“We Shouldn’t Let Academia Exhaust Ourselves Anymore!” : Pandemic Practices and the Changing Psychological Contract in Twenty-First-Century Academia

Abstract

This chapter explores how academics construe the relationship between work and their universities during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The data consist of several rounds of semi-structured group interviews, conducted on Zoom with three groups of academics based in Europe and North America. The first group consisted of four early-career academics, the second group of a mixture of both early-career and established researchers, and the third group of three established academics. Drawing on the concepts of responsive and adaptive pandemic practices, we analyse individual responses to both short- and long-term institutional practices of universities. We utilise the notion of academic psychological contract to specifically focus on the micro-level constituents of academics’ relationships with their work and their university. Based on our analysis, we argue that academics’ reactions to their universities’ pandemic practices were, on the one hand, marked by disillusionment, frustration, and conflict, and on the other hand, by feelings of contentment and satisfaction, being cared for and caring for people.