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Progress in Human Geography 33(3) (2009) pp. 307–312
I Introduction
Academics enjoy a tremendous quality of life. They are generally free to organize their time, enjoy societal respect as professionals, and are engaged in creative work. On the other hand, many feel overworked and excessively stressed. It was this tension that
I sought to explore with my ‘Work-life balance in Academic Geography in 2008’ survey. The survey was distributed to specialty groups associated with the Association of American of Geographers (AAG) and the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers, the Canadian Association of Geographers, and numerous individual geographers in Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. Remarkably, over 700 responded.
The survey 1 asked researchers about their subdiscipline, gender, academic position, length of time in academia, whether or not they run a research laboratory, how many students they typically supervise, their relationship to email and digital devices, and geographical location.
The next set of questions sought to determine expectations for research productivity (publication and acquisition of external funding) and how these are changing. There were also questions about length of scholars’ work week and number of contact hours with students.
The third section focused on leisure time and activities as well as children. Finally, I asked about stress, perceptions of overwork and work-related health events. The degree to which geographers are bound to email, work long hours, feel institutional pressures to increase productivity, and experience stress are
‘red fl ag’ regions of the survey and are discussed below. Question 40, the last, asked for further comments. 33% of respondents posted comments – many of them detailed accounts of their own experiences – for which I am very grateful. These comments, perhaps as much as the tabulated results, provide a complex, storied account of academic work-life balance in Geography – as I will now explain.
II Monkeys like to talk: academic geographers and email
The easiest way to account for overwork and stress in academic life is to blame invisible structures, and rising expectations. Email is the arena in which much of our time is spent.
The survey illustrated the extent of our addiction. Over 90% of us check email at least every
2–3 hours during the work-week (over half of those check it every hour or more). 95% of us check email always or sometimes on the weekend (most do so always). Surprisingly, less than 10% of respondents have a Blackberry, iphone or other digital device that permits them to check email everywhere.
*Email: nadine@sfu.ca
© 2009 SAGE Publications DOI: 10.1177/0309132508096350
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308 Progress in Human Geography 33(3)
While the numerical survey results indicate geographers’ close relationship to email, few respondents explicitly mentioned it as a facet of their work stress in the comments. This silence is contradicted by research that indicates that email is a huge distraction from work and leads potentially to greater levels of stress. The popular press widely reported a study that found that workers are increasingly overwhelmed, partly because of their email responsibilities (Bird, 2007; Campbell,
2007).
We have increasing numbers of emails every day, so there is the problem of volume and the responsibilities associated with responding (promises of reference letters, reviews, meetings with students, conferences to attend, permissions to seek, etc). There is also the largely ignored problem of distraction. Studies and individuals report that after each email interruption – to which we unfailingly respond (who can resist Eudora’s cuckoo or Mail’s red circle indicating that we have another ‘important’ message?) – it takes a signifi cant period to return to the same level of concentration and productivity that we enjoyed moments before (Sorensen and de
Peuter, 2006). Given that most of us receive several emails every hour, it is no wonder that we are overwhelmed. For the unique thing about academic work is that much of it does require creative concentration whether for writing course material or academic papers.
A revelation of the survey was not that most of us check email frequently, but that, despite 65 pages of comments from respondents, few linked email to feelings of stress.
While email binds us, it also keeps us apart from our families and friends and true leisure.
One respondent demonstrated the effect of email:
I don’t even have the work/home separation of a home offi ce anymore; I have my laptop on my lap and answer emails, edit online … I am fi lling this out online, for instance, while ostensibly watching a movie with my wife in the living room at 10:30 at night as our one evening together this week. After answering more than a dozen emails related to a department committee that I’m chairing … I know my colleagues are all doing more or less the same thing.
It is this erosion of the inner sanctum that perhaps causes the greatest stress for our family members. As another respondent said, ‘technology forc[es] one to be ‘at work’ always (if email is not answered right away, then one is seen to be slack!)’.
Email is part of a pervasive ‘speeding up’ of our academic lives, but it is also the fabric of our social networks. It allows us to stay connected with our tribe. We check email on weekends and holidays partly because we are part of a gigantic social network comprised of academic researchers much like ourselves.
This is our community and email is our glue.
Monkeys like to talk. And – this is conjecture – perhaps some of our increased productivity stems not only from external pressures, such as university administrators or the Research
Assessment Exercise (RAE), but also from the heightened intensity of our interactions with our peers.
Email is the great connector but also a perpetrator of stress. It is, however, not the only dimension of an emerging culture of overwork in the academy.
III Work makes us (more or less) free?
Over 70% of survey respondents agreed that more is expected of them since they started their careers. Over 70% also agreed that their institutions have raised expectations specifi cally for research and external funding in the past decade. Many respondents referred to the intensifi cation of work:
Most of us are self-motivated, but the pressures are there. I feel sorry for young colleagues with families. If they took the time for personal/ family life [like] I could when I was untenured, they probably now would fail. There is a sad lack of balance.
We are all overworked. I am in a transitional generation – I’m early forties – and so I remember the days when most academic departments in the humanities and social sciences had people
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Viewpoint 309 who did good work, but they worked slowly, often spending a few years before producing each new publication. There were also people who were called ‘deadwood’ behind their backs. Those ‘deadwood’ often did really important things in the overall division of labor.
There seems to be consensus that it is harder for faculty now than in the past:
Expectations by the university, students and everyone else have changed hugely over the last 25 years. It takes me just as long to write a paper as it used to but fi nding the undisturbed time to do so – or even just to work on data – is far harder than before. The only uninterrupted time is in the evenings and at weekends. That’s why I end up using it for work. When I was younger, I felt in control of my life and my job. Now I feel perennially on the edge of letting something drop. I lurch from deadline to deadline.
77% of survey respondents sometimes or frequently work in the evenings. Almost as many work some or most weekends. Given that 80% of respondents plan to publish two or more papers annually, the hours may be required. Moreover, the vast majority of respondents indicated that their institutions expected at least 2–3 papers each year.
Administrative work was frequently cited as a culprit:
What is not mentioned is the GREATLY increasing administrative burden placed on faculty as more and more is offloaded from central administration and less and less support is forthcoming in terms of clerical personnel etc.
In the UK, the RAE was noted, especially among emerging academics, as a source of increasing pressure:
The UK culture … means that postdoctoral researchers have a diffi cult time to get established on the lecturing ladder in the UK. I have been told categorically that I am expected to have 10 major journal publications before I can expect to be considered for a lecturing post in the UK … the UK approach represents the victory of accounting.
The academy is undoubtedly being transformed into a neoliberal institution. Lawrence
Berg has written about the CV as a neoliberal instrument in the academy:
Today, everybody is working at 110 percent …
The neoliberal academy is destroying itself.
And we are allowing the corrosive effects of overwork to creep down farther and farther into the ranks of graduate students and undergraduates. [What] is the culture of reading when people don’t have time to read, because they are too busy trying to write, to produce articles, or to chase grants? (Berg, in Castree,
2006)
I personally remember walking into the offi ce of an associate dean of research rushing to get a signature for a grant application only to find him sitting reading a book, his desk empty of clutter or even a computer. I was appalled. He retired shortly thereafter. Only upon reflection I did realize that this man embodied the ideals of a past academy with an emphasis on reading and refl ection.
Despite shifting expectations of academic geographers, a number of survey respondents were keen to emphasize how much they enjoy their work:
I enjoy working. As Richard Florida notes, for many of us work time and leisure time bleed into each other.
Work is exhilarating, stimulating, and energizing. I’m not doing mindless work on an assembly line. Work does not encroach on life, it enriches it.
Others felt that there is a ‘falsely created’ feeling of overwork leading to a culture of complaint among academic geographers:
[T]here is an inherent culture of complaining about how busy you are as a way of bragging about how important you are … but [some] problems are self-infl icted (eg, agreeing to be on too many committees, reviewing too many papers, etc).
Academia is the easiest paying and working job anywhere, and the idea of having stress, unless you are utterly mediocre, is ludicrous.
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310 Progress in Human Geography 33(3)
Individual perception of overwork was blamed for this.
Work-life balance is also an individual thing.
I can sit and whine that I am not getting two hours per day to smell the roses but I never wanted that … those who want that [are perhaps not suited for] large public research or top private research schools.
I must say that I find it sometimes irritating that numerous scholars seem to socially construct a stressful environment.
Still other respondents compared academic life with that of many professionals and found that we are more fortunate:
Relative to other professionals, where insecure employment and >50+ hours in the office, plus spill-over at home and very late nights to meet deadlines, is the norm, we’ve got it pretty good.
There is clearly a strong Pollyanna streak among geographers. Yet, at the same time, almost 80% of respondents perceive themselves as somewhat or highly overworked.
86% find the fact that academic work is never fi nished somewhat or highly stressful.
The problem might not be the nature of our work but our perception that it is ceaseless.
The work never ends, and there is never a day off – that is what is most diffi cult as I get older
(over 50).
A number of people noted that they had developed strategies for the stress of overwork.
A surprising number had negotiated parttime academic work ranging from 60% to
80% appointments in order to accommodate other aspects of their lives. Some were planning to leave the academy:
I am actually in the process of looking for a non-academic job while trying to maintain an academic connection.
Others utilized a geographical solution; they simply moved. Several respondents wrote of how they deliberately sought employment in a university with a less-pronounced culture of overwork. While there is disagreement about whether individuals or institutions are to blame, most geographers who responded to the survey feel overworked.
IV The stress of academic life
Hans Selye, a McGill University researcher, wrote a landmark book called The stress of life in 1956. His identification of stressors and their effect on physiology was foreboding. He described a pathological state that is created from ongoing, unrelenting stresses – much like that experienced by busy academics who are struggling to simultaneously publish, mentor graduate students, apply for external funding, teach, and conduct research programs, or graduate students trying to write their dissertations while submitting multiple peer-reviewed publications.
A number of specifi c stresses were described in the numerous comments that survey respondents wrote.
Unexpectedly, one of the greatest stresses cited was money – both for research and as compensation. Clearly academics are not very different in this respect from everyone else. Several scholars noted that we are underpaid compared to other professionals based on the number of years we spend in postsecondary education. Shortage of research monies for running a laboratory was a consistent theme. Certainly I sympathize with the pressures that GIScientists and physical geographers face in supporting a lab and a cadre of students.
The stress of parenting was another consistent theme:
As a parent/caregiver, I often feel I have to work faster/harder/more efficiently than non-caregiving peers to anticipate caregivingrelated emergencies that I may have to take time off for.
Perhaps it is not surprising that only 46% of respondents have children.
Surprisingly, the issue of gender was only a faint echo in the survey results and was balanced by several comments about there being
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Viewpoint 311 greater pressure on non-minority males. This is in contrast to a recent report from a much larger survey conducted by the Canadian
Association of University Teachers (CAUT,
2007). The CAUT survey that found that women scored higher than men on most stress indicators – especially the work-life balance measure. Lack of gender differentiation on levels of stress may be a structural flaw of my geography survey – though several of the most satisfi ed, happy comments were from women. One respondent reported that she suffers greater stress as a result of being a point person for multiple GIS research projects in her institution than as a result of being a minority female. This is a hidden pressure that many in
GIScience face on a continuing basis.
The most distressing comments reported were from scholars in the burgeoning secondary labour force that supports those of us who focus on research. I speak of those who are in adjunct teaching positions, often hired on a contractual basis to teach large numbers of courses. This is a pervasive trend in North
American universities and a way to enhance teaching capacity without paying benefi ts or affording job security. One email described the situation:
50% of academic geographers at public universities in the USA are ‘adjunct lecturers’.
We don’t have ‘research quarters’ and get little to no support for publications [or] travel.
Being an adjunct lecturer is perhaps the most stressful position in academia. We must all take note of this situation as it poses a latent danger. There is no ‘us’ and ‘them’; the creation of a large peripheral labour force reveals potentially toxic administrative strategies for rationalizing the value of academic labour.
Perhaps the title of this Viewpoint should have been ‘Work, life and stress in academic geography in 2008’ .
Certainly, the most poignant written responses to question 40 were about work stress. It is worth noting that over 50% of respondents have suffered a stress-related health condition – though most did not take time off as a consequence. Clearly stress permeates academic life but there are strategies for relief.
V Be creative: take the time to watch the sky
In 2002, Doreen Massey wrote a compelling editorial in Transactions . She described the lives of academics as busier and busier, leaving little time to think. This trend, she argued is exacerbated by the push to publication meaning that people publish not when they have something signifi cant to say but under duress to produce. At the same time, she noted that funding is becoming extremely project specific with emphasis on policy-relevant research. This curtails ability of academics to do ‘blue-skies’ research that is motivated by curiosity, not political demands. This survey, conducted six years later, reveals an intensifi cation of these trends.
The greatest loss is, perhaps, creativity.
The survey revealed our conundrum: the more administrative, research and teaching pressures we experience, the harder we work, and the less leisure time we have to think.
Ironically, while many of the ills associated with academic life were revealed by this survey, many ameliorative tactics were suggested by respondents.
• Setting boundaries. Many people described their evolution from being harried and overwrought to developing a clear sense of what they could reasonably accomplish. Their advice: just say no to extraneous administrative and research tasks that will erode your time off.
• Leadership is required. One senior female academic who leads a school described the need to ‘explicitly support a humane workplace’. Several other senior scholars were trenchant in their calls for a cessation of excessive pressure on graduate students and new faculty.
• Turn off your email when you are writing.
• Mitigate against the expansion of a secondary, temporary labour force.
• Love your job.
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312 Progress in Human Geography 33(3)
Foucault (1979) famously argued that we are never outside a system. Changes to our working environment – and work-life balance – will come from within the system. In closing, I remind readers that blue-skies research as well as quality teaching constitute our true raison d’être ; we must cherish and defend these activities from the encroachments of technology and economic and administrative rationalization.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Valorie Crooks and
Sarah Elwood for reading and commenting on a draft of the survey before it was posted.
All mistakes and errors of interpretation are mine.
Note
1. The survey was open from 1 March 2008 to 15 July
2008. Though now closed, the results can be viewed at http://www.sfu.ca/gis/schuurman/work_life_ balance_survey_results/survey_results.htm
References
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Canadian Association of University Teachers
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2008 from http://www.caut.ca/news_details.
asp?nid=1057&page=490
Campbell, D.
2007: Email stress – the new office workers’ plague: a deluge of messages distracts people from work. The Guardian 12 August. Retrieved
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Castree, N.
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