Conference Program

German academia is characterised by the widespread use of fixed-term and part-time employment, as well as by a growing number of staff categories beyond the traditional personnel structure. With non-fixed contracts almost only available for full professors, 80 per cent of non-professorial full-time academics overall and as many as 92 per cent of those under the age of 45 are employed on a fixed-term contract (Konsortium BuWiN 2021, p. 111). These fixed-term employment relationships, which are generally regulated by the Act on Temporary Academic Contracts (Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz, WissZeitVG), are frequently characterised by very short contract durations. More than half of the employment contracts concluded under the WissZeitVG have a duration of less than one year (Jongmanns 2011).

Although the WissZeitVG has increasingly been criticised by academics themselves, and media campaigns such as #ichbinhanna have gained public attention, academic staff in mid-level positions at universities remain largely dissatisfied with their employment conditions, particularly with regard to career predictability, opportunities for advancement and job security (Jaksztat et al. 2010, p. 16). Nevertheless, the effects of activism and protest remain limited. The number of academics who contest poor working conditions and even more poor employment conditions remains low due to low representational power.

The paper discusses this situation from two perspectives. First, drawing on my own research on precarity in academia (Graf, Keil and Ullrich 2020; Keil 2018, 2020), I show how academic culture in Germany is shaped by personal dependency, asceticism and contingency, fostering loyalty and endurance rather than collective voice. Structural and historical features of German academia, such as the high turnover of academic positions and the structure of union representation, further undermine political organising.

Second, based on my own experiences of mobilising academic staff within the sociological community, I outline how articulating political concerns conflicts with the ideal of academic asceticism and the subordinate position of non-professorial academic workers. In the absence of a collective identity as workers, solidarity tends to be rooted in shared suffering rather than in collective mobilisation. Moreover, political engagement may directly affect career prospects, as support from professorial staff is fragmented and precariousness is frequently processed as a biographical precondition for academic success.

The aim of the paper is to identify the challenges and structural barriers to the mobilisation of academic workers in Germany, to situate these challenges in an international comparative perspective, and to outline possible points of intervention for further action.