Awards
- Winner of Academic Essentials-Education Academia September 2003 0 (United States)
- Winner of Academic Essentials-Education Academia September 2003 2003 (United States)
Overview
Brings together essays by tenure-track faculty, adjuncts, and graduate employees from a variety of disciplines and geographical regions in an analysis of the changing identity of academic labor. The essays included suggest alternatives for responding to the ongoing erosion of tenure and academic freedom and reshaping the academic workplace. Contributors discuss the impact of today's casualized academic job market on faculty's self-perception, political action, and responses to the changing nature of higher education. The essays included in this collection address a number of topics, including: today's academic labor situation from an educational history perspective, the development of an academic worker identity via the build-up to a strike, the graduate-employee union movement, unionization as a social justice movement, faculty unionization and workplace solidarity, the potential culture clash between professional and blue-collar unions, the faculty's complicity in the creation of a two-tiered job system, and the othering of adjunct and non-tenure-track faculty. By focusing on the state of the academic job system on their campuses, the contributors to this volume suggest some alternatives for responding to the ongoing erosion of tenure and academic freedom in higher education and reshaping the academic workplace.
Full Product Details
Author: Deborah M. Herman ,
Julie M. Schmid ,
David Montgomery
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint: Praeger Publishers Inc
Dimensions:
Width: 15.60cm
, Height: 2.30cm
, Length: 23.50cm
Weight: 0.485kg
ISBN: 9780897898140
ISBN 10: 0897898141
Pages: 232
Publication Date: 28 February 2003
Recommended Age: From 7 to 17 years
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
By focusing on the state of the academic job system on their campuses, the contributors to this volume suggest some alternatives for responding to the ongoing erosion of tenure and academic freedom in higher education and reshaping the academic workplace. - Sociological Abstracts The book's chapters are consistently readable, accessible, and of good quality. The volume should be of much value to readers of varied interest. The most natural audience is those interested in academic labor, and in unions. More than that, and regardless of one's perspective on unions, the volume offers insight into important features of academic workplaces, graduate student activism, and restructuring... [C]ogs in the Classroom Factory is an excellent contribution to the literature, with rich insights into the details of graduate employee and contingent faculty organizing and work. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the restructuring of academic work, for its focus on the identities of employees and their unions addresses a key factor in organizing academic work in the 21st-century workplace. - The Journal of Higher Education The energy evident in the struggles documented in this volume, as well as the fact that higher education is now one of the most heavily unionized sectors in the United States, argues that academics are increasingly identifying and organizing as workers, not only for better working conditions but also for better universities. For researchers interested in the new labor movement in higher education, this collection is a valuable new addition. - Work and Occupations How do you take weak-willed academic suck-ups and turn them into militant union members in less than a year? It is in answering this question that Cogs makes its most useful contribution... While the answers vary, and there is obviously no formula, the richness of the book is it's ability to place the concrete details of campaign stories in the context of this theoretical question of how unions transform the consciousness of their members... [T]hese essays should prove valuable to organizers of a wide range of professional workers. Labor educators preparing to teach organizing skills to academic unionists-or teaching credit classes to graduate students-will also find this book useful. - Labor Studies Journal Cogs in the Classroom Factory will be of interest to those in academia, particularly those at large universities, who are interested in organizing their ranks to achieve greater rights, benefits, and democracy in the workplace-graduate employees, adjunct faculty, tenured and not-yet-tenured full-time faculty, and union organizers. - NEA Higher Education Journal This book combines valuable case studies with useful and suggestive analysis of the contemporary process of academic restructuring... [T]his book is a powerful tonic for those days where you feel worn down by the grind and resigned to the inevitability of the changes we confront. - CAUT Bulletin
This work underscores the fact that faculty unionization is not a simple reaction against working conditions, but reflects deep commitment to working in the academic world as a shared, intellectual pursuit and not as an enterprising capital venture for administrators and senior faculty members. Academic labor is a reality, not a neologism created by frustrated trade unionists, and that reality begs for definition by all members of the professoriate. -Philo Hutcheson, author of A Professional Professoriate: Unionization, Bureaucratization, and the AAUP, Associate Professor of Educational Policy Studies, Georgia State University
This book combines valuable case studies with useful and suggestive analysis of the contemporary process of academic restructuring. . . . [T]his book is a powerful tonic for those days where you feel worn down by the grind and resigned to the inevitability of the changes we confront. - CAUT Bulletin Cogs in the Classroom Factory will be of interest to those in academia, particularly those at large universities, who are interested in organizing their ranks to achieve greater rights, benefits, and democracy in the workplace-graduate employees, adjunct faculty, tenured and not-yet-tenured full-time faculty, and union organizers. - NEA Higher Education Journal How do you take weak-willed academic suck-ups and turn them into militant union members in less than a year? It is in answering this question that Cogs makes its most useful contribution. . . . While the answers vary, and there is obviously no formula, the richness of the book is it's ability to place the concrete details of campaign stories in the context of this theoretical question of how unions transform the consciousness of their members. . . . [T]hese essays should prove valuable to organizers of a wide range of professional workers. Labor educators preparing to teach organizing skills to academic unionists-or teaching credit classes to graduate students-will also find this book useful. - Labor Studies Journal The energy evident in the struggles documented in this volume, as well as the fact that higher education is now one of the most heavily unionized sectors in the United States, argues that academics are increasingly identifying and organizing as workers, not only for better working conditions but also for better universities. For researchers interested in the new labor movement in higher education, this collection is a valuable new addition. - Work and Occupations The book's chapters are consistently readable, accessible, and of good quality. The volume should be of much value to readers of varied interest. The most natural audience is those interested in academic labor, and in unions. More than that, and regardless of one's perspective on unions, the volume offers insight into important features of academic workplaces, graduate student activism, and restructuring. . . . [C]ogs in the Classroom Factory is an excellent contribution to the literature, with rich insights into the details of graduate employee and contingent faculty organizing and work. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the restructuring of academic work, for its focus on the identities of employees and their unions addresses a key factor in organizing academic work in the 21st-century workplace. - The Journal of Higher Education By focusing on the state of the academic job system on their campuses, the contributors to this volume suggest some alternatives for responding to the ongoing erosion of tenure and academic freedom in higher education and reshaping the academic workplace. - Sociological Abstracts
Author Information
Deborah M. Herman is an interdisciplinary PhD candidate at the University of Iowa. Julie M. Schmid received her PhD in English from the University of Iowa.
