Conceptualising Academic Time

This paper addresses the concept of academic time through the changing temporal aspects of scientific work and academia. Asking how changes to the higher education sector around the world shape the profession of political science, we employ a concept of ‘academic time’. While time in the academy has been traditionally measured by tasks an academic performs (i.e. research, teaching, and service), its allocation is increasingly complex as requests for today’s academic labour grow from within and beyond the university. For scholars, these requests can range from what appears to be routine and associated with university corporatisation to field-specific expertise with potentially powerful implications. What different modalities of academic time can be identified? What are their typical contexts and attributes, and how have these changed or been challenged in recent years? Here we also consider the mechanisms that contribute to the changing tempo of academic time. For example, the performance management schemes of universities and individual performance assessments have shaped the academic work and academic time significantly. Also social media and near-continuous connectivity - the ‘attention economy’ defined by digital technology - exist alongside the classic image of ‘The Slow Professor’. Our paper aims at defining the different modalities of academic time, its contexts, attributes and drivers of change. This lends us conceptual tools for understanding transformations in political science profession and its different trajectories.