Cultural capitalists and academic habitus: Classed and gendered

labour in UK higher education

Diane Reay
Institute for Policy Studies in Education, London Metropolitan University, 166-220 Holloway Road, London N7 8DB, UK
Synopsis
This paper explores gendered work in the academy entwining autobiography with a wider analysis of how gender and class
are mobilised in academic hierarchies in the UK. It interrogates the repercussions of an elitist male and masculinised academy
for a feminised group of workers within Higher Educationcontract researchers, and describes some of the consequences for
their work of processes of corporatisation, casualisation, contractualism, commodification and compliance. Drawing on the
analyses of Jill Blackmore, Nancy Fraser, Dorothy Smith and Pierre Bourdieu, the paper maps out some of the gendered and
classed institutional practices that result in pervasive social injustices within academia.
D 2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Introduction
This is in many ways an ironic account in which I
want to recognise my own contradictory positioning
from the outset. It is a critique of the UK academy, its
values and practices by a feminist who is simulta-
neously deeply embedded in its culture and practices.
I do not claim to be noncompetitive or without
ambition. However, the longer I spend in academia
the more and more I yearn for more feminist and
egalitarian ways of being. The focus throughout this
paper is on the feminised contract researcher, but this
is not to deny that female lecturers are not disregarded
and disvalued in what remains a male and masculi-
nised academy. As Blackmore (1996; p. 345) suc-
cinctly comments:
Restructuring has led to the re-masculination of the
centre or core and a flexible, peripheral labour
market of increasingly feminised, casualised and
deprofessionalised teaching force.
The disrespect and disregard for women teachers
endemic in English state schooling is also prevalent in
the academy and currently many casualised women
lecturers are facing similar work conditions to those of
their female teacher counterparts. Academia in Britain
remains a territory ruled by men; a masculine cultural
economy where the vast majority of women if they
count at all count for less. As Howie and Tauchert
(1999; p. 2) assert, women either find themselves
silenced, or babble, or are judged as lesser men, and
act as the harshest critics of other women while the men
pay no attention. Ironically, against a backdrop of the
feminisation of the labour market (Adkins, 2002), the
women who do succeed in this new masculinised
economy are often those who assume masculine ways
of being (Reay &Ball, 2000). Williams (1991) insight,
that the assertion of professionalism both masculinises
and whitens, is being enacted in the academic field, as
ambitious women play male and ethnic minority fac-
ulty have to act white in order to get on.
0277-5395/$ - see front matter D 2004 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2003.12.006
www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif
Womens Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 3139
However, I want to focus on the feminised
lumpen proletariat of the academy not its female
go-getters. It is impossible to write about the ways
in which emotions are enmeshed with gender and
class in the academy without re/focusing on the work
of the contract researcher. If there can be seen to be
an academic version of manual labour, it lies in
contract researcha feminised but also powerfully
classed academic grouping. As Oakley (1995; p. 22)
asserts:
Like housework contract research is severely
undervalued and under supported in relation to its
actual importance. Contract researchers remain
largely outside the infra structure of the academy,
despite their essential contribution to its financial
and intellectual wellbeing.
Reputation and prestige arising from funded re-
search is always vested in the properly academic
project directors, never in the contract researcher. In
the new classless 21st century Britain, there still
remains a gulf between academic labour and academ-
ic capital. Academia is full of cultural capitalists, but
contract researchers are not among them, although
their labour contributes significantly to others cul-
tural capital. Bourdieu (1988) argues that to succeed
in the academic game, individuals need to transcend
everyday existence in order to work with ideas.
Contract researchers are often the means by which
this transcendence is achieved. In an earlier paper on
contract research in the academy (Reay, 2000), I
wrote that the appropriation of ones intellectual
labour was a constant hazard for contract researchers.
I would go further now and argue that appropriation
of the contract researchers intellectual labour is
normative, routine practice within the academy. As
Bryson (1999; p. 5) states:
Contract research staff, as long as they are inferior
in the hierarchy and under control, are vital to the
professional status and career advancement of
lecturing staff.
Bryson (1999) makes explicit the positioning of
contract researchers as means to others academic
ends. There is a clear process of intellectual ex-
traction in which the contract researchers labours
both in the field and outside of it are converted
into both academic and symbolic capitals, which
accrue to the project directors rather than the
researcher.
I want to draw on my own experience to elaborate
this point. I am now happily employed at London
Metropolitan University, but before my move, I
applied for promotion at a different UK University.
I was summoned to a meeting by the two most
powerful men in the University, the Principal and
the Vice-Principal. All I was told prior to the meeting
was that there were problems with my application.
However, on arrival in the Principals office, it soon
became apparent that they felt that I had been over-
claiming in my application and at one point I was told
by the Principal, this application is at best shoddy at
worst duplicitous. I gave him my sweetest smile and
asked why. To which he responded, Turn to page 13
Appendix 1 research project 6. You have put down
that you were a member of the research team. This
was a project Id become involved in on joining the
University on a one-year research contract. I had
carried out fieldwork, analysed data and been in-
volved in the writing up of data for publication
including writing two sole-authored papers. I had
been working with a very collegial, collaborative
research team in which, although it included an
eminent male professor, I had felt like a bona fide
team member. I looked at both men uncomprehend-
ingly and repeated that I had been a member of the
research team to which I was told impatiently that
No I had not been a member of the research team,
for one I had not been a grant holder. I asked what I
had been if not a team member and was told very
firmly that I had been a contract researcher brought
in to work on collection, analysis and writing up of
data. So I went away and changed my application
form.
My Principals pedantic response bears greater
scrutiny. When we examine his wording it transforms
me from a subjecta team member into an object a
contract worker brought in. From an end in myself
a fully fledged team member to a means to others
ends, namely, the collection, analysis and writing up
of datathe agency no longer lies in my position but
is vested in those project directors who brought me in.
In one sentence, I am converted from subject to
object, ends to means, from my own woman into
D. Reay / Womens Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 3139 32
their creature. In addition, the subtext very clearly was
how dare I assert that I was otherwise.
I have argued in earlier work that research
signifies as a high-level activity but only when it
is embodied in lecturing staff. When it is embod-
ied in the female contract researcher it becomes
reconstituted as a low-level activity (Reay, 2000;
p. 15). However, I had underestimated the status
hierarchies and the class system operating within
academia. The Principal and the Vice-Principal
clearly see the researcher not as an agent in her
own right but as a ciphermerely a repository
holding research until it is extracted by the real
academics.
The 5 Cs: corporatisation, casualisation,
commodification, contractualism and compliance
British higher education has been subjected to
progressive underfunding over the past two decades
as student numbers have grown exponentially while
government funding has remained the same. This
new tough age of rationalisation within Higher Edu-
cation has transformed British universities into places
of predominantly casualised workers. In the academic
year 19971998, of the 17,000 academic appoint-
ments made, only 18% were to permanent contracts.
This is a fall of 22% since 1994/1995 when 40% of
appointments made were to permanent contracts
(Murrells, 1999). However, while there has been a
massive and unacceptable increase in the proportion
of academic, teaching staff on fixed-term contracts,
such contracts are still almost universal for research
staff (Owen, 2000; p. 11). A recent House of
Commons Select Committee (Farrar, 2002) found
that only the catering industry employed a higher
proportion of fixed-term contract workers. In a report
that stated that contract researchers were taken for
granted and badly treated, the Select Committee
concluded that it is hard to identify a single culprit
for the continuing mistreatment of our research
workforce, but top of the list must be the manage-
ment culture of some of our research-intensive uni-
versities, which is callous and short-sighted (Farrar,
2002). One contract researcher told the Committee
unless you get a lectureship you are basically stuck
with no career.
The corporatisation of higher education has en-
abled the market to invade and reshape the practices,
organisation and values of universities across the
globe (Saul, 1995). The ivory tower has been trans-
formed into the enterprise university with a central
role in national competitiveness and the growth of
capitalism within the new world order (Blackmore,
2002). As Winter, Taylor, and Sarros (2000) assert,
the contemporary university is inevitably bound up
with the political and economic forces of capitalism,
which threaten to submit the integrity of educational
and academic values to the forms and priorities of
market-orientated production. The crisis of confor-
mity Saul (1995) refers to has led to universities either
prudently aligning themselves with, or silently sitting
by, rather than resisting, the forces of marketisation.
One upshot is what Blackmore and Sachs (2000; p. 7)
term the new contractualism, creating a research
environment in which increasingly the quantification
of academic output has become the measure of
success, transforming the very nature of research
relationships.
This new entrepreneurial contract culture, com-
bined with the still powerful vestiges of traditional
patriarchal academic elitism, makes surviving higher
education increasingly difficult for the growing numb-
ers of casualised female workers it is increasingly
reliant on. A strong emergent literature (Dominelli &
Hoogvelt, 1996; Shumar, 1999) examines how the
new knowledge economy has commodified knowl-
edge, knowledge workers and students, reducing the
community of scholars to simulacra, made real only
in academic performances and the packaging and
marketing hype found in university brochures. As
Church (1999; p. 260) points out in relation to
American higher education, the academic voice can
no longer coherently express any vision other than
one predicated on the commodification of education.
These processes of commodification and commerci-
alisation of knowledge are global phenomena which,
in the UK context, have worked to intensify the
objectification of contract workers. In addition, I have
tried to illustrate through the example of my personal
experience some of the ways in which these processes
of commodification work on, and through, contract
researchers.
Reinforcing inequalities that arise from processes
of corporatisation, casualisation, commodification,
D. Reay / Womens Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 3139 33
and contractualism are deeply sedimented cultures of
complicity. Having moved to academia in my mid-
40s, after a long period of working as a teacher in
inner London, I was by turns shocked and amused at
the levels of self-seeking sycophancy operating in
academiaall that strategic hot air that goes into
pumping up already inflated, usually male, academic
egos. It is a culture which is underpinned by the
interlacing of flattery and conceitall that networking
for gain with people you dont even like very much. I
am not suggesting that all academics behave like this,
but in a culture that enshrines academic apprentice-
ship, even when you are not a disciple you are often
taken for one. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) talk
about academic habitus as a feel for the game, an
almost unconscious knowledge of the implicit rules,
which allow for ascendancy in any given field. But
what if you despise the rules and want to play a
different game? Many feminists came into academia
with a commitment to social justice research and
collaborative ways of working. Both are under threat
in the new tough instrumentalist ethos of higher
education.
Processes of corporatisation, casualisation, com-
modification, contractualism and compliance work
against, and undermine, collegiality and cooperation.
What has happened to the community of scholars in
the new corporatist era? I suggest that it has been
reconfigured as an upper echelon of elite, predomi-
nantly male, academics serviced by an army of
casualised teaching, research and administrative staff,
a poor shadow of what a community should be. Such
processes are perpetuated by the great personality
cult that predominates in the academy. Krais (2002)
asserts, in relation to the German higher education
context, that there is a belief that working methods
and structures are shaped more by great personalities,
nearly always great men, than by set structures,
which are legally regulated and function irrespective
of the person. The personality of the director in
charge of a particular domain therefore assumes
utmost importance (Krais, 2002; p. 410). In the
new privatised, entrepreneurial academy this academ-
ic elite of great men are increasingly functioning as
higher educations cultural capitalists profiting direct-
ly from the labours of hidden, usually female sub-
ordinates. One consequence is that academics are
increasingly caught up in work relationships, which
often comprise many of the characteristics of the
exploitative class relationships of the privatised labour
market. Such arrangements are often glossed over by
reference to euphemisms such as research team.
However, as I hope my personal example has illus-
trated, the research team often operates as a myth-
ologising discourse operating to ensure compliance.
Embodying emotional labour in the new
masculinised academy
Hey (2001) urges that the challenge for contract
research staff, caught up in the position of being
necessarily and desirably research active while still
considered the lumpen proletariat of academia, is to
theorise our own changing and highly ambiguous
position in the present education market. I want to
build on Heys (1997, 2001) and my own earlier
works Reay (1997, 2000) by mobilising theoretical
insights from the works of Jill Blackmore, Nancy
Fraser, Dorothy Smith and Pierre Bourdieu. In her
feminist sociology, Smith (1988) writes about a social
division of labour in which women undertake invis-
ible labour, which services men and contributes to
relations of ruling. She argues that routine-embodied
activities are not allowed to interfere with engagement
and involvement in the conceptual mode and those of
us who do both, who work with a synergy between the
two, do so at the peril of having our work discounted
as not properly academic. Contract researchers are
positioned as academias domestics. In the academy
no less than in the kitchen, to a very large extent the
direct work of liberating men into abstraction . . . has
been and is the work of women (Smith, 1988; p. 83).
I suggest that in academia, both male and female
academics ability to focus on the abstract theoretical
perspective depends upon the actual work and orga-
nisation of work by others who make the concrete, the
particular, the bodily, thematic of their work and who
also produce the invisibility of that work (Smith,
1988; p. 81). The Remnants of the Cartesian mind
body binary that still haunt constructions of gender
(Tanesini, 1999) underpin the dualism between con-
tract and properly academic research. Reason, ra-
tionality and the production of knowledge are
disembodied, masculinised, academic qualities. In
contrast, images of contract researchers evoke a wide
D. Reay / Womens Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 3139 34
repertoire of feminised, embodied activities: gaining
access, interviewing, listening, collecting data, and
that least acknowledged, but constantly present, job of
work in the field; the managing of emotions, both our
own and others (Macrae, 2000). The new embodi-
ments of academic work that have particular gendered
readings and possibilities (Blackmore, 2002; p. 434)
are made real in the distinction between the proper
academic and the academic related contract research-
er.
1
Hargreaves (1995; p. 12) writes about carefully
regulated and tempered emotions like warmth, pa-
tience, strength, calm, caring, concern, building trust
and expressing vulnerability. These are an essential
part of the contract researchers tool kit, continually
deployed in order to generate high quality data. In
addition, they simultaneously underpin the discursive
construction of contract researchers as insufficiently
intellectual, leg, or perhaps more appropriately,
heart rather than head workers. We are all aware
of the emotional labour female academics frequently
undertake. As well as the heart work in the field,
there is the smile work (Tierney & Berisimon, 1996)
that women in academia need to deploy in order to fit
in and get on in work contexts with entrenched
traditions of male domination.
This brings us to issues of embodiment and the
impossibility of the contract researcher passing as
other when the other is the ideal of academic
rigour; detached and remote from the messy emotion-
ality of the field. Yet emotions, although denied in the
masculinised rational academic and downgraded in
the feminised visibly embodied contract researcher,
exert the revenge of the repressed in the new rational,
evidence based academic economy. There is a pow-
erful contradiction that Blackmore (1999) exemplifies
in relation to educational contexts more generally. The
rational abstract intellectual denies emotion. Yet, ac-
ademia relies upon desire, greed, ambition, pride,
envy, fear, betrayal and inequality within an increas-
ingly privatised, competitive market. Unsurprising
then that there is so little real as opposed to contrived
collegiality when collegiality requires emotional ca-
pacities such as empathy, intuition, trust, patience and
care. In addition, always compounding these compet-
itive, individualistic processes are the ways in which
the academic body is constructed as masculinised
while the contract researcher, whether male or female,
is constructed as the feminised other. As Burton
(1997) asserts in relation to Australian higher educa-
tion, the barrier that women workers in universities
constantly come up against is the pervasiveness of the
masculinity of organisational structures. In Black-
mores (2002; p. 439) own research, the women
who tended to progress career wise were those who
emulated stereotypical career paths, acting like a man
so that maleness triumphs over merit. As feminists
over the past 30 years have argued in relation to
intellectual matters, mens bodies give credibility to
their words whereas a womans body takes it away
from hers (Ellman, 1968; Gatens, 1996).
Having the right style: class in the academy
As always I think Bourdieu, who is also one of
the few sociologists to turn a scholarly lens on the
practices of academics instead of only focusing
outside on those of wider society, is extremely useful
here. We need to scrutinise and deconstruct the
established academic habitus of those who are posi-
tioned in the centre of the academic field and with it
the style and distinctions that generate highly valued
capital within academia. According to Stanley (1996;
pp. 5354), academic distinction is not simply a
matter of reaching certain kinds of explicit criteria.
She argues that it is also a matter of being the kind
of person who possesses, and whose personhood is
taken to represent their possession of the attributes of
intellectual standing, potential and worth. I, with
over 80 publications, 50 in peer-refereed journals
and 13 research projects including 4 large ERSC-
and EU-funded projects, know it has nothing to do
with reaching explicit criteria. In fact, I was told very
clearly by a successful male academic that my
relentless churning out of papers was rather crude
and vulgar, and regularly in my annual appraisals I
am cautioned to focus on quality not quantity. So, if
I have the wrong style, what is the right one? I
would argue, along with Stanley (1996), that it
hinges on very overt characteristicsmaleness, a
propensity for self-promotion and a particular class
confidence.
In their excellent critical appraisal of cultural
capital, Lareau and Weininger (in press) argue that
cultural capital can only be fully understood in rela-
tion to the imposition of direct or indirect norms
D. Reay / Womens Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 3139 35
favouring individuals from privileged social milieux.
Particular evaluative criteria operate in any given
institutional arena, and they assert that careful empir-
ical research is needed to uncover the specific factors
impacting on the application of these criteria to
individuals of different social backgrounds. While
that research is still to be carried out in British higher
education, I would argue that masculinity and white-
ness operate as forms of capital within the field of
academia. However, cultural capital and the academic
distinction it generates, also reside in some very subtle
qualities, in particular, the seemingly effortless gener-
ation of scholarship. As Bourdieu and Passeron (1979;
p.24) succinctly argue, for those who have prior
advantage application becomes pedantry and a respect
for hard work grinding, limited pettiness. So, in an
academic equation in which hard work is opposed to
natural talents, the diligent, hardworking, female con-
tract researcher is seen in terms of lack. This
gendered construction mirrors the findings of feminist
work in schools which reveals how boys are seen to
be naturally bright while girls are just seen to work
hard (Walkerdine, 1989).
Another key characteristic of academic distinction,
contrary to all the rhetoric around collegiality that
pervades the academy, is competitivenessthe ability
and desire to stand out or rather stand above others in
the academic field. As Krais (2002; p. 414) argues,
academic institutions are usually organised on an
antagonistic basis in which hierarchies are constructed
based on conflict. As a consequence, achievement is
not only for its own sake, but to improve ones
standing in relation to others, and the elements of
challenging and asserting oneself against ones fel-
low players are central to the functioning of acade-
mia. The new virile, macho culture in academia is not
a comfortable space for female academics. Most of us
neither aspire to be virile or macho nor want to be on
the receiving end of others virile, macho behaviour.
Most women, and all contract researchers in the
academy, inhabit a much more insubstantial academic
habitus, one rooted in styles and distinctions that
generate little cultural and symbolic capitalwell at
least for themselves. Some of us really want to
collaborate in equal teams rather than serve out our
time in rigid hierarchies with only the prospect of
moving from a position of subservience to one in
which we dominate others.
The ingrained rigid hierarchies that permeate
much of the old university sector in the UK are
particularly difficult places for female researchers
from working class backgrounds. I would argue that
for once, working class women like myself who
grew up with very different cultural values to those
of the academycultures in which straight talking is
valued, the exigencies of daily life leave little space
for either flattery or conceit, and dominant values
were a curious mixture of egalitarianism, meritocracy
and communitarianismfind academia an alien and
confusing space. There is little commitment to egal-
itarianism, a professed but unrealised commitment to
meritocracy and a veneer of collegiality masking
competitive individualism. We need to remind our-
selves that the reason for our presence in the
Academy is first, the exit of the upper middle classes
from the profession, and second, and relatedly, the
new work conditions of regulation and surveillance
that require our hard labour. Our entry into academia
is as much about the Academys downward mobility
as our upward mobility (Reay, 2003). Unsurprisingly,
the experience of the once working class female in
academia often generates a habitus divided against
itself; an experience Bourdieu (1999; p. 511)
describes as doomed to duplication, to a double
perception of self. She is positioned in an untenable
space on the boundaries of two irreconcilable ways
of being and has to produce an enormous body of
psychic, intellectual and interactive work in order to
maintain her contradictory ways of being, her dual
perception of self.
Recognising symbolic violence: uncovering social
injustices in academia
Part of our brief as academics is to question and
analyse social practices. We need to hold up our own
practices to similar scrutiny; to problematise a natu-
ral academic order of things in which, for example,
the norm is for male professor to direct female
contract researchers. This wholesale buying into the
natural order of things is what Bourdieu (1998)
describes as enacting symbolic violence on oneself;
a proclivity he reserves for women and the working
classes in his own writing. For Bourdieu, symbolic
violence is the capacity to impose the means for
D. Reay / Womens Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 3139 36
comprehending and adapting to the social world by
representing economic and political power in dis-
guised, taken-for-granted forms. Symbolic violence
is a subtle, euphemized, invisible mode of domina-
tion that prevents domination from being recognised
as such and, therefore, as misrecognised domination,
is socially recognised. It works when subjective
structures, the habitus, and objective structures are
in accord with each other. According to Bourdieu,
symbolic systems exercise symbolic power through
the complicity of those who do not want to know
they are subject to it or even that they themselves
exercise it. Symbolic violence is the concept Bour-
dieu uses to explain how the dominated accept as
legitimate their own condition of domination. He
sees social scientists as particularly prone to become
producers of symbolic violence by failing to recog-
nise within their depictions of the social world the
social and historical conditions that determine their
own intellectual practices as well as those of the
subjects of their investigations. However, academics
are not just producers of symbolic violence in their
depictions of the social world; they maintain and
perpetuate symbolic violence in their interactions
with each other, and specifically in the traditional
research team.
Academia, with its ethos of, at best, mutual
instrumentalism, at its worst, individualistic, compet-
itive self-interest and self-promotion, lacks any in-
trinsic ethic of care. This is not to deny that
individual academics do not care for, or take care
of, others within their work context. Rather, we all
increasingly operate within a culture where many
academic workers, especially those at the bottom of
workplace hierarchies, are treated with disrespect and
as means rather than ends in themselves. This is a
corrosive process (Sennett, 1998) that implicates all
of us, even those looking the other way. The aca-
demic gaze, when it does focus on issues of social
justice, looks out on the wider social world for
evidence of moral and ethical failure, neglecting
self-scrutiny.
Fraser (1997) identifies two key understandings of
social injustice. First, exploitation in the sense of
having ones labour appropriated for the benefit of
others, and second an understanding of injustice as
cultural or symbolic, emanating from domination,
nonrecognition or disrespect. I suggest that contract
researchers are at risk of both forms of social injustice.
In relation to the former, a contract researchers career
is characterised by a continual struggle to realise the
fruits of their own labour. Contracts often end before
researchers can devote any substantial time to writing
anything other than the research report. The research
data is left in the ownership of project directors,
almost always lecturing staff, who frequently become
the only ones in a position to write journal articles. In
relation to the second form of injustice, Fraser (2000)
sees inequalities of recognition in terms of institution-
al practices of denial, denigration and subordination
and argues that the cultural face of injustice based on
misrecognition is a problem of undervaluation. I
would argue that the prevalent objectification of
contract researchers and the dominant image that they
are not proper academics neatly encapsulate the lack
of recognition and undervaluation of contract
researchers which permeates both policy and practice
within academia.
Conclusion
I want to come back to my own narrative in the
conclusion. I rewrote my application and resubmitted
it. However, I did not get my promotion. My Head
of School gave me one main piece of feedback. The
academic experts had felt that I was still seen to be
under the shadow of an eminent male academic and
needed more time to develop my own distinctive
scholarship. I had been under the apprehension that I
had been working collaboratively with this male
academic, failing to recognise that I had been work-
ing for rather than with him. But even so, out of my
80 plus publications I had only cowritten 11 with
him and had had a healthy publication record before
I started working for him. I also had 15 publica-
tions with other feminists but no one mentioned I
might be labouring under their shadow. Bourdieu
argues (1983; p. 338) that the struggle for individual
distinction is particularly acute among academics
because to exist as an academic is to differ, that is
to occupy a distinct, distinctive position. So after
more than 10 years in academia, I still was not seen
to exist as an academic. I began this paper by stating
that it is in many ways an ironic account so I want to
parody myself and my positioning in the academy by
D. Reay / Womens Studies International Forum 27 (2004) 3139 37
referring to the article I wrote on contract researchers
in 2000:
The flip side to self-promotion is promotion by
others. In Homo Academicus Bourdieu claims that
acquiring academic distinction initially requires
finding a renowned male academic and sycophan-
tically latching on as a disciple. As a female
contract researcher such behaviour, even if you
could stomach it, is often an impossibility because
you are seen to be in a servicing rather than a
learning role, and it is this which frames your
interaction with the great and the good of
academia. (Reay, 2000; p. 17).
My own personal experiences exemplify these
processes of being subsumed, and my personal strat-
egy of dealing with being subsumedmoving out of
a hierarchical, elite academic space into a more female
friendly, collegial new universityhas evident costs
in terms of loss of status. However, I want to look
beyond the personal because I feel there are important
general issues that pervade the academyissues of
gender, status, class and contract research, but
entangled in this mire are also questions of who is
seen to own intellectual labour, both their own and
others. Who is entitled to claim the fruits of that
labour? Bourdieu (1988) argues that the natural inher-
itors of the academy, those who bring large stocks of
cultural capital with them and then accumulate even
moreseamlessly, unthinkingly adopt strategies of
reproduction. The rest of us derive far less profit from
the status quo. Gender reinforces these processes,
operating as opposition or hierarchy but most com-
monly both at the same time. Within this heady mix,
complicity and collusion works to divide and rule,
benefiting very few of us, especially if we are female
contact researchers. We need to develop a critical lens
on the myriad ways in which we are drawn into
making masculinity powerful. Id like to suggest
another C word, which seems to have dropped out
of contemporary academic culturechallenge. Maybe
we, as feminists, have a responsibility to generate
more collective action because challenge is always so
hard on an individual level. But at the same time, we
need to also work at shifting the onus of responsibility
off women and on to male academics. What is clear is
that both collectively and individually we need to
problematise and challenge the contemporary academ-
ic status quo if we are going to achieve a fairer, more
female friendly, academic space.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Louise Archer for her
reflexive and supportive comments on an earlier draft
of this paper.
Endnotes
1
The report by the Universities and Colleges Staff Develop-
ment Agency (1997) differentiates between contract researchers on
the one hand and academic staff on the other, as if researchers were
not themselves academics.
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