How does ECA cope with organizing paradox?

The tension of the freedom for working in many roles with many tasks might be approached by dedicating enough time for academic life and duties.

“Do not work in full-time besides PhD, especially not at multinational companies. Finally, I can understand why the system was different before, so that they could only have part-time jobs. I actually underestimated this whole process.”

Paying attention to other needs of ECA is a desired self-help coping strategy not only for the body but also for the soul and the community needs.

“When I finally reached the point, where I could hand in the first version of my dissertation I promised myself to buy the gym and swimming pool membership as soon as possible.”

A coping strategy might be to accommodate with organizing paradox is restructuring the available resources and use any social support that might be available from colleagues, friends and family.

“My parents could tell stories, I guess… For example, when we went on holiday for 2 weeks, the line-up was the following: they played with my children while I was writing one of my papers.”

A typical coping strategy as a self-punishment for organizing is that some ECA willingly allocates their time in a way that they work late at night.

“In the research phase, you can allocate your time completely flexible, so you can write a dissertation at 2 a.m., and that was not a problem at all.”

Table 2. below summarizes the main coping strategies found in the empirical research according to the performing, belonging and organizing paradoxes.

KOMÁROMI

Table 2. Coping strategies in practice for ECA

It seems that among the early career academics, three dominant paradoxes are highly visible. Performing is a tension for them from the very beginning of their career as they need to perform as researchers and teachers at the same time. They need to adapt themselves for this requirement. Belonging is also two-faced for ECA since credit and publication pressures are demanding on a personal level, but they are also related to several institutional units, and they are also pushed to serve the common interest for their department, faculty or research group. An additional third paradoxon appears for ECA on

their personal level. They arrive in academia with the hope of freedom, but they need to face that the illusion of freedom may be more present.

Coping with paradoxes might be approach type, and/or self-help type, and/or accommodation type. ECA uses the three techniques to juggle with their tensions. For each paradox they try to find social-support whether it is coming from their professional work or from private life. The presence of maladaptive coping strategy – self-punishment – may be perceived as a proof for the existence of paradoxes: it is difficult to solve the tensions in the long run while struggling to satisfy immediate expectations too.

The paper explores the paradoxes separately, overlooking their dynamic and interrelated nature, which makes even more complicated the coping for the individual.

Therefore further analysis of data is needed in order to explore coping with the dynamic and interrelated system of paradoxes. The presence of self-punishment technique suggests, that besides the virtuous cycle the vicious cycle (Smith and Lewis, 2011) is also present, and there is a need for further analysis to uncover their possible relationship, and the practices along which stepping out, transforming the vicious cycle may be possible.

These limitations may be answered in a next paper through a longitudinal analysis of the ECA narratives.

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ONLINE Source

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