The economic and cultural withdrawal of academic teaching in Italy: The adjunct professors as a case study

This article investigates the working conditions and career aspirations of adjunct professors in Italy. It is based on the results of a national survey carried out in 2018 collecting information on a representa-tive sample of 5,556 respondents distributed across all Italian universities, on semi-structured interviews with 35 adjunct professors, and on an auto-ethnographic study conducted in 2018 during trade union assemblies with precarious academic workers at ten Italian universities. Adjunct professors are considered as a litmus test for observing how the academic structure and career paths have changed in recent decades in Italy. More specifically we look at how teaching activities’ loss of prestige as ‘non-market’ activities results in both a loss of academic opportunity for pursuing a future career and a worsening of the present teaching work conditions. In this regard, we combined Bourdieu’s field theory and Schütz’s social phenomenology, with the recent literature on new forms of unpaid work. De-parting from this conceptual frame, in the analysis we explore how working as adjunct professors may be seen as an invisible form of unpaid work produced by the new logic of the Italian academic field, which also rules the ways in which economic and symbolic capitals are distributed, affecting the possibility of pursuing an academic career.