ABSTRACT
In the current managerial university environment, the dominant way to describe academic work tends to follow the plot of a misery narrative, stressing increasing temporal and productivity pressures combined with emotions of disillusionment, insecurity and anxiety. Against this background, this paper presents a narrative of happiness. It is based on focussed interviews with 15 established academics in the social sciences at two Russell Group universities in the United Kingdom. The happiness narrative tells about love for work, freedom, success and the joy of total commitment. Moreover, transformations of higher education are seen as beneficial, and the legitimacy of the misery narrative is denied. In doing this, the happiness narrative makes a distinction between the devoted, successful and morally superior elite and the majority of nine-to-five academics who do not reach to same high standards. The happiness narrative is discussed in the light of power relations and increasing polarisation in academia. Intermingled with the managerial ethos, the narrative entails a strong normative pressure as to what a true academic is like and what success means. In addition, differences between national contexts are considered by mirroring the UK data with interviews with Finnish social scientists.
