Collective Career Shocks, Adaptive Complicity and the Sustainability of Academic Careers

In this research seminar, findings from a mixed-methods study of women academics working in higher education institutions across four European countries are presented to examine how the COVID-19 pandemic operated as a collective career shock. Drawing on organisational analysis, vocational behaviour and feminist scholarship on gendered and domestic divisions of labour, the seminar explores how academic careers were disrupted, navigated and reoriented during and after the pandemic.

This article advances the study of career shocks by foregrounding the value of interdisciplinary analysis of collective disruptions and their long-term implications for career sustainability and identity. Drawing on organisational analysis, vocational behaviour, and feminist scholarship on gendered and domestic divisions of labour, the study examines how the COVID-19 pandemic operated as a collective career shock within academia. Based on a mixed-methods study of women academics working in higher education institutions across four European countries, the research explores how careers were disrupted, navigated, and reoriented both through and after the pandemic. Data were collected between 2023 and 2024 through a survey and semi-structured interviews, enabling analysis of how women negotiated intersecting pressures across work, home, and career over time. Conceptualising COVID-19 as a high-magnitude, low-controllability career shock, the analysis identifies three interrelated themes: experiencing intensified disruption, coping through adaptive complicity, and post-pandemic reorientation. Together, these themes reveal two overarching dynamics: COVID-19 as an accelerator of existing inequalities and continuity amid change within academic careers. While women academics initially faced heightened workloads, caregiving demands, and institutional opacity, many adapted through self-care, peer support, and boundary-setting. However, experiences were polarised. Senior or more secure academics often navigated disruption with relative stability, whereas early-career and caregiving scholars reported exhaustion, stalled progression, and weakened identification with academia. Across trajectories, coping frequently sustained rather than transformed gendered and neoliberal institutional arrangements. The study extends career shocks theory by reconceptualising shocks as collective, chronic, and structurally mediated, and introduces the concept of adaptive complicity to capture how coping reproduces inequality under prolonged disruption.