An interdisciplinary research design does not mean drawing on many fields loosely. It means selecting disciplines with purpose, each one because it sees something the others cannot.
The Doctor of Social Sciences is interdisciplinary by design and by conviction. Graduates of the program are expected to cross disciplinary boundaries deliberately, bringing more than one field’s tools to bear on complex social problems that resist single-discipline explanations. This dissertation does that. What follows is an account of the six disciplines that shape this study, why each one belongs here, and what becomes visible only when all six are working together.
The problem at the centre of this research, structural precarity as a shared condition for contract faculty and international students inside the same institution, is simultaneously an economic, organizational, ethical, pedagogical, and sociological problem. No single discipline can hold all of that at once. This is why the DSocSci’s interdisciplinary framework is a methodological choice as much as it is a program requirement. Each discipline brings a distinct way of seeing. The argument of this dissertation is built from all six of those ways of seeing working in concert.
The Six Disciplines and What Each Contributes
1. Sociology
Sociology is the discipline that trains a researcher to look past individual experience and ask: what structural conditions produce this? It gives this study the vocabulary of precarity as a social fact, the concept of institutional reproduction, and the theoretical scaffolding for understanding how organizations sustain inequity across time. Drawing on scholars including C. Wright Mills, Guy Standing, and Pierre Bourdieu, the sociological lens in this dissertation makes visible the mechanisms by which universities manage populations rather than individuals. When a contract faculty member’s position is renewed semester by semester, or an international student’s status is contingent on continuous enrolment, sociology asks what institutional logic is operating and who that logic serves.
2. Organizational Behaviour
Organizational behaviour examines how people act, feel, and experience belonging inside organizations. It shifts the unit of analysis from social structures to the lived interior of institutional life: group dynamics, identity, culture, motivation, and the psychological experience of marginalization. In this study, organizational behaviour provides the conceptual tools for understanding what asymmetrical precarity looks and feels like from the inside, what it does to a person’s relationship with the institution that employs or enrols them, and how organizational culture either names or obscures the conditions people are navigating. It is the discipline that insists on taking experience seriously as data.
3. Human Resource Management
Human resource management is the discipline that examines how organizations recruit, deploy, evaluate, compensate, and release workers. It is also, crucially, the discipline that documents the systematic growth of contingent and contract employment across sectors. In this study, HRM provides the analytical framework for understanding the contract faculty labour market: how institutions use flexible staffing to transfer employment risk onto individual workers, how renewal processes operate as tools of informal control, and how the management of teaching labour shapes the conditions students encounter in the classroom. HRM sees the employment relationship clearly. That clarity is essential to this research.
4. Leadership Studies
Leadership studies asks who holds power, how it is exercised, and what responsibilities come with it. It also asks what relational, ethical, and transformative dimensions of leadership look like when they are practiced with integrity rather than performed for institutional benefit. In this dissertation, leadership studies informs the analysis of institutional decision-making: how administrators frame precarity, how institutions lead through language, and how the gap between stated values and structural practice is managed or denied. It also informs my own positionality as a researcher and educator who held formal leadership roles inside the institution I am now studying. Leadership studies is where this research gets personal in the most structural way.
5. Business Ethics
Business ethics is the discipline that asks: what does the institution owe the people it depends upon? It examines organizational obligations, the moral dimensions of institutional decisions, and the conditions under which power asymmetry becomes a justice question rather than a management question. In this study, ethics provides the normative framework for the concept of malperformative inclusion: the institutional practice of performing awareness of inequity without acting to address it. Ethics also grounds this study’s methodological commitments, including the duty of care to research participants navigating precarity and immigration vulnerability. I taught business ethics for seventeen years. I arrived at this research, in part, because I could no longer separate what I was teaching from what I was experiencing.
6. Education and Pedagogy
Education and pedagogy bring the classroom into view as a site of analysis, a space where structural conditions land on people in real time. The literature on trauma-informed pedagogy, relational teaching, epistemic justice, and culturally sustaining curriculum provides this study with the tools to examine what happens at the intersection of precarious teaching and precarious learning. When a contract instructor arrives in an institution that treats her as disposable, and faces a classroom of international students the institution treats as revenue, the pedagogical encounter is already shaped by those conditions. Education is the discipline that refuses to bracket that reality off from the teaching and learning relationship.
A Quick Reference: What Each Discipline Sees
The table below summarizes the core contribution of each discipline to this study.
| Discipline | Core Question It Asks | What It Makes Visible in This Study | Key Scholars Drawn Upon |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sociology | What structural conditions produce this experience? | How institutions reproduce precarity as a systemic feature, across populations | Mills, Standing, Bourdieu, Kezar |
| Organizational Behaviour | What does institutional life feel like from the inside? | The lived experience of conditional belonging, identity, and psychological precarity | Argyris, Schein, Meyerson |
| Human Resource Management | How does the institution manage its workforce? | Contract structures, renewal mechanisms, and the systematic management of contingent labour | Kalleberg, Connelly, Kezar & Sam |
| Leadership Studies | Who holds power, and how is it exercised? | Institutional decision-making, the gap between stated values and structural practice | Burns, Northouse, Shields |
| Business Ethics | What does the institution owe the people it depends upon? | Moral dimensions of precarity; malperformative inclusion as an ethical failure | Velasquez, Fricker, Noddings |
| Education and Pedagogy | What happens in the classroom when structural conditions go unnamed? | Pedagogical consequences of precarity; relational and trauma-informed teaching as resistance | hooks, Freire, Ladson-Billings, Dei |
Why Integration Matters
Each of these disciplines, studied alone, produces a partial picture. Sociology can name the structural conditions without accounting for the relational and pedagogical consequences. HRM can describe the labour market without examining the ethical obligations those arrangements create. Business ethics can articulate what is owed without explaining the organizational mechanisms that prevent it from being delivered. Education can document what happens in the classroom without the structural analysis that explains why it keeps happening.
The integration is where the contribution lives. This dissertation argues that precarity in higher education can only be understood, and only be addressed, by holding all of these lenses simultaneously. That is what the DSocSci program trains its graduates to do. It is what this research attempts to demonstrate.
The concepts developed in this dissertation, asymmetrical precarity, malperformative inclusion, ghost data, blended witnessing, and performative silence, are each products of this disciplinary integration. They could only be named by a researcher willing to stand at the intersection of sociology, organizational behaviour, HRM, leadership, ethics, and education at the same time.
Full citations for all scholars referenced on this page appear in the Annotated Bibliography and Literature Review.