“Assistant Professor with an Asterisk”: Conflicting Tensions in the Workplace Experiences and Professional Identities of University Faculty on Fixed-Term Contracts
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Drawing on identity work theory and social capital theory, this qualitative study explores how Canadian university faculty on fixed-term contracts construct their professional identities in response to the opportunities and limitations associated with their employment. Study participants generally appreciate their remuneration, relative professional autonomy, the control they have over the products of their labour, and the opportunity to teach at the postsecondary level. Positive aspects of their employment, however, were undercut by various professional limitations. These limitations include job precarity, little acknowledgment of their contributions to their fields or to their universities, limited access to research funding, and the challenge of building bonding (i.e., intra-institutional) social capital. The perceived disconnect between participants’ professional qualifications and the precarity of their employment situation further undermines their ability to cultivate positive professional identities. Participants negotiate the contradictory tensions of their employment via one or more of the following adaptive strategies: 1) pursuing research as best they can given prevailing obstacles; 2) making teaching the focal point of their professional identities; and 3) utilizing bridging social capital to create opportunities and forge connections beyond the university. Future research directions are discussed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it