Criteria for precariousness of employment of academic staff

The effectiveness of scientific and pedagogical activity largely depends on the economic and social and labor characteristics of hiring scientists and teachers. As part of the “competition paradigm” in the field of science and higher education abroad, and for some time now in Russia, the conditions for hiring and remunerating workers are changing: termless employment contracts are becoming a thing of the past; the conditions for passing the competition for a position are losing their stability; in wages, a significant share begins to fall on incentive payments which depend on changing requirements. This new reality for this socio-professional group causes discussions in the research environment: while some researchers talk about the applicability of the concepts of "precarization" and "instability" to the employment of scientific and pedagogical personnel, others consider such statements to be premature and redundant. On the basis of empirical data obtained in the course of a two-stage sociological study, which included a series of in-depth semi-structured interviews and a mass survey of university lectures and researchers from scientific centers, representing different branches of knowledge and living in different regions of Russia, an attempt was made to correlate the generally recognized criteria for the precariousness of employment and various aspects of working conditions and hiring of scientific and pedagogical personnel in order to identify signs of instability in employment and assess its severity. The obtained results suggest that employment in the scientific and pedagogical sector of the labor market can be characterized as unstable according to most of the relevant criteria: this concerns the terms and conditions of the contract, the amount of income, involvement in multiple additional employment, participation in informal forms of self-employment, poor social protection of workers etc. Taking into account the predominantly negative impact exerted by the instability of employment on the quality of work of workers in creative professions, it is necessary to search for the optimum between creating a competitive environment and stimulating achievements and normal reproduction of scientific and pedagogical personnel.