To Plan or Not to Plan? Anticipating Agency in Academic Competitions

Postdocs are caught in the limbo of temporary work contracts and high-performance expectations of academic organizations. Our paper investigates how they make sense of this particular career stage. Specifically, our study examines how postdocs plan future activities and career steps in the absence of tangible prospects. We therefore draw on a full qualitative interview panel of 45 postdoctoral researchers in particle physics and modern history employed in German research institutions. By focusing on the temporal orientations engrained in the decision-making process of postdocs, we contribute a novel and processual perspective on the precarity and meaningfulness of academic work. We find that postdocs’ career narratives are structured by the temporalities of different forms of organized academic competition: On the one hand, the temporal horizon against which postdocs make sense of their career is adapted to both the average length of employment contracts at the postdoc stage and to the funding cycles of the grants that are crucial to secure postdocs’ employment. On the other hand, narratives about the agency that postdocs claim to have for their career are not related to any academic activities per se, but geared toward competitions for publications, funding, and jobs.