Conference Program

Across contemporary higher education, time has become a central site of governance (Gibbs et al., 2014). Universities are increasingly organized through accelerated evaluation cycles, deadline-driven reporting, project-based funding, and metricized performance targets (Ylijoki, 2016). These arrangements do not only redistribute workloads; they also reshape the temporal grammars through which academic work is imagined as good or successful: what counts as timely productivity, what horizons are deemed realistic, and which rhythms of inquiry are rendered legitimate or inefficient. In this sense, temporal pressures operate as normative prescriptions that become naturalized in everyday routines, making contestation difficult while subtly reconfiguring research autonomy, the conditions of teaching quality, and the balance between intellectual work and administrative compliance.

To capture this temporal restructuring, the paper introduces the concept of temporal paradigm, defined as a patterned set of representations, values, and practices through which actors orient themselves in time and coordinate action under institutional constraints. Rather than treating temporalities as either abstract cultural frames or purely behavioral time-use patterns, the temporal paradigm conceptualizes how temporal norms are internalized and enacted: how time is cognitively represented, how it is practically managed, and how actors hierarchize and orient past, present, and future. Operationally, the construct is specified as multidimensional. The statutory dimension concerns cognitive representations of time and beliefs about its genesis. The conative dimension captures concrete time-management practices, including time monitoring, pace of life, planning ability, and the distribution of time across daily activities. The value dimension captures time horizon and time perspective, highlighting the relative salience and hierarchical ordering of past, present, and future in orienting action and planning.

Methodologically, the study draws on an original survey of professors and fixed-term researchers in Italian universities. Using the public national registry of academic staff, a randomized typological–factorial sample (N = 1,056) was designed to capture heterogeneity across roles and institutional contexts. The questionnaire includes item batteries for each sub-dimension of the temporal paradigm. The dimensional structure is assessed through scale construction and consistency checks, followed by cluster analysis to identify robust groupings of temporal paradigms.

Results identify eight temporal profiles. Four clusters related to the statutory and value orientation dimension emerged in the first analysis. In a second step, four other clusters were identified by considering only the conative dimension. Across profiles, time distribution is pivotal: many academics report the erosion of temporal boundaries and a strong absorption of working time by administrative and bureaucratic demands. More regulated profiles tend to allocate a higher share of working hours to research and a comparatively lower share to teaching, especially among fixed-term researchers whose career prospects are closely tied to research output. Overall, the findings suggest a transition toward accelerated, heterogeneous academic temporalities (Vostal, 2016), producing uneven adaptive strategies and heightened risks of short-termism and “time-eating” work cultures, particularly among younger academics (Berg & Seeber, 2016). As a long-term consequence, it could threaten the quality of future research and teaching (Connell, 2019).