| This dissertation studies the organization of adjunct instruction within Departments of English and Mathematics at three colleges -- a public research university, a private masters granting teaching college, and a public community college. Four questions lie at the core of this project. First, what higher principles and standards of evaluation (i.e. forms of worth) are used among full-time faculty and administrators to justify and criticize adjuncts and the college's use of them? Second, what tests of worth have been institutionalized to evaluate adjuncts? Third, how does the college avoid the potential accusation of exploitation? And fourth, how does being an adjunct faculty member fit into the occupational trajectories of the adjunct faculty themselves? Several general findings emerge. First, two forms of worth, scholastic and pedagogical, were dominant at the three colleges.;Second, each college attempts to avoid the accusation of exploitation by claiming that adjunct work cannot and should not be thought of as anything approaching full employment. Third, the idea that adjunct work is a boundary object of the academic field is affirmed. Fourth, the tests of worth are often ceremonial in nature or somehow discredited. And fifth, the autonomy of a field is reconstructed to mean a positive heterarchical relationship. |
