How to Make the Cut in Academia: Managing the Uncertainty of Time as a Necessity to Have a Research Career

The future is a time of risk. It is uncertain. Whatever we want from life, we must plan on the bedrock of today’s knowledge, which is insufficient and flawed, but the only knowledge at hand. Concentrating on the uncertainty in academia in Germany, we develop a theoretical framework in which we conceptualise the future as a hyper-phenomenon, a form of transcendence that needs to be bridged by symbolic representations. We argue that “career” and its planning must be considered such a symbolic representation, inherently a set of strategies by which the actor masters time. In this context, we present a typology of different ways of dealing with the uncertainty of life in the academy.