Trabalho e subjetividade do professor da pós-graduação da UNESP : o sentido do trabalho e as relações entre sofrimento e prazer

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the work and subjectivity of the professor that works at the postgraduate program of UNESP, comprising the relationships between distress and delight, compliance and strangeness regarding the productive sociability and the possibilities and hindrances of the construction of meaning at work. In this investigative path, we examine the reality of two postgraduate programs, from the humanities area that have high academic performance. The theoretical assumptions are based on the contribution of the Psychodynamics of Work and Psychosociology, to which the interaction of researchers whose focus of analysis comprises the work, the subjectivity and the health of the university professor are related. The research anchors, at first, in the analysis of documents of UNESP, from the Brazilian postgraduate and the higher education, composed by laws, publications, ministerial orders and statistical analysis. Following that, questionnaires were conducted, composed by objective and essay questions, to a sample of 36 professors. Finally, 10 semi-structured interviews with professors were carried out. With data triangulation, some analysis guiding categories were created: the meaning of work and the relationships between distress and delight in the teaching office; compliance and strangeness regarding the productive sociability; the dynamics of the union of work and recognition; and work intensification and deterioration of work conditions. It points out that the work and subjectivity of the postgraduate professor are inserted in a political and economic context configured by the predominance of the financial sphere of capitalist accumulation (capital globalization) and by the conformation of the Reform of the State Apparatus to the neo-liberal guidelines. In this scenario, deep reforms were made in the role to be played by the university, transforming it in a managerial institution, productivity-focused and mercantilized. Practices of Human Resources Rationalization and the dissemination of the ideology of academic excellence are present in the education sector, among them, at UNESP, deteriorating work conditions due to its intensification. The dynamics of recognition – important factor to the delight at work - , is undermined due to the conflicts, individualization of relationships and competitiveness among pairs. Still, the particularity of the teaching office provides the existence of authentic recognition echoes among the shredded union. Delight and distress are revealed over and above its apparent dichotomous perspective between delightful or distressful potential in activities, respectively, of construction and transfer of scientific knowledge and of bureaucratic and administrative nature. It points to an intricate dialectic and contradictory movement of the process of construction of meaning at work and of the relationships between distress and delight. The research indicates distress experiences coexisting with delightful ones, as well as limitating, but not suppressing, them. Also, following a pathogenic distress resulting from pressures, overload and meaning senses there are narcissistic and fetish delight forms due to the malpractice of the recognition dynamics. However, it does not remove successful creative distress and sublimation at work alternatives, resulting from the unyielding and unalienable intellectual and creative office dimensions, of the authentic recognition echoes and of the ethical and political meaning. The conclusion is that there are various possibilities presented to the subjectivity of the postgraduate professor, peered in the complex dialectic and contradictory interplay of the pair distress-delight, and in the limits and possibilities of the construction of meaning.