The political economy of part-time academic work in Canada

The financial crisis in the Canadian higher education system has led to marked growth in the use of part-time faculty, whose interests and powers are strongly differentiated from those of the full-time faculty. The reasons for the differential power and divergent interest between the two are to be understood in the context of corporatist responses to the state in crisis. Under continuing financial strigency, the university administration negotiates concessions with the collegium of full-time faculty to satisfy their corporate interests and maintain the stability of the system. Part-timers, excluded from the collegium, remain peripheral to these corporatist arrangements, their marginalization being strongly related to ideological structures that originate from and entrench the dominant power and status of the full-time faculty.