CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Gursel, Emir |
|---|---|
| Title | Precarization in Turkish Academia and Scientific Field: A Comparative Case of Research Strategies of Academics in Social Sciences |
| Summary | A considerably sizeable body of research has highlighted neoliberalism’s effects on universities and production of knowledge, emphasizing the proliferation of the university-industry relationships. Although the previous works have documented the changes in the research practices in a highly meaningful manner, they have not touched upon several elements. Firstly, they do not investigate how the new regime of precarious work that was brought about by neoliberalism affect knowledge production of academics. Secondly, social sciences are left out in these debates largely. Lastly, the rather top-down, macro approach does not pay much attention to internal logics and structures of science as a space – namely, scientific field. In this work, I try to take a step further by doing a comparative research between the social sciences departments of the two types of universities in Turkey. First type is the ‘elite’, American universities that focuses on institutional accumulation of scientific capital, whereas the second type is the ‘non-elite’ universities whose institutional aims and strategies are more oriented towards profit making through extraction of surplus from academics’ immaterial labor. Precarious work being both present in these universities, the research of the academics with high volumes of scientific capital in the elite universities, I argue, are affected the most by precarity, as their research dispositions are reconciled with strategies of hedging risks. In the non-elite universities, however, precarious work prepares the conditions for ensuring research dispositions of the academics with low scientific capital to be put into action. |
| Supervisor | Ju Li, Violetta Zentai |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/gursel_emir.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University