Abstract

Background In recent decades, the university and academic work have been reorganized under the guidance of Neomanagement, cultivating a new ethos in its culture and subjects. International studies show an accelerated, hyper-productive, competitive, and hyper-individualized academy with important consequences for the lives of academics (Gill, 2009; Jenkins, 2020; Slaughter, & Leslie, 1997). In this regard, the literature consistently reports increased stress and anxiety; intensification, extensification, and diversification of work; job insecurity; feelings of lack of recognition and hyper-responsibility (Gill, 2009; Langford, 2010; Shahid et al., 2016). The academy, accelerated and competitive, is configured as an absorbing and demanding work space, while seducing through promises of success and recognition. In this way, the subjects, trapped in the academy, recognize that they are under pressure to successfully fulfill the goals of their work while developing vital non-academic projects (Langford, 2010; Shahid et al., 2016). Likewise, a series of investigations show how academics associate subjective discomfort with the daily difficulty of reconciling work and life demands (Metcalfe et al., 2008). This difficulty is particularly accentuated in academic women (Ivancheva et al., 2019; Jenkins, 2020; Shahid et al., 2016). While probity and meritocratic systems at the base of academic management have mitigated arbitrariness and historical gender gaps in universities, successful female researchers have assumed a high personal cost. This personal cost is related to the so-called work-life conflict (Pérez, 2014), and its dimensions such as: the double workday, the choice between a scientific career or forming a family, as well as social pressure and individual responsibility for reconciling the demands of academia and family life. The dimension of time is a central aspect in this conflict and its study has been reduced to the unequal use and value between men and women (Ivancheva et al., 2019; Jenkins, 2020), neglecting subjective and qualitative aspects. Aims In this paper we propose to understand, in a specific and situated way, how academics build time and its relation to the work-life conflict in a context of managerialization of Chilean universities (Denzin & Lincoln, 2003; Flick, 2004). Method & procedures Twenty researchers from different disciplines and Chilean universities (private and state) participated in this study, with funded research projects and scientific production in indexed journals (Scopus or WoS). Likewise, all of them are perceived as women who have dependent relationships (children or other people to care for). For the production of data, we opted for the technique of active interviews, whose distinctive quality is the production of discourses, through the fluid and flexible interaction between interviewers and interviewees (Holstein, & Gubrium, 1995). The analysis of the data was guided by the strategy of interpretive repertoi