This is a quote from ongoing research conducted into precarious working conditions in higher education:
I love my research, but that passion comes with a cost, it’s hard to speak out when doing so might jeopardize your career. The pressure to secure funding, meet metrics, and navigate bureaucratic hurdles often leaves little room for real collaboration or mentorship, and it’s exhausting.” (Research Fellow, 2025)
It raises the importance of looking at precarity and research culture together.
Success in higher education often requires sacrifice and devotional perseverance to maintain one’s position. The sector is structured through formal and informal hierarchies, and shaped by layered histories, as well as culturally complex values and practices.
Individuals must navigate expectations within this system that are often shifting and ambiguous.
Pressure to publish
Institutional reputation, journal impact factors, and affiliations carry significant weight in academic culture, and success is measured not only by scholarly output but also by visibility, reputation, and alignment with institutional norms. The evolution of modern UK universities has resulted in an environment where researchers feel pressured to “publish or perish”, often resulting in a prioritisation of academic outputs over all else.
Within this environment, performance metrics are key, and “success signaling” asserts legitimacy and authority. As precarity has become structurally embedded and expanded in academic life, it reinforces a culture where conformity, institutional approval, and metric-driven outputs outweigh genuine intellectual inquiry.
Cultural studies
Research culture reflects how we engage with colleagues, students, stakeholders, and society, and we must also recognize the profound influence that institutional structures and priorities influence the way research is conducted, shaping not only what we study, but how success is defined and rewarded. In this context the ways that universities invest their time and resources is not a neutral decision, what is prioritized and what is neglected has real consequences.
A university’s culture is embedded in what is done, how it is done, and who is involved. Research culture shapes how academic environments are created, located, assessed, and funded. It affects research quality, ability to collaborate, and potential for innovation. Institutional policies, funding models, and performance metrics therefore create powerful incentives that can encourage certain behaviors while constraining others. These forces influence collaboration patterns, research agendas, and even the values that underpin academic work, making it essential to critically examine the interplay between individual practice and organizational culture.
End of term
Despite the positive push to improve research culture, widespread job insecurity negatively affects the entire academic ecosystem and makes it harder to build a healthy, sustainable research environment. Universities rely heavily on fixed term contracts; in 2022-23, for example, 22 per cent of full-time academics are employed on fixed term contracts, increasing to 43 per cent for part-time academic staff. This is compared to the general UK labor market, where around 15 per cent of employees are on temporary contracts.
Fixed-term contracts contribute to a pervasive sense of precarity and creates a range of challenges that affect both individuals and research more broadly. Precarious contracts can disrupt teams and weaken the collaborative networks that are essential for advancing knowledge. At an institutional level, relying on precarious employment makes it harder to build a positive research culture. These contracts also worsen inequalities, disproportionately affecting early career researchers, women, and marginalised groups who are more likely to be on temporary contracts.
Passion and insecurity
While researchers are deeply committed to their work, the systems they operate within may make it difficult to thrive. Passion and dedication often coexist with insecurity, competition, and systemic barriers, fostering a culture where overwork and chronic stress are not only common but increasingly normalized. Addressing these challenges requires not just individual resilience, but systemic changes that value collaboration, fairness, and sustainable research practices.
Precarity should not be seen as an industry standard; its consequences are too serious to ignore. By working toward a positive research culture, we have the chance to rethink the systems that shape academic life and create better ways to engage with our research and the world. Making this shift would strengthen both research and research led teaching, the core mission of universities.
Could the REF help?
Universities don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re shaped by systems like the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and funding structures that decide what gets valued, rewarded, and supported. The REF focuses on outputs, impact case studies, and institutional stories that promote can lead to a citation wherein only that which is measurable is deemed as valuable.
The somewhat opaque nature of the REF has also been identified as having harmful impacts on universities, as ‘REF myths’ turn into workplace realities in universities. One risk is that, with limited resources, universities prioritise documenting activity funded by research councils and delivered by already overstretched professional services colleagues to work toward the REF, rather than investing in and promoting their own meaningful, internally driven work.
The proposed Strategy, People and Research Environment (SPRE) element of the REF offers a chance to do things differently. Although these proposals have already been watered down (the weighting of this component has been reduced from 25 per cent to 20 per cent, and the contentious word “culture” has been replaced with “environment”) these changes could help shift attention away from individual performance and towards building fairer, more supportive research environments.
For these changes to be effective, however, there is a need for universities, funders, and policymakers to rethink what excellence looks like, not just in outputs, but in the conditions that make research sustainable and impactful. By prioritising people alongside performance, higher education can foster an environment where passion thrives without being overshadowed by precarity and pressure.
Quantifying the unquantifiable?
While REF is important, there is something intrinsically unquantifiable about research environments or research culture; they are not just about what we do, but instead comprise all the things we brush under the rug, all of the things that don’t exist within formal mechanisms. We know these informal mechanisms exist, and we also know that one’s ability to navigate these unknown, undisclosed mechanisms will determine their success.
Higher education is not an open system, it is riddled with never ending hierarchies and structural inequities. We would be foolish to think a system that charges students between £9,000 – £30,000 per year isn’t shaping their expectations, anxieties, and behaviours towards the institutions they operate within.
Now more than ever we need to think critically about where universities invest their money and resources. This is not about publishing spending reports and putting together a website that convinces prospective students you care. Universities need to take a step back, look at their institutions, look at themselves and truly consider what decisions are being made, by who, and through what evidence.
The revised REF therefore presents an opportunity for universities to refocus on their core mission of research, but in a manner which must pay attention to the people – in particular those on precarious contracts – who contribute so much to thriving research environments.
The article is severely out of date in equating fixed-term contracts and precarious contracts. Haven’t the authors noticed the redundancies of people with supposedly permanent contracts? At least people with fixed-term contracts (and I have had those!) know what they are signing up for.But imagine the person who got a permanent contract, bought a house, started a family, got made redundant and now has to (1) move to the other side of the world for a (any!) academic job or (2) try to find a job in another sector with no relevant (according to potential employers) experience aged 40 or so.
Hi Bobby.
We would not disagree that precarity is solely and issue for fixed-term staff. Precariousness is a condition of work that can impact all workers, and recent waves of redundancies in UKHE have illustrated this. Our article here was very limited in what it could say with the space available to it, but we would like to add we are are of how precarity is increasingly a feature of work for all staff in these times when university restructures are becoming more common and frequent.
The issue raised in the article is not simply that fixed-term contracts exist, but how they are used structurally within academia.
It’s true that redundancy can affect people with permanent contracts, and when it happens mid-career it can be extremely difficult because academic skills are specialised and mobility often requires relocation. But that reality doesn’t contradict the article’s argument , if anything, it reflects the same systemic problem.
For a long time universities have relied heavily on fixed-term researchers (postdocs, fellows, teaching fellows) as a buffer against financial and institutional uncertainty. When funding fluctuates, the system absorbs the shock by simply not renewing temporary contracts. In other words, instability is pushed downward onto the most precarious workers.
This has two consequences.
First, early-career researchers are expected to accept years of instability under the implicit promise that this is a necessary stage toward a permanent academic position. But the number of permanent posts is far smaller than the number of researchers trained for them, meaning that the “career path” often functions more like a funnel than a ladder.
Second, when financial pressure becomes strong enough that temporary staff can no longer absorb it, the same logic begins to affect more senior positions. In that sense, mid-career redundancy is not evidence that fixed-term precarity is irrelevant, it may actually be a downstream consequence of a system that has normalised instability lower down.
There is also an assumption embedded in the comparison that deserves questioning: the idea that mortgages, families, and long-term life plans belong primarily to people with permanent contracts. Many postdocs are in their 30s or 40s and face the same life decisions while navigating a series of short contracts.
So the problem is not simply individual contracts but a labour structure that relies on prolonged precarity as a normal stage of the academic career. When instability is built into the system this way, it eventually affects the whole structure, not just those at the beginning of it.
Imagine having studied until you were 25 and then having two 3-year contracts, having to move three times across the country, and still not have any certainty. Having to choose between having kids and subjecting them to that uncertainty or not having kids. Being unable to get a mortgage due to the uncertainty. Choosing between leaving academia to settle down or pursuing research you have invested 10 years in.
It isn’t a competition about who has the worst time from pecarity. It is a question about how to make universities sustainable. A culture of temporary contracts for a huge proportion of university staff and the regular cycles of redundancies are both consequences of structural issues, be it unsustainable funding models for teaching and research or shifting risk from organisations to individuals.
The article doesn’t mention one (perhaps the main cause) of the precarity of academic jobs, which is the mismatch between the demand of PhD graduates eager to stay in research and the supply of secure academic positions. I doubt whether the REF — which is intended to be a mechanism for allocating resources based on research quality — is a solution to this problem.
Hi there,
I would agree with you that the REF cannot, and should not, be the sole tool for resolving precarity in UKHE. Issues of labour supply and demand are crucially important. University leaders who I have spoken to have commented that the ready availability of PhD graduates for academic positions limits the need for working conditions to be improved too much. This is anecdotal, but I cannot imagine that other university leaders are unaware of this issue of supply and demand.
I have sometimes wondered what a PhD supervision boycott would do – I think the results would be limited, as other countries would continue to produce PhD graduates who would apply to the UK.
I therefore think that there needs to be a more coherent approach to reducing precarity which comes from greater democratic control over universities by staff. This is however a topic for a separate piece!
I agree that there is a mismatch between the number of PhD graduates and the number of permanent academic positions. But that mismatch is not simply the result of too many people “wanting” academic careers, it is also produced by the way universities organise research labour.
PhD programmes are not only training schemes; they are also a central part of how research groups operate. Doctoral researchers contribute significantly to publications, projects and teaching while being funded at a much lower cost than permanent staff. This means universities benefit from maintaining relatively large numbers of PhD students even if only a small proportion can realistically remain in academia.
So while the supply–demand imbalance is real, framing the issue mainly as “too many PhD graduates” risks placing responsibility on the individuals who enter the system rather than on the structure that produces and depends on that imbalance.
If the PhD is primarily an educational investment, then there should be clearer and more stable academic career pathways. If, instead, universities operate more like research-intensive organisations competing for output and funding, then it becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion that large numbers of PhD students function as a form of highly skilled but relatively inexpensive research labour.
In that sense the mismatch is not just an unfortunate side effect – it is closely tied to how the current academic system is designed.
You miss the positive effect if short term contracts. Reasearchers are initially hired to provide expertise on a project. Unless that person is to move in, the Pa is left having to find money to keep existing people employed rather than doing the PAs real job if pursuing new lines of inquiry. Rama’s who end up in rolling contracts end up with no career options.
The push back on culture in REF demonstrates that the improved focus on people is not accepted by many in influential positions. Some of it read as wanting to go back to just weighing publications.
With such views still prevalent, addressing structural precarity is a big shift for many. The damage is not proportional to the benefits but who is damaged and who benefits is split across power imbalances.
Which is why levers such as the REF have to be used to improve our research environment to mitigate damage and better share benefits.