学术职业的概念化:主观职业生涯的意义

How to Conceptualize the Academic Profession:The Significance of Subjective Careers

过去对于专门职业的研究主要遵循“特质模式”的路径,本文提供了另一种思路,从人们对职业生涯的主观体验来理解职业。这种方式揭示了职业的内部分化,即本文所关注的学术职业预示着不同的“工作世界”,每个世界中都有被编码的意义、理解、阐释和生涯路径,所有这些共同组成了一个职业。本文基于一项历时20年的追踪研究,旨在总结这一研究路径中的关键要素,分析学术职业经历随时间和机构的变化及其意涵。这个研究框架可以推广到对其他国家学术职业的研究、对其他专门职业的研究以及对其他群体的研究。

Over the course of time that professions have been studied,a trait-based model has dominated the approaches:“expert knowledge,”“lengthy training,”“certification,”“autonomy,”“altruism,”and so on.Such traits,to the extent they represent truth about professions,are disembodied from the people who compose professions.I have,in my work,offered an alternative:professions as understood by how careers are subjectively experienced.This approach“brings people in”to the study of work.In doing so,we reveal an internal differentiation of professions,the academic profession in our present concerns,that bespeaks different“worlds of work,”in which there are encoded meanings,understandings,interpretations,and career pathways that constitute a profession.This article,which is aimed to summarize for Chinese audiences key elements of my approach,is based on a line of work that spans two decades on academic scientists who were first studied in the 1990s and then again in the 2000s to create a longitudinal basis on which to understand how academic careers are experienced over time and in the institutional contexts in which careers unfold.This work enables us to see:what it means to be a professor,to work at a university,and to develop a career with accompanying satisfactions and dissatisfactions,as highly contingent on time and place.The framework outlined has broad generalizability for the study of the academic profession in varieties of national contexts,for professional occupations generally,as well as for other groups.