Higher education strategies and the changing academic profession: Case of social sciences

This dissertation is aiming to see whether academics are going through a proletarianization process while the Humboltian University is being replaced by the American model throughout the globe. While higher education is being commodified through neoliberal ideology of capitalism, a global higher education market is being formed. The reflection of these developments in Turkey are, the establishment of YÖK in 1981 which gave way to foundation universities and the restructuring of public universities via new public management policies. In the light of these developments, in-depth interviews with 28 faculty members from 17 different universities differentiated as A, B, C and D type, located in Istanbul and Izmir have been conducted, in an effort to understand and explain the changes in academic labor process in Turkey. Research has shown that, two basic academic activities which are teaching and research are being organized on the basis of efficiency principals in transforming labor power to labor. Academics are being controlled by, inner and outer labor market; standardization of teaching and research; separation of conception and execution in academic labor process, performance control, technological control and reward incentives like 'academic incentives'. In this regard, it has been seen that, academic work is becoming increasingly precarious, academic labor reduced to easily interchangeable units and being degraded. The fact that, career entrance is being standardized by exams such as ALES and language exam; academic skills are being tied to technological developments such as Power Point and data analysis programs and there is a deskilling of academic labor have also been identified. Attempts for resistance towards control, such as unionization as organized collective resistance have failed. In these regards, it has been seen that academic labor is going through a proletarianization process.