Symbolic spaces in dirty work: academic service as authentic resistance

Abstract

Drawing from in-depth ethnographic interviews conducted at anResearch on the occupation of university professors regularly yields two findings: professors love their job, and they love to complain about it (e.g. Blackburn and Lawrence 1995;Bowen and Schuster 1986;Clark 1987). Nevertheless, such research only tells a partial story. Whenever professors research their own work and occupational structure they tend to view themselves as either researchers or teachers, but hardly as bureaucrats or administrators. Yet, service and governance are important components of professors' work.Through their institutional governance faculty members contribute to the smooth running of universities and their departments. Faculty members are in charge of numerous administrative activities individually and collectively, in large part due to the highly abstract and specialized nature of academic work, which requires the expertise of insiders. Institutional governance tasks for example include the hiring, firing, and promotion of faculty members, departmental policy-making, consulting with the administration on long and short term plans, organizing instruction, communicating with students, alumni, and administration through cabinets, senate committees, councils, and task forces, conducting commencement and other ceremonies, contributing to innumerable extra-curricular activities, organizing campus life and much more. Due to the very nature of professorial work, faculty members are also often asked to perform service for the public in different ways. These may include testifying in judicial courts in the role of specialists, addressing citizen groups, appearing on mass media, delivering health care, collaborating with administrative and legislative local, state, and federal units, providing artistic, cultural, and recreational activities and services, consulting with businesses or interest groups and organizations, working as anonymous reviewers for academic publications, volunteering the governance of professional associations, and meeting a vast number of social needs (Bowen and Schuster 1986: 14-24).¹ Despite the importance of service and the amount of occupational time professors dedicate to it, much of our knowledge on

The Authenticity of Self: Conceptualization, Personal Experience, and Practice

“…2006, 2007). What that study reveals is that self‐meanings are constantly changing across individual biographies (Vannini 2007), as a reflection of transition from social position to social position such as when professors earn tenure (Vannini 2006), and in light of the need to surrender battles in the long term for the sake of long‐term goal achievement (Vannini 2008). Vannini's study also shows us many university professors understand the practices, conventions, and expectations of academic work as something which they have either embraced or contributed to shaping and that therefore acting in accordance to these values does not necessarily contradict self‐values (also see Erickson 1995; Rosenberg 1979).…”