Det mätbara arbetslivet i laboratoriet

Abstract

Today’s publishing system with H-index and Impact Factors has made it easier to measure research productivity and working life in academia. This article investigates the consequences of this measurability and competition for PhD-students that work in a biomedical research group. The ethnographic material is interviews with seven Swedish PhD-students that were employed in various research groups at the same university. They were all women between 25 to 30 years old. The central questions for the article are how do the PhD-students relate to measurability and competition in working life? But the article also discusses what the PhD-students experiences can say about the measurable working life more generally? Those PhD-students that criticizes the measurability of the publishing system, also seems to create other experiences of the working life than those PhDstudents that accept the competition. For the latter group, the “entrepreneurial self ” can be used as a summary term describing the specific experiences developed within the scientific laboratory. The “entrepreneurial self ” is an individual that is future-oriented and constantly strives to do more to claim his or her position within the academia. Today’s publishing system risks preclude those individuals that are driven by other goals and visions.