PHD Thesis – the source of precariousness or a strategy to limit it?

Abstract

The trend of limiting employment at universities with a parallel increase in the number of doctoral students significantly reduced their employment prospects. At the same time, the non-academic labour market, where many of them try to anchor, does not offer much of stability.

In the article I focus on the ways PhD students cope with the challenge of balancing academic activities with work and personal life in the context of uncertainty and insecurity of the academic and non-academic labour markets. I attempt to analyse the mutual conditioning between these experiences and the motivations and strategies of the interviewees. I treat the experience of PhD students as an example of problems and tensions related to work in the new capitalism, referring to the concepts proposed by Guy Standing (work and labour insecurity, work for labour) and Luc Boltański and Eve Chiapello (activity as a key feature of a new capitalist man).

The empirical basis of the article is biographical narrative interviews with PhD students of humanities and social sciences as well as technical faculties at the university.