The transformations that the academic field has undergone globally – and the UK, which is the focus of this paper, has largely led the way in Europe – in the previous two to three decades, including the massification of higher education, and the sector’s marketisation and professionalisation, have led to significant changes in research policy, particularly with respect to its focus on auditing, selectivity, and performance-based funding. This marked a shift in the academic culture and identity (Harley, 2002; Locke, 2007), increasing the pressure to publish, increasing administrative burden, and fostering competitiveness. Aiding the further transformation of UK academia, one of the most recent innovations in conceptualising, measuring, and rewarding research quality in the government’s major research excellence exercise (REF), has come to include the ‘impact’ of research, or rather its social usefulness. This decision has in the last few years caused a major shift in institutional priorities, as universities are dedicating significant resources and investing significant efforts in creating the conditions under which the social and economic impact of their research can be achieved, and – crucially – documented.  With this, the sector had moved one further giant step away from the Humboldtian ideal of university, as the disinterested pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake continues to yield before the authority of social relevance (Chantler, 2016).

Whilst these changes have affected the academic landscape in ways that are continually being documented, their impact has perhaps been most keenly felt, and as yet insufficiently researched, in the case of those only embarking on their academic careers, rendering the latter highly uncertain, marked by temporal contracts and lateral job migration. Although some colleagues have made significant advances in exploring the question of early career academics’ (ECAs’) professional paths, the precariousness of their careers and identities, and the creativity with which they have been responding to the new governance regime (see Ashwin et al., 2016; Smart and Loads, 2016; Chen et al., 2015; McAlpine and Turner, 2012; Bennion and Locke, 2010), there is still a lot of ground to be covered, as evidenced by continued demands for more (qualitative) research into the various facets of early academic career, not least in this network call.

One effect of the new research policy regime on ECAs’ careers and identities, which is fairly recent, and as such all but absent from the already limited literature, has been the appearance of ‘hybrid’ post-doctoral roles which embody traditional academic requirements, alongside those dedicated to nurturing impactful relationships with non-academic communities, fostering collaborative and engaged research projects, and performing impactful activities. It is these roles, and their relationship to the wider policy discourse that are the subject of this paper. Using the theoretical framework developed during my doctorate (Djerasimovic, 2014; 2015), and which analyses self-governance (in Foucauldian terms) through the prism of social, cultural, linguistic, and symbolic (Bourdieu, 1991; 1997)  capital possessed by the individual, and finds spaces for resistance to hegemonic discourse and its transformation, in the subjects’ individual engagement with it, I will explore the motivations, aspirations, and working mechanisms of ECAs who either pursue or come to accept such roles which amplify career precariousness to the degree of not only impermanence but also lack of supervisory support or established career choices and imperatives. I will examine to which degree such lack of definition is perceived and enacted by individuals as a necessity arising from the current academic climate on one hand, and the space for agentive action in transforming the discourse based on own ideas regarding the academic ideal.

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