Negotiating successful academic careers in South African Higher Education Institutions

Abstract

The study examines the ways in which individuals in the pursuit of an academic career produce subjectivities which allow for a greater sense of academic identity. It highlights the complex process of becoming an academic by examining the conditions of possibility and the dynamics of such a process. The study is based on case studies of selected South African universities with a focus on academic staff members, including junior and senior lecturers, professors, head of departments and deans of faculties which were interviewed. The study adopted a constructionist perspective to grasp experiences in becoming an academic as a process of self-making and being within a context through particular discourses and discursive practices on academic careers. Thus, the central argument of the study is that despite some progress in changing the demographics of academic staff employment, limited change has taken place in the domain of institutional culture and the academic environment, which remain highly constraining to the pursuit of academic careers by black academics. The study argues that, under such circumstances, central to the successful pursuit of academic careers by black academics have been their initiative, efforts and imagination, or put differently, the role of their individual and collective agency in navigating through complex and alienating environments. This has been possible insofar as they have been able to generate conducive subjectivities for a greater sense of academic identity. Based on the emerging theoretical insights, the domain of the construction of academic identity with reference to subjectivity and agency is an area that still requires considerable research. The study is exploratory in the sense that it leaves many insights unanswered. This implies that these insights warrant deeper research in order to provide further clarity. Thus, the issue of subjectivity requires further research since academic staff rely significantly on agency in order for them to survive. Further studies about the
reframing of structural factors are required to reduce the burden on these individuals. Since most studies focus on structural elements, in this case, we realized that these structural elements are so overwhelming that the academic staff survive through conducive subjectivity and agency.

Keywords: Subjectivity, agency, identity, discourses, discursive practices