ERIC Number: EJ727450
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2004
Pages: 5
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0190-2946
EISSN: N/A
The Entrepreneurial Adjunct
Hess, John
Academe, v90 n1 p37-41 2004
Increasingly, the higher education community is witnessing what the author calls the "entrepreneurial adjunct phenomenon": a kind of merchandising of the needs, concerns, and activities of faculty with short-term, often part-time, appointments that depend on factors like enrollment, budget, and program changes. These faculty members are called any number of things: adjuncts, part-timers, lecturers, non regulars, sessionals, and so on. The author calls them "contingent faculty" to draw attention to the most important aspect of their employment relationship: its tenuousness. A number of recent articles, e-mail postings, and Web sites have advocated an entrepreneurial approach to the experience of contingency, and have endorsed a commodification of contingency itself. To comprehend the entrepreneurial phenomenon, one needs to understand contingent faculty in their role as sellers of their knowledge, and skills as well as of their emotional and physical labor. The entrepreneurial approach sees contingent faculty as participants in a free market for academic labor.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Higher Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A