BIO:

Tina Saebi is an Associate Professor of International Strategy at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) and holds a PhD in Economics from Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Her research advances the micro foundations of business model innovation, with particular attention to managerial cognition, narratives and attention dynamics. Tina has published in leading journals such as the Journal of Management, Journal of World Business, and Long Range Planning. Her work on social entrepreneurship received the Journal of Management Scholarly Impact Award, and several of her articles have become foundational in the business model innovation literature.

She has more than 15 years of experience in teaching postgraduate and executive MBA courses (in English). She enjoys supervising master's theses, doctoral dissertations and is an active member of PhD assessment committees.

Abstract: 

Many of us are drawn to academia for its promise of autonomy, intellectual freedom, and meaningful work. Yet reality can look quite different: academics often have to navigate competing demands, constraints, or disruptions in their everyday work. Despite these tensions, academic systems remain functioning: research continues to be produced, teaching is delivered, and organizational life proceeds. This raises a fundamental puzzle: how is academic work sustained in the presence of persistent and often incompatible demands? More specifically,  what forms of largely invisible work do academics perform to navigate these contradictions in everyday practice? Drawing on a systematic analysis of autoethnographic studies of academic life, I examine how academics respond to challenging situations in practice: what they do, how they cope, and how they maintain participation in their work.

I develop the concept of hidden labour to capture these responses: a set of micro-level practices through which individuals temporarily stabilize contradictions without resolving them. Building on this, the paper moves toward an integrative framework linking the tensions academics face, the hidden labour they perform, and how these practices enable academic work to continue while also reinforcing the conditions that generated these tensions. 

This is work in progress, and I would particularly welcome feedback on how best to position this study in the broader intellectual landscape, as well as suggestions for strengthening the conceptual framing and the emerging framework.