respondents about their perceptions of the causes of inequality and include luck on lists of potential factors to be rated, luck is only discussed in a few articles that analyze these data and, even then, only in passing.…”

The composition of precarity: ‘emerging’ composers’ experiences of opportunity culture in contemporary classical music

“…Loveday describes the use of ‘luck’ as a narrative by early career academics in making sense of their experiences of the job selection process (Loveday, ). In her research she finds that those on fixed‐term contracts put their successes down to pure luck, while their failures they put down to personal deficiencies and lack.…”

Precarious Academics: Information Practices and Challenges

“…Within academe casualization has typically been examined as a systemic issue (e.g., Gill, 2014;Giroux, 2014), lacking empirical explorations of the phenomenon from the perspective of those most directly affected -contract academic staff. Some researchers have begun to explore these academics' experiences empirically, notably in Australia (e.g., Brown et al, 2010;Kimber & Erich, 2015;Klopper & Power, 2014) and recently in the UK (Jones & Oakley, 2018;Locke et al, 2018;Loveday, 2017;. This research will address the deficiency of empirical research in the Canadian context, providing a systematic examination of the lived experiences of contract academic staff, focussing on casualization, and accounting for systemic and contextual factors of the Canadian higher education sector.…”