Page 37 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

graduate would normally be recruited” (EU, 2016, p. 192) was 156.595 (EU, 2012) compared to 191.238 in 2013 (EU, 2016). This is a 22 per cent increase over three years. A similar trend can be found among postgraduate / PhD students, which is related to the projectification too. The number of PhD students in the 23 EU countries has increased from 379.153 in 2010 to 465.252 in 2013 (a 23% increase) (EU, 2012; 2016). The overall numbers of academic staff did only increase with 9% from 918.875 in 2010 to 997.109 in 2013 (EU, 2012; 2016), which shows the disproportionate growth of early-career temporary positions.
The postdoc stage, where time can be spend on research (only), was intended for building publication records and developing new research ideas before moving into stable positions (Bessudnov, Guardiancich, & Marimon, 2015; O’Grady & Beam, 2011). Yet, the number of permanent positions did not grow to the same extent as postdoc positions, as the EU figures revealed. Therefore, the number of precarious postdoc researchers working on a series of fixed-term contracts without prospects for permanent positions is increasing (Åkerlind, 2005; Ylijoki, 2010). This has led to the establishment of a sharp distinction between a core and a peripheral academic workforce.
Precarious postdocs resemble what the dual theory of Human Resource Management (HRM) (Lewin, 2005) labels as the “peripheral workforce” (p. 286): temporary employees who receive little or no employment security and fringe benefits. On the contrary, the “core workforce”, as described by Lewin (2005), is made up of employees who are carefully selected and who enjoy employment security, well-defined career paths, and fringe benefits: tenured staff. The peripheral workforce usually has little or no development and promotion opportunities within the organisation (Ackers & Oliver, 2007; Lewin, 2005). Research showed that postdocs indeed often lack monetary and social security benefits, support regarding library services and training, and access to HRM practices such as performance evaluations and development planning (Harney et al., 2014; O’Grady & Beam, 2011). The dual theory of HRM assumes that the temporary workforce is peripheral to the organisation’s main tasks (Kalleberg, 2000). This might suggest that postdocs lack power because of their precarious position in the workforce, yet they are essential to academic knowledge development and production. As they conduct a substantial part of all research conducted in higher education institutions (Callier & Polka, 2015; Van der Weijden et al., 2016), their counter-power should not be underestimated as principal investigators rely on their work for project success.
In the literature on the neoliberalisation of academia some attention is paid to postdocs, but this research mainly focused on their lived experiences, such
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