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Tertiary Education and Management
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Casual Academic Staff in an Australian
University: Marginalised and excluded
Suzanne Ryan a , John Burgess b , Julia Connell b & Egbert Groen a
a University of Newcastle, Australia
b Curtin University, Australia
Published online: 23 Apr 2013.
To cite this article: Suzanne Ryan , John Burgess , Julia Connell & Egbert Groen (2013): Casual
Academic Staff in an Australian University: Marginalised and excluded, Tertiary Education and
Management, 19:2, 161-175
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Casual Academic Staff in an
Australian University: Marginalised
and excluded
Suzanne Ryan
a
, John Burgess
b
, Julia Connell
b
*and Egbert
Groen
a
a
University of Newcastle, Australia;
b
Curtin University, Australia
(Received 17 January 2013; final version received 3 March 2013)
Over the past 25 years, the Australian workforce has become more casualised, with approxi-
mately one-quarter of the workforce in casual employment today. One of the highest users of
casual employees is the higher education sector, where casual academics (referred to as session-
als in the Australian context) are estimated to account for 50% of the overall teaching load. The
purpose of this article is to investigate the processes associated with the management of sessional
academic staff. The study focuses on a single university, utilising a survey questionnaire and
interviews with the sessional academics and their managers. The results depict a bifurcated sys-
tem of maximum labour regulation for full-time academics alongside minimum regulation for
sessional staff. The findings stress the urgency for improvement in both the employment condi-
tions and management of sessional academic staff, both for their own benefit and the universities
that employ them.
Keywords: Australian universities; academic employment; casual employment; workforce
segmentation
Introduction
In the Australian system of labour regulation, a casual employee is one who: is
employed on a short-term basis, receives no leave entitlements and is outside
standard employment protection such as unfair dismissal regulations (Burgess,
*Corresponding author. Curtin Business School, Curtin University, Perth, WA, Australia.
Email: julia.connell@curtin.edu.au
Tertiary Education and Management, 2013
Vol. 19, No. 2, 161–175, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13583883.2013.783617
Ó2013 European Higher Education Society
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Campbell, & May, 2008). The casual employee in Australia occupies a position in
labour regulation that is in many ways similar to a temporary employee in Europe
(Campbell & Burgess, 2001). In the past, casuals were employed in sectors with sea-
sonal labour demand or with an uneven distribution of labour demand over the day,
week or month. Hence, casuals were found in retailing, hotels, hospitality and con-
struction (Burgess et al., 2008). For employers, casual employment offers a high
degree of flexibility in labour use with regard to costs, both numeric and functional,
while for many employees it meets the demands for short-term and irregular employ-
ment required by students and women with caring responsibilities (Burgess et al.,
2008). The Australian workforce has gradually been casualised over the past 25
years, and currently around one-quarter of the workforce are casually employed
(Australian Council of Trade Unions, 2012). What is interesting about the process
of casualisation is that it has also spread into professional employment such as nurs-
ing and teaching (de Ruyter, 2004). However, one of the highest users of casual
employees is the Australian higher education sector, where casual employment has
expanded in numbers and employment share for the past two decades (May, 2011).
The Australian higher education sector has the third highest level of casual
employment among 14 industries, behind the health care and social assistance and
retail industries, and ahead of the hospitality industry (Australian Council of Trade
Unions, 2012). The surge in casually employed academics is a recent phenome-
non. Specifically, in the 15 years between 1996 and 2011, the number of full-time
equivalent (FTE) casually employed academics grew by 81% (Larkins, 2011). By
2011, casual academics represented 25% of teaching and research, and teaching-
only academics (National Tertiary Education Union, 2012). Casual academics are
estimated to carry 50% of the teaching load in universities, including up to 80%
of the first-year teaching load (Percy et al., 2008). When it is considered that one
FTE academic position constitutes from one to 16 actual persons, it is not surpris-
ing that there are now twice as many casually employed academics in Australia as
there are academics in continuing employment, including fixed-term employment
(May, 2011). In the context of Australian universities, casually employed academ-
ics are known as “sessionals” who teach courses for a given session teaching term.
The sessional may coordinate courses, design courses, mark assignments or mark
examinations. The contracts are flexible in terms of duration and duties, and, as
such, sessionals are the ultimate form of contingent labour (Standing, 1999).
Twenty years ago, in one of the first Australian studies of casual academics,
Fine, Graham, and Paxman (1992, p. 51) were struck by the “highly personalized
nature of casual appointments” in terms of recruitment, development and supervi-
sion. Driven by the external forces of globalisation and neoliberalism (Olssen &
Peters, 2005), government policy changes in the 1980s led to the massification of
higher education systems, and this was rapidly followed by their marketisation and
corporatisation (Ryan, Guthrie, & Neumann, 2008). Australian governments of
both political persuasions accepted the logic of neoliberalism and imposed it
through the steering mechanisms of competition, budgets and performance
measurements. Senior management at universities readily accepted government
162 S. Ryan et al.
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impositions and used their own steering mechanisms, such as budgets, structure
and governance (bureaucratisation and monetarisation), to change relationships
and structures within the university (Ryan & Guthrie, 2009). In effect, universities
did to their own faculties, schools and departments what the government had done
to them (Marginson & Considine, 2000). The result is a system that is highly reli-
ant on surplus funds generated from large numbers of full fee-paying international
and domestic students, and transnational programmes. Behind this shift of Austra-
lian universities into global education, there is an army of casually employed
academics who are used as a buffer against the vagaries and oscillations in the
global higher education market, and in government policy and funding.
The purpose of this article is to explore the employment relationship of sessional
academics, in particular the extent to which sessionals have access to fundamental
human resource management processes. Using a single university case study of
casual academic employment, involving a survey of casual academics and inter-
views with casuals and their managers, we outline the personalised, discretionary
and ad hoc nature of the employment relationship. This demonstrates that univer-
sities have been restructured from an employment model that was previously
linked to long-term engagement, secure employment and a career structure, into
organisations that resemble construction sites and supermarkets with day and
casual labour; short-term and insecure hires; seasonal and monthly fluctuations in
demand; and a “floating pool” of contingent labour located on the boundaries of
universities. This has resulted in a situation where many of the sessional academic
staff believe that they are both marginalised and excluded.
The article proceeds with a discussion concerning the casualisation of the Aus-
tralian academic workforce. This leads to an analysis of the segmentation of the
academic workforce and the marginalisation of the periphery in terms of employ-
ment conditions and service access. These processes are illustrated in practice
through a case study of one Australian university. The following sections explain
how, through the use of a survey of sessional staff and a series of interviews and
focus groups, the university’s management practices impact on casual academics
and their managers. This is followed by a discussion of the findings, together with
suggestions for improving the treatment of the peripheral academic workforce.
The Casualisation of Labour at Australian Universities
The application of numeric flexibility strategies in Australian universities has
become endemic and institutionalised. Australian universities now employ twice as
many academics on a casual basis as they do staff with ongoing employment
contracts, either tenured or on limited-term contracts (May, 2011). This situation
has arisen from a confluence of four major changes in the Australian higher
education system:
(1) a 28% reduction in real government funding of higher education between
1995 and 2005 (Ryan et al., 2008);
Casual Academic Staff in an Australian University 163
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(2) a 72% increase in student numbers against a 38.5% increase in academics
in the period 2000–2011 (Larkins, 2011);
(3) changes to the Australian industrial relations system that replaced industry-
wide agreements with enterprise agreements, introduced direct bargaining
and involved fewer collective and legislative constraints over labour use
strategies (Sappey, Burgess, Lyons, & Buultjens, 2008); and,
(4) the pressure for research outputs from firstly, the Research Training
Framework and now the Excellence in Research Australia framework,
resulting in over a third of academics being classified as research only
(Larkins, 2011), and a cross-subsidisation of research from teaching activi-
ties (Deloitte Access Economics, 2011).
Universities receive less public funding than previously, they compete for
fee-paying students in national and international markets, they have fewer
constraints placed on them regarding employment arrangements, yet they are
required to nurture and attract key research staff. The result is a growing periphery
of casual academics with a core of key researchers and administrators, resulting in
a highly segmented university workforce.
Changes in the Employment of Academic University Staff
Changes in the core values of universities have changed the ways in which staff are
employed (Parker, 2012). Prior to 1989, the position of tutor (an entry-level posi-
tion) existed as part of an academic career path, and was considered either an
academic apprenticeship reserved for research students or a permanent position
recognised as the entry-level classification to an academic career. With the intro-
duction of new academic career classifications, comprising levels A–E (entry-level
associate lecturer (A) to professor (E)), the title and role of the tutor effectively
disappeared from employment agreements and institutional policies (O’Brien,
2003). The realisation that sessional employees were a cheap option, together with
an increasing propensity to employ academics on fixed-term contracts to deal with
student growth and funding decreases in the 1990s, allowed universities to reduce
the need for continuing academic appointments.
For a short period, the unconstrained growth in casual academic employment was
checked by the introduction of the Higher Education Contract of Employment Award
(HECE), handed down by the Australian Industrial Relations Commission in 1998.
The new award restricted the conditions under which fixed-term contracts could be
used for academic work, such as for: a specific task or project; undertaking research;
requirements for recent professional practice; and pre-retirement contracts amongst
other categories (Lyons & Ingersoll, 2009). Enterprise agreement provisions backed
the HECE restrictions on fixed-term contracts, with the clear intent to curb universi-
ties’ use of various forms of precarious employment to meet the growth in student
numbers. However, such limitations were short-lived and contentious in terms of
their effectiveness, since enforcement and monitoring processes were largely absent.
164 S. Ryan et al.
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Paradoxically, in 2005 the Federal Government enacted the Higher Education
Workplace Relations Requirements (HEWRRs) for higher education providers,
with the intent of removing restrictions on labour use strategies (that is, limiting or
monitoring workforce casualisation), and putting in place enforcement mecha-
nisms linked to the funding of universities. The HEWRRs encouraged compliance
by making government funding contingent on acquiescence to the regulations. In
particular, among the HEWRR requirements, neither enterprise agreements nor
institutional policies limited the ability of management to make decisions and
implement change in respect of staffing requirements. This included no limitations
on the forms and mix of employment arrangements. The effect was to give univer-
sity management the right to employ academics through any form of employment
they wished. Hence, discretion with regard to labour use and further workforce
casualisation was encouraged. This led to an expansion in sessional academic
employment that continues, despite the repeal of the HEWWRs in 2008 and a
movement in university enterprise agreements to reinstitute the equivalent of the
HECE. The repeal of the HEWWRs was a case of too little, too late, since casuali-
sation had become an integral part of the Australian university business model,
and dependence on sessional academic contracts had become institutionalised
across the sector (Coates & Goedegebuure, 2010; Parker, 2012).
Sessional academics in Australian universities experience different forms of
exclusion from conditions and benefits, and from workplace and infrastructure
support. Previous findings from studies of Australian casual academics include the
following: underpayment and/or limited time payment for preparation and marking
(Brown, Goodman, & Yasukawa, 2010; Lazarsfeld-Jensen & Morgan, 2009a); lack
of input into curriculum development (Brown et al., 2010); lack of development
opportunities, both formal (e.g. training) and informal (e.g. mentoring) (Knight,
Baume, Tait, & Yorke, 2007; Percy & Beaumont, 2008); and poor management
of sessional academics (Gunasekara, 2007; Percy et al., 2008), including exclusion
from teaching discussions, absence of feedback, hiring at short notice or after
teaching sessions commence, and denial of access to basic services such as storage
facilities (Junor, 2004; Lazarsfeld-Jensen & Morgan, 2009a). Other forms of exclu-
sion include: delayed internet and library access; lack of office space or computing
services; and exclusion from mainstream activities such as meetings and seminars
(Gunasekara, 2007). The very nature of precarious employment makes sessional
academic staff susceptible in terms of: bullying and intimidation, unfair demands,
feelings of isolation, lack of recognition (Lazarsfeld-Jensen & Morgan, 2009a) and
feeling undervalued (Percy et al., 2008). Few universities have formalised policies
and procedures governing recruitment and the support of sessional academics
(Percy et al., 2008). The point has now been reached where the national quality
agency for higher education, the Tertiary Education Quality Standard Agency
(2012), has identified a “significant reliance on academic staff employed under
casual work contracts” as one of the key risks to the reputation of Australian
higher education.
Casual Academic Staff in an Australian University 165
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The Devolution of Responsibilities
In the devolution of responsibilities to meet government and institutional perfor-
mance targets, the bottom rung, the casual academics, have been overlooked. The
federal government has steered universities to compliance through a series of
teaching and research assessment exercises, each with funding attached towards
reaching targets and establishing monitoring mechanisms. University management
has followed suit by devolving responsibility for compliance down the line to their
faculties and schools (Marginson & Considine, 2000). Transactional steering
mechanisms have included cost cutting, strategic plans, incentive grants, perfor-
mance targets, monitoring and accountability procedures (Parker, 2012). The
devolution of responsibility to faculty managers and departmental heads to meet
targets and objectives set from above not only increases executive control, but also
weakens the academic base of universities, as academics are regarded as obstacles
to reorganisation and resource redeployment (Marginson, 2001). Mechanisms to
control academics are seen in the use of performance management, workload
allocations and constant measurement of their work, through the application of
metrics that evaluate teaching and research performance (Bexley, James, &
Arkoudis, 2011; Ryan, 2012). “Executive leaders often become overwhelmed by
their workload and disconnected from the academic and administrative community
they supposedly lead” (Parker, 2012, p. 609). Further down the line, heads of
departments/schools are crippled by enlarged and multidisciplinary schools and
pressures to meet centrally set targets (Scott, Coates, & Anderson, 2008). Under
these circumstances, the relatively invisible sessional workforce is overlooked as
their line managers, normally course coordinators, are themselves given little
support in understanding and developing this facet of their work (Lefoe, Parrish,
Malfroy, McKenzie, & Ryan, 2011).
The team leader/line manager role is one of considerable ambiguity. Line man-
agement positions are recognised by many as contradictory with regard to the
responsibilities of the role and the limitations of power and authority inherent in
the management structure. Line managers frequently have numerous and conflict-
ing demands that prevent them from prioritising people management (Renwick,
2003). In the case of a university, the course coordinator as line manager is
already beset by multiple expectations other than the management of casual staff.
For the casual academic, the only contact point in the institution is the academic
who hires them. In a survey of a casual academic staff in University of New South
Wales, Fine et al. (1992) noted that the academic who hires casual staff typically
has little control over budget decisions, and those making budget decisions
typically have no interaction with sessional staff and very little awareness of them.
It has been 20 years since Fine et al. (1992) carried out the first examination of
casual academics in Australia. Although important but intermittent studies have
been carried out since then (e.g. Junor, 2004), this study extends the case study
work of Fine et al. with an exploration of employment practices for casual academ-
ics within a single university.
166 S. Ryan et al.
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Methods
The research study was conducted within an Australian university in 2012. It was
designed in two parts: an online survey of casual academics was followed by focus
groups with casual academics and interviews with heads of schools, administrative
staff and course coordinators. In 2011, the university employed almost 2000
academics on casual employment contracts, compared to 986 who were employed
on permanent or fixed-term contracts. The 2:1 ratio is similar to that found by
May (2011) for the Australian university workforce overall. All persons (999)
registered on the university payroll on 30 March 2012 as casually employed
academics were invited via email to participate in an anonymous online survey
over a period of three weeks during April 2012, and the response rate was 30%
(305) in total.
The survey instrument consisted of 43 items relating to employment informa-
tion, academic development and support, academic practice, motivation and
satisfaction, and demographic data. The survey items were adapted from earlier
surveys by Junor (2004), Coates, Dobson, Goedegebuure, and Meek (2009),
Smith and Coombe (2006) and Knight et al. (2007). Only those items that
corresponded with Junor’s (2004) instrument, plus one or two related items are
reported in this article. A final question allowed for open-ended responses to
capture information not covered in the closed questions.
The second, qualitative component of the research comprised focus groups with
casual academics and interviews with their managers and administrative staff. All
casual academics who received an invitation to participate in the survey were
invited to indicate their interest in participating in a focus group. Forty casual
academics participated in six focus groups, and seven heads of school or units and
their relevant administrative staff were invited to participate in interviews. The
interviews were semi-structured and ranged in time from 45 minutes to 2 hours.
The transcripts were broadly coded according to common issues such as selection
and appointment, development, processes, payment and conditions, training and
access to support services.
Findings
The following research findings rely on data from the survey, focus groups and
interviews. Quotations from individuals, either casual academics or managers, are
reported in italics. A profile of respondents (see Table 1) shows the majority of
sessional respondents to be female, middle-aged, with a postgraduate degree and
approximately five years’ academic experience. Moreover, the great majority
performed teaching duties only and sought a secure academic career.
Unsurprisingly, the issue of greatest concern to survey respondents was the
discontinuity of employment arising from the uncertainty of teaching allocations
that adversely affected their ability to plan finances and other aspects of their lives
(see Table 2 for details).
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Following interviews with heads of school, it was clear that most have only
“arms-length” involvement with sessional academics, which incurs little or no
direct contact. The management of sessionals is delegated to the course coordina-
tor who has responsibility for recruitment, training and performance management.
Since the number of casuals needed is often unknown until the start of each
teaching term, when student numbers are finalised, the process of appointment is
somewhat ad hoc and reactive, and personal relationships based on “who you
know” count most in terms of initial recruitment. Both the reactive and personal
nature of appointments are evidenced in comments such as: “I got a phone call
and then I just tumbled into it from there”; and “[I was initially employed]
through a contact in the faculty who said, ‘I’m in need of someone to come and
teach into my program’”. Rarely was there evidence of a formal appointment
process comprising job descriptions, open advertisements and interviews.
Although heads of school and their administrators indicated there were school
policies to re-employ the same people contingent on adequate performance, they
Table 1. Characteristics of sessional academic respondents
Category Item N= 297 (%)
Age Average age 45
Gender Female 61
Years in casual employment Between 5 and 10 years 23
More than 10 years 25
Median duration in years 4.9
Highest qualifications Bachelor degree 17
Bachelor Hons and other postgraduate 12
Masters’ degree 26
PhD 27
Enrolled in PhD 17
Preferred employment University career 69
Casual teaching 17
Career outside the sector 14
Main duties Tutor 72
Lecturer 26
% of income from casual employment Greater than 80% 29
Table 2. Employment concerns of sessional academics
Item Moderately to very important (%)
Discontinuity of employment 84
Insufficient notice of teaching allocation 81
Impact of income uncertainty on financial planning 80
Employment risks in refusing demands seen as unreasonable 72
Impact of variable hours on family life 64
168 S. Ryan et al.
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also agreed the methods of evaluating performance were informal and less than
satisfactory. Most sessionals reported re-employment to be less certain than
suggested by school administrators. Job insecurity is high and there is absolute
discretion afforded to course coordinators around employment and re-employ-
ment. Instead of past performance, personal relationships and preferences were the
main bases for re-employment decisions. However, as the following quotations
illustrate, even previous personal relationships are temporary and insecure when it
comes to the provision of further work: “You are reliant on friendly benefactors,
lecturers and coordinators who are prepared to give you work … but the thing is,
if circumstances change, subject circumstances change, well then, if you lose that
benefactor you might lose a whole section of work”; and “every time the course
coordinator changes, so do the tutors. New course coordinator and no job”.
Most schools had some form of induction process for sessionals; however,
school managers generally agreed they were not effective and there were no
processes to ensure attendance. In some instances, individual or small group
induction sessions were conducted by a course coordinator, but this was left to the
discretion of the course coordinator. The lack of clarity surrounding induction is
captured in a statement from a school administrative officer:
As far as I know they do the university orientation, which is that online kind of stuff.
Then the process is, once they are allocated their course, each course coordinator is
supposed to have a meeting, and we go through the course content and how we want
it to be taught and so on.
From the sessional academic’s perspective, such opportunities were few. For
most, “there’s no orientation, I was just thrown in the deep end”.
Once a casual academic is appointed, they are frequently left to their own devices
with minimal or no supervision. Despite the course coordinator’s considerable dis-
cretion over appointments, duties, pay, re-employment, support services and other
conditions of appointment, there appears to be little further interest in what the
casual academic might actually do. The feeling of invisibility is common among ses-
sionals as they are generally excluded from mainstream school activities and com-
plain of being ignored by their course coordinators. Experiences of supervision are
typified in the following comments: “I don’t have much contact with my co-ordina-
tor but I always keep her informed, just never hear back”; “I find out how to do
things by trial and error; course coordinators are happiest when tutors are out of
sight and out of mind”; “I feel privileged to teach at the Uni but I wonder why
nobody ever asks what I do”. In fairness, some sessionals do experience excellent
supervision and development from their course coordinators, but where this occurs,
it seems to be the exception rather than the rule. In either case: “tutors are at the
whim of the course coordinators who can be really good or really bad”.
The discretion of the course coordinator as line manager, the invisibility of
casual academic work and the nature of teaching result in underpaid and unpaid
work that varies between faculties, among schools and within the same school.
The survey results in Table 3 indicate the levels of unpaid work at the university,
Casual Academic Staff in an Australian University 169
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especially for hours associated with student consultation and time spent respond-
ing to emails.
The nature of teaching itself does not allow for exact hourly calculations and
different schools are subject to different budget considerations: “there’s a lot of
unpaid work such as administration and marking; there’s different pay rates
between departments but never enough money to cover the work, especially
administration and email”. In some schools, the rate of payment is linked to
students such that “our pay is always uncertain because it depends on student
numbers”. In some instances, the course coordinator has a role in deciding what is
and what is not considered paid work: “it depends on the course coordinator
whether we are paid for meeting attendance”. Finally, in some schools, paid and
unpaid work depends on the school culture: “our full-time professors give their
marking to us PhD students but without pay and we’re afraid to say no, especially
the international students”.
Sessionals receive very little in terms of training and development, advice and
feedback, and access to basic human resource support. The main form of perfor-
mance review is via informal mechanisms, such as student feedback initiated by
the individual casual academic. There are a number of barriers to implementing a
more formal system including dispersed campus locations, limitations of university
online feedback systems, and a lack of interest by managers and course coordina-
tors. Sometimes, a course coordinator might conduct an informal review, but this
occurs infrequently. From the survey results on training and development and
feedback opportunities (Table 4), there are serious deficiencies in how these areas
are managed, or not managed, as is more often the case.
The conditions for sessional staff are well entrenched in academic culture.
Although most academics and administrators are aware of their situation, they are,
for whatever reason, unable or unwilling to make changes. The following
admission by a head of school of inequitable treatment of casuals demonstrates
awareness of the problem: “Yes, they are treated like slave labour. I don’t think
they’re treated as an important resource”. However, awareness is not action.
Another head of school likewise shows awareness and sympathy, but also provides
insight into how the “blame” can be shifted beyond the level of the school:
I would like there to be less uncertainty or less differences between areas in that
respect, and that would be part of this induction process; they would be trained by
human resources in terms of the expectations of the university, not the expectations
Table 3. Paid and unpaid work of sessional academics
Are you paid for the following tasks? Yes (%)
Student consultation 33
Marking 91
Responding to emails 16
Preparation for teaching 50
170 S. Ryan et al.
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of the particular lecturer or the expectations of a particular head of school, but what
the university sees as its obligations and their rights, as well as all the other processes
in terms of how they can develop.
While this may be a correct analysis in some aspects, it fails to recognise the
powerful role of the school and the line management responsibilities it devolves to
course coordinators, both of which reinforce the peripheral status of the casual
academic. Neither the heads of schools nor course coordinators seem to be aware
of their own obligations with respect to the employment of these employees.
Discussion
It is apparent from this study that the observation made by Fine et al. (1992)
regarding the highly personalised nature of recruitment, development and
supervision of sessional academics still holds true over 20 years later. Within the
Australian university system, it appears there is a bifurcated workforce—one group
(full-time and ongoing academics) that is subject to formal human resource
management processes, and another that is characterised by informal and ad hoc
processes. Workforce segmentation is extensive, endemic and growing; it extends
not only to the terms and conditions of employment, but also extends to service
access and management. Universities possess extensive processes and human
resource management systems concerning recruitment, induction, training, proba-
tion, career development and performance management, that are in fact so
extensive that they are a continual source of complaint (Bexley et al., 2011; Ryan,
2012). However, they only apply to continuing academics, the “core” of the uni-
versity workforce. On the periphery of the workforce, the recruitment practices for
sessionals (casual academics) are “literally just that: casual” (Gunasekara, 2007).
There was a strong consensus among heads of schools and other managers that
sessional academics are a critical component affecting the success of university
teaching. In particular, they acknowledged the strong reliance on their expertise
and the inability of schools to function without them. However, the selection and
management of sessional academics are left to course coordinators who, in the
main, receive neither support nor training for this function. Indeed, the work of
course coordinators has become extensive and onerous through mass and multiple
Table 4. Training and development offered to sessional academics
Item Agree or strongly agree (%)
Provided with opportunities and time for contact with other staff 50
Provided with useful performance feedback 32
Provided with opportunities for training and development 23
Made aware of entitlements 20
Advised on career options 15
Included in meetings and decision-making processes 38
Casual Academic Staff in an Australian University 171
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programme delivery, and the requirement to support growing numbers of casual
staff (Percy et al., 2008), such that discretion and informality characterise univer-
sity management practices. Consequently, we have a professional, sophisticated,
knowledge-based industry that is export-intensive, yet it relies on employment
practices for casual academics that would be unacceptable in most other sectors of
the economy, including the fast food industry (Nadolny & Ryan, 2012).
Moreover, as recognised by Australian University Quality Agency and the
Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency, these practices do not come with-
out risk. Without attention to current human resource management practices for
casual academics, universities will be open to risks associated with quality
assurance, management and reputational issues. Several reports and “best
practice” guidelines for the management and development of casual academics
and their managers have been produced in the past decade (Australian Universities
Teaching Committee, 2003; Lefoe et al., 2011; Percy et al., 2008) with little
impact, at least within the university reported here. The reasons for this continuing
and growing situation are multiple but stem from the entrenched invisibility of
casual academics.
Invisibility arises from several factors, all of which are underpinned by a focus on
financialisation at the expense of the core university functions of teaching and
research (Parker, 2012). Among the specific factors leading to the invisibility of
casual academics are: the abolition of small academic departments in favour of
large school structures (Scott et al., 2008); the increased and often unmanageable
workloads of academics and their managers (Bexley et al., 2011); the ambiguous
position of course coordinators with full responsibility but no authority (Percy
et al., 2008; Lefoe et al., 2011); and the absence of a casual academic voice due to
exclusion and isolation (Lazarsfeld-Jensen & Morgan, 2009a, 2009b; Nadolny &
Ryan, 2012).
Conclusions
As this article reports on a single case study, it is not representative of all Austra-
lian universities. However, prior reviews of the conditions of employment for Aus-
tralian sessional academic staff confirm the forms of exclusion and marginalisation
outlined in our case study (Bexley et al., 2011; Brown et al., 2010). Australian
universities have embarked on an extensive and systematic process of workforce
segmentation. In line with the flexible model of the firm, the peripheral workforce
offers universities the ability to alter labour costs, employee numbers and the skill
composition of the workforce at short notice. For those university staff caught in
the periphery, it means that their pay and conditions are inferior to staff engaged
as core workers, and their access to acceptable human resource management prac-
tices is limited. Ongoing funding cuts by the federal government and the shift
towards greater market provision of higher education, especially through attracting
offshore and full fee-paying students, have resulted in universities operating in a
cycle of short-term uncertainty, while, at the same time, being forced to respond
172 S. Ryan et al.
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to greater demands for accountability and reporting from central government. A
segmented and flexible workforce is an obvious response to these developments
(Standing, 1999); however, such systems pose a range of risks to universities which
are associated with the potential impacts on reputation and research from having a
large casualised workforce. In addition, as clearly indicated by the peripheral work-
force included in this case study, employment conditions and service access were
inferior, sub-standard and determined by access to “friendly benefactors”, leading
to the sense of marginalisation and exclusion amongst the sessional academic staff.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge the research support provided by Karen
McNeil and Christiaan McComb.
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