Exploring the interplay between structure and agency in the context of higher education in North Macedonia: a qualitative study on the experiences of early career academics

This qualitative study examines the experiences of early career academics (ECAs) in contemporary North North Macedonia and sets out to understand how the interplay between specific academic workplace structures and the agency of ECAs unfolds on a day-to-day basis and over their career trajectories. In order to examine this research question empirically, I draw on data from semi-structured interviews with 32 ECAs working across four Macedonian universities. Their insights provide an in-depth comprehension of the agentive strategies employed by individuals and an articulation of the different structural contexts that shape and have impact on their experiences. I also interviewed 15 university administrators from the same four institutions to inform my background analysis of the Macedonian higher education landscape. The lack of research into higher education in North Macedonia means that the study can potentially make an important contribution to understanding the way this system works. Theoretically, my study draws on Margaret Archer’s work on the dynamics of interplay between structure and agency. I show how her work can be used, and taken further, to contest the dominant divisions in literature focusing on academic careers that tend either to emphasise structural factors and underplay the role of agency, or to stress the role of the individual and hence to lose sight of the structural perspective. Through my own conceptual framework, I argue that a combined structure-agency approach explored in a specific context bears more fruit in capturing empirically and explaining conceptually the experiences of ECAs. It does so while drawing attention to the range of pressures and possibilities created by personal and professional relationships within and outside academia, and the range of temporal dimensions (day-to-day experiences and career trajectories) that must be managed and reconciled. The findings of this thesis situated in the under-researched context of a more peripheral higher education system point to a new perspective on the dynamics of the structure-agency interplay that challenges current understandings of the structure-agency debate in relation to academic life. What I show is that the constraining and unstable nature of formal and informal structures that ECAs in North Macedonia face on a day-to-day basis and over their career trajectories encourages agency as a tool for survival, rather than leading to its reduction. Existing workplace structures - such as, formal policies and procedures, unwritten rules, hierarchies, nepotism, political patronage and cronyism - do not prevent ECAs from exercising agency, but instead require them to be even more agentic, agile and strategic if they wish to remain and succeed. As my empirical work makes clear, it is perfectly possible for ECAs to feel constrained by the workplace structures in which they find themselves. Yet, at the same time they can undermine or take advantage of them by creating their own spaces and finding unexpected ways through barriers via rule-breaking, informal dealings, seeking dependencies, subtle and covert acts of emotional disengagement, resistance or even sabotage. Even in cases when ECAs had negative experiences with the structures in place, it was, oddly enough, the very existence of such structural barriers that helped them discover and exercise agency. This recognition moves away from a one-sided emphasis on structural constraints, which covers only the negative implications and neglects the possibility that frustrating experiences with structures can stimulate, and often necessitate, agentic thinking and action. In this respect, the thesis offers a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between structure and agency, and adds complexity and richness to the structure-agency debate by uncovering a-typical ways of exercising agency, while exposing a different and essentially more rounded representation of the structures that influence the practice of ECAs. Looking forward, one wonders the extent to which this more nuanced understanding of the interplay of structure and agency will emerge in studies of other peripheral systems.