Navigating an Academic Career in Marketized Universities: Mapping the International Literature

Abstract

Over the past two decades, debates surrounding the marketization of higher education worldwide have intensified. The impact it is having specifically on academics and their careers is less well documented, but enough literature has emerged to certainly warrant a review. To investigate the topic, a systematic literature review was conducted to examine the implications of the increased marketization of higher education on academic careers. This secondary research reviewed 54 documents that included both theoretical contributions and empirical findings from 21 different national contexts. Our findings indicate that academic careers are affected on at least two levels: first, on a material level, career structures have undergone a progressive precarization, marked by an increase in temporary contracts and part-time jobs; and second, on an ideological level, in which fatalistic narratives such as “there is no other way out of the neoliberal game” appear to be prevalent. Our findings suggest that key collective and political aspects of academics’ careers may have become depoliticized through the individualistic “careerist strategies” they are encouraged to embrace to survive in an academic career.