I write a lot about setting priorities, renegotiating commitments, taking weekends off, and taking vacations.

Often I hear “We are expected to …” in response. The weight of expectations and the difficulty of meeting them within a reasonable working week (however you define that) is evident. This kind of thing comes up all year, from both established academics and those in more precarious positions.

Let me be clear: I do not think that the problem is you. I’m a sociologist. Structures, systems, and discourses are all very real and very powerful. I’ll leave the analysis of the problem to others more interested in and better at that sort of thing. I recommend recent blog posts by Bonnie Stewart (@bonstewart) and Plashing Vole (@PlashingVole) for starters.

I do, however, think that you don’t just have to lie down and accept that this is how it is and evermore shall be. Although changing the culture of overwork will be a long and difficult process, it is not impossible. It will involve collective action and personal action. Here’s one thing I think might help.

Step 1: Stop using passive voice

Using the passive construction “We are expected to …” neatly erases the person, institution or whatever that is doing the expecting. It makes that expectation abstract and somewhat formless.

If you can’t identify where the expectation comes from, it’s hard to know what the consequences of not living up to that expectation might be. You have a vague sense of dread that something awful might happen, but you can’t really put your finger on what that awfulness might look like. Maybe collective action is needed, but if you don’t identify the source of the expectation, it’s pretty hard to figure out where to target that action.

The vagueness of the expectation and the dread also limits your ability to interrogate the seriousness of either. Simple questions like “Is it true?” or “How likely is this to happen?” are hard to ask when dealing in vague generalities.

You may need to do more work than you think is reasonable but you do not need to collude in the erasure of the political agency of others.

Try an experiment

I want you to experiment with talking about those expectations in the active voice. Identify who or what is doing the expecting. Get specific. Some possibilities:

• Your head of department, dean, or other “line manager”
• Your departmental colleagues
• Your peers within the discipline/field
• A general sense of academic culture in your institution and/or beyond it
• Yourself (personal values, identity, …)
• Your family
• Non-academic friends
• …

It is highly likely that a combination of several of these is working at any given time. Try to tease out who is expecting what.

The first stage of the experiment is data collection

Just notice. Make notes. You can also make notes about what you are observing. You might want a special notebook for this. Or a digital document of some sort.

Notice when you are feeling “I am expected to …” and try to turn that around into “x expects me to …”

Notice whether doing that makes a difference to how you feel, how you make decisions, or anything else.

I’d love to hear what you are noticing

Share your active construction in a comment on this post.

Tweet your active construction using the hashtag #weRexpected (you can tweet a link to your comment if 127 characters are not enough)

You can also share some of what you notice about the effect of turning those sentences around.

Edited May 31, 2016.