Exit, Voice und Loyalty. (Un-)Möglichkeiten kollektiven Widerspruchs im akademischen Mittelbau in Deutschland

Although the increasingly precarious employment conditions of German nontenured faculty foster a dissatisfaction among those, we can hardly find any expression of Collective Voice. With reference to Hirschman’s concept of Exit and Voice as major response options to dissatisfaction, we will explore how to explain the relatively Silence and what are the (im-)possibilities for articulating Collective Voice. In order to detect possible reasons for maintaining silence we firstly resort to a Bourdieusian field- and habitus-theoretical perspective and differentiated concepts of employees’ silence. With recourse to research approaches on social movements and protest, we then ask secondly about preconditions for the emergence of Collective Voice and discuss these against the background the actual situation of non-tenured faculty in Germany. It can be shown that specific structures of the scientific field and the field members’ habitus are more suitable for creating Silence instead of Collective Voice. The field’s peculiarities, the embedded power structures, and especially the specific career structures in Germany make a mobilization difficult.