Academic casualisation and precarity: a scoping review
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
Worldwide there are significant and growing concerns about the increasing number of academics working on short-term contracts (referred to as adjunct faculty, contingent faculty, casual academics, sessionals, etc.). These concerns include working conditions and the consequences of casualised labour practices on higher education. However, the number of empirical studies that speak directly to these issues is relatively small. This scoping review, which is the first review of the experiences of contract academic staff, used Arksey and O’Malley’s methodology for a scoping review and used PRISMA guidelines. Twelve databases were searched, and 2507 records screened, leading to 71 empirical articles focusing on the experiences and perceptions of contract academics, including their ways of working, communications and interactions with universities, and the influence of precarity and marginalisation within higher education, generally. The findings show working on short-term contracts not only disrupts how academics conduct their day-to-day work, but also influences their expectations about academic work. Further, the findings indicate that precarity is differentially experienced, leading to greater inequality for some. Lastly, the findings point to disrupted workplace communications. The review highlights both practical issues for contract academic staff and broader concerns for the field of higher education.
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 | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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