Considering how the idea of luck is mobilised by different groups and to different effect in academia, Jonatan Nästesjö argues luck can play a positive and negative role in maintaining status hierarchies.
Researchers often say they’ve been lucky. This can refer to career paths, research results, prizes, awards, and funding. But what does luck actually mean in these contexts? And why is it common in stories of academic success?
To some extent, the prevalence of luck reflects an empirical insight: hyper-competition and the interpretative nature of academic judgement mean that luck and chance inevitably shape peer review processes. Moreover, academia operates as a reputational and network economy, where social networks quite suddenly may open doors to temporary positions or to be part of successful grant applications. Max Weber expressed this sentiment over a hundred years ago in his lecture Science as a Vocation: “I know of hardly any career on earth where chance plays such a role.”
What makes scholars’ talk about luck interesting is that, at least on the surface, it contradicts the meritocratic narrative that typically characterises how they make sense of themselves and their world. According to a meritocratic worldview, success is viewed as the result of effort and achievement, while individuals are encouraged to take responsibility for their own shortcomings and failures.
What makes scholars’ talk about luck interesting is that, at least on the surface, it contradicts the meritocratic narrative that typically characterises how they make sense of themselves and their world.
From this perspective, luck can have a subversive meaning. By disrupting the heroic story of a researcher who works tirelessly seven days a week to achieve, and deserve, success, the acknowledgment of luck opens up an understanding of structural constraints that extends well beyond the entrepreneurship of individual academics. Hard work doesn’t always pay off, merit isn’t rewarded evenly, risk-taking can backfire, and individual researchers may have very little control over these dynamics.
However, as argued by Vic Loveday, such a subversive meaning is dependent on luck not only being directed upwards (toward success), but also downwards (toward failure). And this is less common. In her study of precarious researchers in Britain, Loveday revealed that the most common perception was to see success as a matter of luck while attributing failures to individual responsibility. Used in such a way, the notion of luck not only fail to provide consolidation when things do not go their way. It may also erode the confidence researchers have in in their own skills and abilities.
If luck can be interpreted and used in various ways, it matters who is speaking. Examining conceptualisations of luck evoked by a select group of elite students at Oxbridge, Rebecca Ye and Erik Nylander demonstrated that elite students often use narratives of luck to legitimise privilege associated with their social background. Rather than contradicting meritocracy, distinct notions of luck reinforced their meritocratic belief. The students linked their luckiness with a sense of deservedness, used it as a means to convey humility, and credited their success to elements of chance. In these ways, luck can serve elite groups by justifying their life conditions and career trajectories in increasingly unequal societies. While the dynamics of this phenomena within elite segments in academia are relatively unexplored, it is reasonable to assume that talk about luck and chance follow a similar logic.
emphasising the importance of luck can also foster a sense of community among young researchers who constantly compete with each other
Yet, emphasising the importance of luck can also foster a sense of community among young researchers who constantly compete with each other. In a study conducted on Swedish postdocs, I found that by identifying themselves as a particularly vulnerable group in the science system and emphasizing the importance of luck in securing research funds and employment positions, early career researchers create conditions for simultaneously competing and supporting each other. As a postdoctoral researcher in history stated in an interview, “When everything feels like a lottery, we might as well help each other out.” Still, this involves young scholars adhering to certain informal rules that states how earning the help of colleagues depends on one’s own investment in the work of others. Such moral commitment does not eliminate or erase conflicts stemming from the competitive structures of academic careers. Rather, it provides strategies for temporarily resolving it through the negotiation of action based on common values.
While attributing success to luck have been interpreted as a lack of agency among fixed-term scholars or as evidence of the contingencies shaping both knowledge production and the trajectories of those engaged in it, my findings point to a very social form of luck. For the postdocs I interviewed, narratives of luck served both as strategies for managing contradictions within a competitive career system and as cultural resources for altering the meanings of competition in their everyday lives. Importantly, this would let them develop a sense of community and a desirable sense of self.
we should pay close attention to the many ways scholars evoke it and the representations of legitimacy thereby produced
To better understand the role of luck in academia, we should pay close attention to the many ways scholars evoke it and the representations of legitimacy it produces. Indeed, what we learn from the studies above is that luck does not take a single social form or function, but many. This is important to keep in mind the next time the significance of luck is discussed in the lunchroom or at seminars – especially if it is someone high up the status hierarchy that is speaking. Talking about the importance of chance and luck, like Weber did, when you have been appointed professor before turning thirty is undeniably without risk.
This post draws on the author’s article, Between Delivery and Luck: Projectification of Academic Careers and Conflicting Notions of Worth at the Postdoc Level, published in Minerva.
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