Invisible Pipework: Service Labor and The Mechanisms of Devaluation

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 12: Working in Higher Education

Abstract

Faculty describe service labor as the “everyday plumbing” that holds departments, disciplines, and institutions together, yet power, positionality, and privilege shape how this labor is distributed and rewarded. We draw on interviews with 25 faculty of various ranks in the social sciences and humanities at research-intensive universities in the Southeast United States to explore two questions: 1) How do faculty define and carry out service work? and 2) how do institutional practices affect how this work is distributed and valued? Using the concept of cultural taxation and racial equity labor, we show how certain roles are privileged while others are feminized, racialized, and made invisible, even though they are treated as a core duty of the academy. Evaluation systems favor countable, high-profile leadership roles, while student-facing and diversity work, most often done by women, BIPOC faculty, and those who sit at the intersections, is more likely to go unrecognized and under-rewarded. These inequalities are exacerbated by legacies of historical and contemporary racial exclusion, which result in a mismatch between the number of BIPOC faculty and an increasingly diverse student body. Despite participants reporting that service is a vital part of their jobs, they describe it being neglected in most tenure, promotion, and merit reviews: those doing minimal or poorly performed service are not penalized, while going beyond service expectations does not result in material benefits. This pattern reproduces systemic inequalities across higher education by taking some (often minoritized) faculty away from what is deemed most important in tenure and promotion: research. We argue that in order to address these systemic inequalities, institutions need to reexamine how they measure and reward service labor.

Authors

• Kathryn Norton-Smith, University of Arkansas

• Alexia Angton, University of Arkansas