Academic service: attachment, belief and hope

One of the areas that is being impacted by the neoliberal turn to universities is arguably that of academic service. In this chapter, we explore this in the context of Australian universities through the narratives of 45 academics interviewed from 2015 to 2017. While important figures like MacFarlane (2007) argue that academic citizenship is in decline, our research demonstrates that much of this is complicated by material and immaterial things. Importantly, much of the service work conducted by early career researchers, we argue in this chapter, is done for a hope for permanent role within the academy but also because of the subjective enjoyment they receive for it. However, we explore this in the context of changing internal expectations around areas like teaching which impact on the extra labour many early career researchers take on.