Academic Capitalism and Precarity in the Neoliberal University: Job Insecurity and Stress in Two Liberal Market Economies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This study analyses the relationship between academic capitalism and employment precarity. Drawing on two cross‐national sources of survey data, we compare academics' experiences with job insecurity and related stress in Australian and Canadian universities during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Although these two countries are similar liberal market economies, Australian higher education has embraced academic capitalism to a greater extent than in Canada. Against this backdrop, our study focuses on the moderating role of ‘soft income’ from international tuition fees and the use of contingent labour in explaining cross‐country differences. We find that international tuition played a role in heightening job insecurity and associated stress, particularly in the Australian universities due to their greater reliance on this source of income. However, these outcomes converged for ‘permanent’ and ‘casual’ academics in Australia but diverged in Canada. We contend that the cross‐national differentiation is likely due to the weaker job protections afforded to permanent academics in Australia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".