The Uberisation of Scientific Work in Portugal

This paper discusses how the emergence and assumption of the knowledge society as an ideological integration in the European Union (EU) and in the European Research Area (ERA) resulted in precarious and insecure employment relations in the Portuguese scientific system. The knowledge society narratives encouraged the European states to promote political initiatives to foster Innovation and Research (I&R) so that economic competitiveness would be improved. Consequently, and parallel to this scenario, since the beginning of the new millennium, the number of doctorates has been growing in Europe, without, however, a similar correspondence to the available positions in higher education institutions (HEI) and/or Research and Development Units (R&D), questioning not only the pertinence of training researchers, but also, and subsequently, the sustainability of the national innovation system (OECD 2019). These doctorates have been mainly integrated in the higher education system with short-term contracts to develop tasks within research projects. This association with research projects along with their precarious working conditions turned them into invisible workers inside Higher Education Institutions (HEI). Portugal was no exception in these tendencies with the number of PhD holders increasing since the new millennium, although still far from the average of the European countries. Based on the analysis of the Portuguese case, this study shows how the transformation of the higher education and the research systems induced a growing number of PhDs holders, which resulted in an increased unbalance of the labour market that, along with the projectification of science, has been leading to the worsening of the working conditions within academia. The increase in the invisible mass of short-term and/or part-time academics at the margins of the university expresses the Uberisation of academic work. A mixed-methods study is applied, combining the analysis of public data with intensive unstructured qualitative analysis (e.g. media press analysis). Findings show that the use of scholarships to finance scientific work generated a huge and growing bubble, subsequently intensifying the deterioration of researchers’ working conditions who were partially invisible in the system. This invisibility of Doctorates and their precarious working conditions corresponds to an Uberisation of scientific work, considering that the relationship maintained with the host institution was punctual/one-off and without any kind of involvement from HEI side. To a great extent, this invisibility and Uberisation of researchers’ work is a consequence of the higher education and scientific system’s governance model, since R&D units usually do not have their own staff, and research projects are hosted in these units and not in an HEI. Furthermore, it is also an outcome of the projectification of science, as the knowledge society is framed in the project format, resulting in the organisation of work in a fixed-term base (Ylijoki, 2016) and consequently in fixed-term contracts.