Care and the Organisation of Academic Work: Insights from Academics Who are Parents and Carers

Academic careers tend to be organised around expectations of mobility, flexibility, and sustained productivity. While these common expectations drive the way teaching, research and professional development are organised within universities, they can create tensions for academics who are parents and carers. Scholarly research on academic motherhood and work-family dynamics has shown that institutional expectations around being available, productive and mobile often intersect with caring responsibilities in complex ways (Ward and Wolf-Wendel, 2012; O’Laughlin and Bischoff, 2005). Nonetheless, the implications of these complex dynamics for the organisation of academic work and university cultures remain under-examined.

This paper draws on survey responses and reflective comments from academics who identify as parents or carers to explore how participants describe navigating the relationship between caring responsibilities and academic work. Rather than focusing solely on individual challenges, the analysis considers what these experiences uncover about the organisational cultures of universities. Participants describe balancing competing professional and caring responsibilities on a regular basis, negotiating fragmented time, and navigating institutional environments in which mobility, visibility and constant availability are often interpreted as signifiers of academic commitment.

While research on work-family conflict has long documented tensions between academic careers and competing family responsibilities (cf. Greenhaus and Beutell, 1985; Ward and Wolf-Wendel, 2012), the findings of this study suggest that caring responsibilities reveal a less visible dimension of academic work: the implicit temporal and cultural norms through which professional legitimacy is often evaluated. Participants’ reflections reveal how for example, conference travel, informal networking opportunities and expectations of uninterrupted research time continue to function as a basis of academic engagement. By highlighting how these institutional expectations are experienced by academics who are parents and carers, the paper highlights how everyday university practices may inadvertently privilege particular patterns of availability and mobility. The paper concludes by considering how greater attention to the temporal organisation of academic work could inform more inclusive approaches to academic development and institutional culture.