Vägar till och från akademin

Fostran till forskare i humaniora och samhällsvetenskap

Abstract

The governmental efforts to increase collaboration between society and the university have hardly brought any multitude of research-trained scholars to the labor market outside of the higher education system. Many scholars in social science and the humanities express a will to convey their knowledge and their work to the general public and to society at large. Nevertheless, they spend almost all of their working hours inside the academy and they also tend to affirm the value of intellectual work for its own sake. Taking the point of departure in a large number of interviews with young scholars, I intend to demonstrate how ties of loyalty to the academy are formed in social science and the humanities as an outcome of the conditions of the labour market and of an academic socialization distinguished by recognition. The difficulty to cultivate an instrumental attitude towards intellectual work implies that any wish to enter the labor market outside of the academy that may occur tend to be caused by disappointment with the academy rather than by the call of sirens.