Suchergebnisse

A multitude of research studies have provided an important shift away from classic perspectives of why women are prone to encounter significant hurdles in the advancement of their scientific or academic careers, and why "leaky pipelines" are of the order in many scientific fields (SSH/STEM). Instead of presuming that professional trajectories are shaped purely by "subjective factors" of women that lead to a kind of auto-elimination, by opting for something else rather than a scientific career (maternity, family life, following their spouses to another country for his job, etc.) (Beaufays and Krais, 2005:52/53; Grant et al., 2000), the attention has been drawn to looking at research institutions as gendered organisations (Acker, 1990), that translate the social division of work between the sexes in distinctive ways in the practice of scientific work. We would like to underpin the approach that examining gender in the making can contribute to researching science in the making and questioning the norms of science and scientific careers (from Beaufays and Krais, 2005). We argue that these norms are shaped by discourses (Fairclough, 2009; Kuhn, 2006), in the sense of référentiels (Muller, 2006), that are both constructing and constructed by actors' (both womens' and mens') hierarchical articulation, in a process of sense making (Weick, 1995) and referencing of an array of discursive ressources (Kuhn, 2006) in their everyday professional and personal/family lives, which constitutes an important form of identity work (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998; Jenkins, 1996; Kuhn, 2006). This sensemaking (Weick, 1995) process, we argue shapes institutional practices and feeds on, as much as from discourses in the different research locales (Pred, 1990; Keenoy & Oswick, 2003) or local orders (Friedberg, 1997). Amongst others, one fundamental issue to be tackled is that there is still prevalent in today's postindustrial society a "myth of separate worlds" (Kanter, 1977), and an out-dated symbolic and pratical persistance of the "bread-winner" and "carer" models (despite important shifts in the dynamics of family roles and constellations), which is also present in the university environment. In the context of a precarity of jobs, of the high demands for a competitive game and an accent upon hyper-productivity, this does not create identitical spatio-temporal agency for researchers (Fusulier & Rio del Carral, 2012). Moroever, the enrolment in "greedy institutions" (Coser, 1974), such as research/academia but also the family, is on voluntary basis (Hermanowicz, 1998; Grant et al., 2000), and the nature of scientific/academic work has its or should be having its own unique mission and orientations (Stengers, 2011), albeit shaped by today's changing public and political discourses (Musselin, 2005). Our hypotheses regarding these enrolments are that there are important tensions as much between a) different discourses of demands from the postdoctoral phase and demands of entering a permanent (tenured) position at a given European university, and b) different discourses of demands in family/private life and demands of the professional scientific/academic career. In this paper, we propose a conceptual approach and an empirical application in the Belgian french-speaking institutional context, that tests these hypotheses and has four aims; A) examining what kind of discursive ressources researchers, in the early stages of their scientific/academic careers (after obtaining PhDs and before obtaining a tenured position), use to articulate their professional and private lives; B) how these actors (both women and men) hierarchically use, negotiate and prioritize an array of discursive ressources (Kuhn, 2006); C) if there are and if yes, what kind of gendered logics and dynamics exist in this identity work and finally D) how does this articulation contribute in shaping today's practice of scientific/academic work and mission of research institutions. Bibliography Acker, J. (1990) Hierarchies, jobs, and bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. Gender & Society, 4:139-58. Beaufaÿs, S. et Krais, B. (2005) « Femmes dans les carrières scientifiques en Allemagne : les mécanismes cachés du pouvoir », Travail, genre et sociétés, 2005/2 No 14, p. 49-68 Coser, L. A. (1974) Greedy Institutions: Patterns of Undivided Commitment. New York: Free Press. Fairclough, N. (1995) Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language, London: Longman Fusulier, B., Del Rio Carral, M., 2012. Chercheur-e-s sous haute tension !. Presses de l'université de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve. Grant, L., Kennelly, I. And Ward, K.B. (2000) Revisiting the Gender, Marriage, and Parenthood Puzzle in Scientific Careers, Women's Studies Quarterly, 28 (1/2), pp. 62-85 Kanter R.M. (1977) Men and Women of the Corporation. Basic Books, New York. Kuhn, T. (2006). A "demented work ethic" and a "lifestyle firm": Discourse, identity, and workplace time commitments. Organization Studies 27, 1339–1358. Weick, K. (1995) Sensemaking in Organizations. SAGE Publications: Thousand Oaks, California