‘In-subordination’ in academia: Between control and autonomy

Abstract

This article examines the contemporary meaning of subordination in academic employment and analyses how it intersects with the legal and epistemic dimensions of academic freedom. While academic staff members are formally employed under legal regimes grounded in hierarchical authority, their core professional activity is inherently autonomous, unpredictable and resistant to managerial control. The article argues that the academic profession operates at the intersection of two structurally distinct logics: the logic of employment, which presupposes supervisory power; and the logic of scholarship, which requires cognitive independence. Although these logics appear conceptually incompatible, the reality of academic work reveals a differentiated and non-binary spectrum of subordination.

Drawing on labour law theory, organisational studies and the sociology of science, the analysis demonstrates that academic subordination varies significantly across different categories of academic activity. Full subordination characterises organisational, administrative and reporting duties, which are defined and supervised by the employer. Teaching activities display a hybrid form of subordination. While universities may impose requirements concerning format, scheduling or curricular frameworks, the academic retains a degree of intellectual discretion regarding content, subject to disciplinary boundaries. Research, by contrast, is governed by residual and coarse-grained subordination. Although institutions cannot direct the substance of scholarly inquiry without infringing academic freedom, they shape the outer limits of what research is desirable through resource allocation, performance evaluation, strategic priorities and funding structures. This tripartite differentiation - full subordination in organisational tasks, hybrid in teaching, and only residual in research - constitutes the central conceptual contribution of the article and provides the analytical framework developed in the subsequent sections.

The article further argues that attempts to control scientific work encounter inherent structural limits. Drawing on Polanyi's conception of the ‘republic of science’, Merton's normative structure of scientific practice and Weick's theory of ‘loosely coupled systems’, the analysis demonstrates that scientific discovery is epistemically unpredictable and dependent on intrinsic motivation, professional discretion and decentralised judgment. As a result, managerial authority may govern procedures, but it cannot generate intellectual insight, creativity or discovery.

This structural asymmetry has significant implications for legal doctrine and institutional governance. For labour law, it challenges traditional conceptions of subordination as a uniform feature of the employment relationship and demonstrates the need for context-sensitive approaches to professions whose core activity is autonomous. For universities, it highlights the importance of designing governance mechanisms that secure institutional functioning without undermining the epistemic conditions under which knowledge is produced.

The article concludes that ‘in-subordination’ is not a defect of academic employment but an inherent characteristic of scholarly labour. The autonomy required for research cannot be fully absorbed by organisational hierarchies, yet the control required for institutional coordination cannot be eliminated. Contemporary universities operate in a dynamic equilibrium between these two poles. Understanding this equilibrium is essential for building regulatory and organisational frameworks that respect the nature of academic work while ensuring effective institutional operation.

The analysis is primarily situated within the European legal context, while selective references to North American approaches serve to illustrate how different legal traditions shape alternative understandings of academic freedom and subordination.