Canadian higher education institutions have seen significant structural and operational changes on their campuses over the last 50 years. As a result of these changes, precarious academic work has increased significantly and more and more courses are being taught by precarious faculty who lack job stability and are often paid a fraction of the salary that their tenure and tenure-track colleagues make teaching the same courses. The pandemic has illuminated the working conditions and prevalence of precarious faculty in the Canadian higher education system. This, in turn, is illuminating the ways in which precarious faculty work (or don’t work) within the academic system.

Scholarship on higher education has been dominated by organizational and functionalist literatures, leading to a ‘republic of scholars’ ontology which has denuded the prospects for theory development or explanatory models to account for the configuration and changing patterns of higher education governance. This chapter proposes three correctives to traditional analogical frameworks. First, abandoning standpoint-guildism perspectives and adopting political economy and market segmentation lenses of inquiry. Second, abandoning methods of enquiry that situate the locus of change in higher education governance in mechanistic institutional-group processes and instead adopting frameworks that focus on the sociology of goods, their classification, and value construction as central drivers in market stratification and coextensive processes of divergence and convergence. And third, adopting more analytically rigorous conceptions of convergence and governance to overcome what we view as a false empiricism – the tendency to conflate policy labels and political rhetoric with policy instruments and governance tools to produce over-inflated images of convergent higher-education governance trajectories.

This chapter argues that changes to the academic labour process have fundamentally deskilled or deprofessionalized academic labour. The chapter is based on a neo-Marxist appraisal of the proletarianization of academic labour. We argue, first, that universities in Anglosphere countries have become commodified due to the privatization of their funding. Second, the decline in public funding and rise of student fees has resulted in a decomposition of academic labour that minimizes costs and increases the surplus from student fees. Third, the capacity of the state and universities to break down the skills of academic labour is enhanced and then restructured in terms of market veridiction. In the process universities become corporatized and locked into a state regulatory regime that interpellates and cajoles academics into that market-driven mission. Lastly, the chapter contends that academics are alienated from their labour and proletarianized in the process, though they do show forms of resistance which can be regarded as ‘weapons of the weak’ to counterattack the commodification process, and they rely on the remnants of professionalism to defend their conditions.