ILPC 2026

In this paper we’ll present theoretical and empirical initial approaches of our research in progress about university professors working conditions in the scenario of globalization as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon and in which, in addition, Higher Education acquires a crucial importance.

Thus, work, knowledge, symbolic analysis, communication and affects become closely linked, making idle any distinction between productive and unproductive work and making necessary the category of "immaterial work" for an adequate interpretation of the social reality and the problems of the world of work. Immaterial work crucial importance lies in the tendency to subsume all other forms of work, a fact that’s even more evident in the knowledge field and makes it especially relevant to the theoretical perspective we propose. In this sense, we propose a  theoretical perspectives integration that have addressed the problems of globalization and the phases of capitalism relating them to transformations in the field of knowledge, the immaterial work new role and the integration processes in new global scales , but with local condiments and connections without which it’s not possible to understand these new dynamics. The concept of "cognitive capitalism" is also useful to describe the complex connections between the new technological-productive paradigm, the new technologies (in an outstanding way, information technology and communications), the global economy and the new socio-cultural patterns.

Our central hypothesis proposes the existence of a renewed relationship between knowledge and capital in this globalized capitalism phase and that this affects different spaces of production and social reproduction, but prominently the world of Higher Education. It’s in the universities where those who will be "symbolic analysts" are formed and, among them, scientists stand out, while science and technology acquire a central role in innovation and this in the dynamics of capital  expanded  production and reproduction; the CEOs, "managers", senior and middle management necessary for the global capitalism organization and functioning  (in multinational companies, transnational and international organizations, services firms and central states) and university professors necessary for training the preceding categories.

We’ll emphasize, in this opportunity, the first results, both quantitative and qualitative, around to the specificity of the double regulation that we find in university teaching that refers, on the one hand, to the contractual conditions that regulate the work plane itself and to which they are directed  the regulation of working conditions such as the working day, the salary condition and social benefits and, on the other hand, the plan that regulates the academic conditions of work and are related to the mechanisms of academic organization, the evaluation processes of academic work for admission, promotion and permanence. Undoubtedly, both planes are affected directly or indirectly, by the tensions that the phenomena of globalization and internalization means, which affect Higher Education in Argentina as in MERCOSUR.