Working (Non)sense at the University of Hamburg

We intend to conduct our own research on the working conditions at the University of Hamburg during this project semester which has been organized by students.

The focus of current discussions on the working world is on inadequate payment, flexibilization of work, temporal compression of work with associated stress and the erosion of the normal employment relationship (precarization). The employees at the universities increasingly start to resist against these developments e. g. by demanding student wage agreements (#tvstud) and better and unlimited work for the academic staff (#ichbinhannah).

Another, previously neglected aspect has gained relevance in the past few years: the fundamental question of the purpose of the individual work. Hints can be found in the discussion on „Bullshit-Jobs" (initiated by the book with the same title written by David Graeber, 2018). Graeber’s observation that more and more people consider their work as senseless partly can also be seen in parts of the work at universities: scientists spend more and more time writing applications for funding to finance their research instead of researching themselves and study coordinators lament the bureaucratic way of the organization of courses of studies since the start of the Bologna-Reform.

We are asking ourselves during this research seminar how employees at the University (of Hamburg) perceive the sense of their own work and which effects the working conditions at universities have on this point. We try to answer this question by doing our own research on it. In order to achieve this, we have already worked out possible questions and the theoretical basis during the summer term 2022. For example, we will interview the different groups of employees (students, administrative staff, academic staff) to take a look at the situation at the University of Hamburg to talk to them about their working conditions and the sense of their work during this research seminar. To do this, we can rely on the theoretical pool from the summer term as well as questions and research approaches we have worked out previously. However, it is also possible to execute new ideas of our own.

Should you have questions, you may contact us at: arbeitsunsinn"AT"riseup.net

Student research group

• Marius Schulze
• Bernd Piening
• Felix Steins
• Lorenz Meyer-Burgdorff

Mentor

•  PD Dr. Daniela Schiek