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Special Issue of Social Alternatives on university reform in Australia
Abstract
The theme for this issue, 'It’s Time: The re-form of Australian public universities’, is timely for the forthcoming federal elections in Australia, particularly as the higher education system is crucial to Australia’s path forward at any time. While the university sector has gone through constant changes historically, the themed articles in this issue express
significant concern about recent reforms where: managers, administrators, academic staff and students now function under a commercial, transactional system of hierarchical
power relations informed by ‘managerialism’ and ‘new public management’ principles (Hil et al 2022: 3). While the articles go beyond critique and propose alternatives to the
‘corporate university’, this cover design specifically aimed to visually capture their quite complex concerns.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
This paper critically explores the notion of academic citizenship, evaluates its importance and argues that faculty have shifted away from engaging in collegial activities to behaviour that is purposefully targeted towards the attainment of academic performance metrics. We highlight the significant implications and challenges for the academy of a gradual retreat from academic citizenship in an era characterised by academic capitalism. We argue that university management urgently need to foster a culture of collegiality that fully appreciates and nurtures academic citizenship, particularly amongst junior faculty as they represent the future of the academy. Furthermore, we call for academic citizenship activities to be explicitly recognised in academic performance metrics and workloads to facilitate prioritisation by faculty.
Astratta
it Questo articolo esplora criticamente la nozione di “cittadinanza accademica”, ne valuta l'importanza, e sostiene che la professione accademica si è spostata dall’impegnarsi in attività collegiali a comportamenti mirati al raggiungimento di metriche di rendimento. Sottolineiamo le significative implicazioni e le sfide per l'accademia dovute ad un graduale ritiro dalla “cittadinanza accademica” in un'epoca caratterizzata dal “capitalismo accademico”. Sosteniamo che la gestione universitaria abbia urgente bisogno di promuovere una cultura della collegialità che apprezzi pienamente e nutra la “cittadinanza accademica”, in particolare tra i giovani accademici, in quanto rappresentano il futuro dell'accademia. Inoltre, richiediamo che le attività legate alla “cittadinanza accademica” siano esplicitamente riconosciute nelle metriche di rendimento e nei carichi di lavoro affinché la professione accademica sia facilitate nell’assegnazione delle priorità.
In an era where higher education institutions appear increasingly committed to what Sara Ahmed calls ‘speech acts’ whereby declared goodwill, through stated commitments to diversity, equity, and increasing Indigenous student enrolment and completion have been made; it is undeniable that Indigenous academics are in high demand. With fewer than 430 Indigenous academics currently employed here on the continent now commonly referred to as ‘Australia’, and 69% of that cohort identifying as female, what does it look like to experience this demand as an Indigenous academic woman? Drawing on data collected from a Nation-wide study in 2019 of 17 one-on-one, face-to-face interviews with Indigenous academic women, using Indigenous research methodologies and poetic transcription, this paper explores the experiences and relational aspects of Indigenous academic women’s roles in Australian higher education.
Objectives
With the high and rising total cost of medical school, medical student debt is an increasing concern for medical students and graduates, with significant potential to impact the well-being of physicians and their patients. We hypothesised that medical student debt levels would be negatively correlated with mental health and academic performance, and would influence career direction (ie, medical specialty choice).
Design
We performed a systematic literature review to identify articles that assessed associations between medical student mental health, academic performance, specialty choice and debt. The databases PubMed, Medline, Embase, Scopus and PsycINFO were searched on 12 April 2017, for combinations of the medical subject headings Medical Student and Debt as search terms. Updates were incorporated on 24 April 2019.
Results
678 articles were identified, of which 52 met the inclusion criteria after being reviewed in full text. The majority of studies were conducted in the USA with some from Canada, New Zealand, Scotland and Australia. The most heavily researched aspect was the association between medical student debt and specialty choice, with the majority of studies finding that medical student debt was associated with pursuit of higher paying specialties. In addition, reported levels of financial stress were high among medical students, and correlated with debt. Finally, debt was also shown to be associated with poorer academic performance.
Conclusions
Medical student debt levels are negatively associated with mental well-being and academic outcomes, and high debt is likely to drive students towards choosing higher paying specialties. Additional prospective studies may be warranted, to better understand how educational debt loads are affecting the well-being, career preparation and career choices of physicians-in-training, which may in turn impact the quality of care provided to their current and future patients.
With levels of student debt unprecedented and rising in many democracies, growing attention has been given by academics and practitioners to its possible effects for student wellbeing. This article makes three contributions to this debate. First, it offers a critical review of literature that considers the relationship of student debt and wellbeing to open up discussion about the dimensions, limitations and possibilities of the field. Second, the paper points to potential avenues for future research about student debt and wellbeing by considering indicative comments made by New Zealand university students as part of a series of in-depth interviews. Third, the article makes a practical contribution to current debates about the tuition ‘fees free’ policy in New Zealand. We argue that developing a more robust understanding of how student debt affects wellbeing may help to broaden and reinvigorate academic and public debate about student debt.
Bullshit is a ubiquitous communication practice that permeates many dimensions of organizational life. This essay outlines different understandings of bullshit and discusses their significance in the context of organization studies. While it is tempting to reject bullshit as corrosive to rational organizational practice, we argue that it is necessary to understand its organizational significance and performative nature more systematically. We outline different social functions of bullshit focusing on two particular types of managerial practices in which bullshit is likely to play a significant role: commanding and strategizing. On this backdrop, we consider bullshit in terms of the messages, senders and receivers involved, focusing especially on the dynamics between these dimensions in the context of organizations. The final part of this essay debates the reasons why bullshit, which is recognized by organizational members, is rarely called and rejected explicitly.
Performance measurement systems (PMSs) are a global phenomenon emanating from new public management (NPM) reforms. While they are now prolific and entrenched, they have attracted criticism based on their design and the manner in which they are applied. The purpose of this article is to explore the history of accounting for research in the Australian higher education sector (HES). It focuses on how successive Australian governments have steered research within the sector through the introduction of PMSs, in line with NPM reforms. Relying on publicly available online policy documents and scholarly literature, the study traces the development of performance measures within the Australian HES from the mid-1980s to 2015. It contributes to literature in management accounting aspects of NPM through the means of management accounting techniques such as PMSs. It also contributes to accounting history literature through an examination of three decades of accounting for research in the Australian HES.
University managers used to couple administrative work with research. Now the role is full-time, they’re losing touch with the academic community
Exploring the idea of student protests as an autonomous object of research and discussion, this paper leads to the understanding that the transforming role of university and its governance defines the possibilities for the political role of students. In this perspective, there is a particular constellation of the different forms of higher education governance that provides students with the right and even the responsibility of protesting as politically engaged citizens of the university and of the state. Approaching the transformation of the models of university governance as a set of archaeologically organised states this paper identifies the sequential roles provided to the students and the meaning of their protests and demonstrations. After visiting some antecedents of more contemporaneous student movements and protests, this paper focuses on the UK to explore three manifestations of university governance that can be roughly differentiated as the enduring democratic period that extends from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, the globalisation period that extends from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s and as the post-millennial turn. These periods, embodying three different styles of governance of higher education, not only demonstrate conformity with the political and economic contexts in which they are embeded, they also correspond to particular socio-technological and communicative ecosystems and determine the specificities of the role of the students and their capacity for political action.
Background
Practitioners and decision makers in the medical and insurance systems need knowledge on the relationship between work exposures and burnout. Many burnout studies – original as well as reviews - restricted their analyses to emotional exhaustion or did not report results on cynicism, personal accomplishment or global burnout. To meet this need we carried out this review and meta-analyses with the aim to provide systematically graded evidence for associations between working conditions and near-future development of burnout symptoms. MethodsA wide range of work exposure factors was screened. Inclusion criteria were: 1) Study performed in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand 1990–2013. 2) Prospective or comparable case control design. 3) Assessments of exposure (work) and outcome at baseline and at least once again during follow up 1–5 years later. Twenty-five articles met the predefined relevance and quality criteria. The GRADE-system with its 4-grade evidence scale was used. ResultsMost of the 25 studies focused emotional exhaustion, fewer cynicism and still fewer personal accomplishment. Moderately strong evidence (grade 3) was concluded for the association between job control and reduced emotional exhaustion and between low workplace support and increased emotional exhaustion. Limited evidence (grade 2) was found for the associations between workplace justice, demands, high work load, low reward, low supervisor support, low co-worker support, job insecurity and change in emotional exhaustion. Cynicism was associated with most of these work factors. Reduced personal accomplishment was only associated with low reward. There were few prospective studies with sufficient quality on adverse chemical, biological and physical factors and burnout. Conclusion
While high levels of job support and workplace justice were protective for emotional exhaustion, high demands, low job control, high work load, low reward and job insecurity increased the risk for developing exhaustion. Our approach with a wide range of work exposure factors analysed in relation to the separate dimensions of burnout expanded the knowledge of associations, evidence as well as research needs. The potential of organizational interventions is illustrated by the findings that burnout symptoms are strongly influenced by structural factors such as job demands, support and the possibility to exert control.
Over the last 50 years, we argue that incentives for academic scientists have become increasingly perverse in terms of competition for research funding, development of quantitative metrics to measure performance, and a changing business model for higher education itself. Furthermore, decreased discretionary funding at the federal and state level is creating a hypercompetitive environment between government agencies (e.g., EPA, NIH, CDC), for scientists in these agencies, and for academics seeking funding from all sources—the combination of perverse incentives and decreased funding increases pressures that can lead to unethical behavior. If a critical mass of scientists become untrustworthy, a tipping point is possible in which the scientific enterprise itself becomes inherently corrupt and public trust is lost, risking a new dark age with devastating consequences to humanity. Academia and federal agencies should better support science as a public good, and incentivize altruistic and ethical outcomes, while de-emphasizing output.
This paper presents an autoethnographical account of the events associated with the
author's redundancy from a tenured academic position at Murdoch Business School, Murdoch
University, Perth, Western Australia. It is argued that managerialism, a social philosophy
that sees the management of a university to be little different from the management
of a for-profit business, provided university management with a rationale for a course
of action that imposed heavy costs on individuals and undermined core academic values.
The apparent weakness of the protection provided by tenure is highlighted by the mechanisms
through which university management exerted control over the academic employment relationship.
The cost of imposing management's will to win at all costs corrodes valuable aspects
of academic work, such as collegiality, trust and the sharing of information. The
paper shows that the various mechanisms of control imposed by a university management
that adheres to managerialist principles can destroy much of what is worthwhile in
the university. What is left is something with little spirit and nothing worthwhile
to manage.
Entfremdung als kritischer Begriff in Sozialphilosophie, Soziologie und Psychoanalyse zielt nicht nur auf Erfahrungen von Einzelpersonen und Gruppen, sondern auf den Zustand einer ganzen Gesellschaft. Dieser Band zeichnet ein dynamisches Gesamtbild, indem er verschiedene Bereiche der Entfremdung miteinander verknüpft.
This paper explores the impact of neoliberalism on Australia's public higher education system. It examines flaws in the university system revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic and identifies how the conditions created by neoliberal policies have limited universities' capacity to respond to a crisis. The paper reviews the previous literature on universities, neoliberalism policies, and new public management practices. It uses data from the literature, newspapers, and contemporary documents to shape an overview of the Australian public sector university system up to 2021 and its transformation by stealth. The impact of this transformation has been a heavy reliance on international onshore student fees to fund operations, infrastructure, and research activities. COVID-19-related public health measures have caused a significant downturn in the number of international students studying in Australia, in turn, creating a financial crisis that has seen many tens of thousands of university staff losing their jobs and courses being cut. The transformation has also seen accountingization of both individual academic and university performance to become the norm. The quantified performance metrics associated with accountingization have become universities' new language, and their goal displaced ends. Revenue generation and expenditure has been privileged over making a contribution to the nation and society. We call for a radical rethinking of the public sector university mission for the ultimate benefit of the Australian community.
Purpose
The Australian higher education sector faces severe risks from the consequences of COVID-19. This paper aims to explore these risks, their immediate impacts and the likely future impacts. The authors specifically focus on the institutional financial and social risks arising from the global pandemic.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors collect data using the 2019 annual reports of the 37 Australian public universities and relevant media contributions. The findings of identified sector change are interpreted through Laughlin’s organisational change diagnosis.
Findings
The sector confronts significant financial and social risks because of its over-reliance on income from fee-paying onshore overseas students resulting in universities primarily undertaking morphostatic changes. These risks include job losses, changing employment conditions, mental health issues for students, scholars, other staff, including casual staff, online learning shortfalls and the student expectations of their university experience. The study reveals how many of these risks are the inevitable consequence of the “accountingisation” of Australian public universities.
Practical implications
Despite material exposure, the universities provide only limited disclosure of the extent of the risks associated with increasing dependence on overseas student fees to 31 December 2019. The analysis highlights fake accountability and distorted transparency to users of audited financial statements – a major limitation of university annual reports.
Originality/value
Research on the Australian higher education sector has mainly focussed on the impact of policies and changes. The public disclosure of critical risks taken by these universities are now addressed.
COVID‐19‐related public health measures have severely impacted the Australian higher education system (AHES). This paper examines the resilience of the AHES, particularly its past reliance on onshore international students to generate revenue that cross‐subsidises operational and research expenses. By our measure, ten universities are at risk of financial default. With a different approach on the part of the Government and university leadership, surplus monies could have contributed to building a more resilient AHES. Our findings correct widely held misconceptions about the state of the AHES and aim to provide valuable learnings to individual universities and the sector more broadly.
Die Meinungsfreiheit steht weltweit unter Druck. Das gilt, wie schon immer, für die Meinungsfreiheit als klassisches Abwehrrecht gegen staatliche Eingriffe. Das gilt aber zunehmend auch mit Blick auf Private, die andere Rechte, Persönlichkeitsschutzrechte oder im weitesten Sinne arbeitsvertragliche oder tarifvertragliche Instrumente gegen die Meinungsfreiheit in Ansatz bringen und die staatlichen Gerichte zu Abwägungsentscheidungen zwingen. Selbst wenn diese zugunsten der Meinungsfreiheit ausfallen, kann dennoch ein erheblicher „chilling effect“ entstehen, denn Gerichts- und Prozesskosten können, je nach wirtschaftlicher Situation der Partei unterschiedliche Belastungen hervorrufen. Am Beispiel des australischen Hochschulbereichs, der zwar ganz vornehmlich aus öffentlichen Hochschulen besteht, aber sich in vielerlei Hinsicht nicht von privaten Unternehmungen unterscheidet, wird gezeigt, wie selbst Institutionen, die der Meinungsfreiheit in besonderer Weise verpflichtet sein sollten, nicht davor zurückschrecken, ihre finanziellen und wirtschaftlichen Interessen gegen Kritik zu verteidigen, auch wenn das als Einschränkung der Meinungsfreiheit gewertet werden kann.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to critique the accounting and financial orientation of Australian universities’ business model to identify the future university financial management and accounting role in universities’ strategic trajectory responding to COVID-19.
Design/methodology/approach
Informed by Habermasian perspectives on change, it uses published research into university commercialisation and media commentaries on COVID-19 impacts.
Findings
Australian universities have aggressively pursued an accounting-based private sector business model. Their revenue generating reliance on international student revenues has been undermined by the COVIS-19 crisis. Nonetheless, university management clings to their commercialised university identity and role colonised by the accounting structures. Fundamental change requires a reversal of this relationship.
Research limitations/implications
Future research must observe and evaluate university strategic crisis reactions and their impacts on national and societal well-being with a view to identifying alternative futures.
Practical implications
Universities face decisions concerning their ongoing role in society and their future approach to balancing operational strategies and the accounting influence.
Social implications
This study raises the issue of whether universities should continue being seen as an export industry supporting the national economy or as knowledge, educational and social resource for their national and regional communities.
Originality/value
This paper integrates research into universities over several decades into a strategic critique of their current reaction to an unprecedented global pandemic.
In the last few years scholars have postulated that non-institutionalized psychopathic individuals may be overrepresented in leadership positions. In this paper we juxtapose theory and research on the profile of those high in psychopathy in leadership positions with the traditional profile of those high in psychopathy in prisons and institutions. We hypothesize that the psychopathic leader has a unique combination of traits that enables and drives such a leader to be ‘successful’ in a position of power. We propose that the differentiating trait in the profile of the psychopathic leader may be the trait high self-control. This is in contrast with the traditional profile of institutionalized psychopathic individuals in which levels of self-control are typically low. Furthermore, we hypothesize that although the traits of high self-control and impulsivity are apparently contradictory, the conjunction of high self-control with one specific domain of impulsivity could further amplify the ‘success’ of the psychopathic leader.
The higher education sector in Australia is operating in an ideological context in which the ideas of managerialism and neoliberalism combine to create a discourse shaping the lives of both workers and students. The practices that emerge inside higher education organisations as a result combine to form an organisational neoliberal managerial culture that shapes practices, operating in a vicious cycle. In this vicious cycle, managers set the organisational culture through the roles they take on in this figured world, leading to particular ways of behaving and engaging in the practice of management. These experiences are received and internalised by their recipients who come to believe their reality reflects the only way things operate. In this paper I take an autoethnographic approach to reflect on my experiences of the practices emerging from this culture as I have experienced them within one higher education organisation in Australia. I argue that we are seeing the operationalisation of a discourse of managerial privilege that, in the long term, is not only detrimental to the functioning of higher education organisations but puts at risk the wellbeing of the nation through its impact on both staff and students
The research literature emphasises the emergence – in the English context particularly – of performative accountabilities associated with metrics-based evaluation. Recent studies observe uneven effects of such evaluations at organisational level. This UK-based study examines academics’ perceptions of the fairness of organisational accountabilities, drawing on organisational studies literature to identify dimensions of organisational justice. A cluster analysis identified four groups varying in their perceptions of procedural justice (fairness of organisational processes associated with metrics) and distributive justice (performance consequences of metrics). Exploring the responses further, interview respondents emphasised greater concerns with procedural justice and greater variability in accountability practices relating to research metrics than with teaching. In groups where procedural justice was evaluated more positively, academics saw metrics being applied in ways aligned with valued research and teaching enhancement practices. The study draws attention to institutional practices that contribute to academic perceptions of fairness and increased alignment between organisational and individual goals.
Organisational climate, particularly safety climate, has been documented as a crucial element in promoting occupational health and safety. However, most previous studies have focused more on safety issues (e.g., injuries and accidents) rather than health outcomes (e.g., illnesses, stress, etc). A comprehensive review is also lacking in relation to understanding the organisational climate–health relationship between different levels of analysis, different data sources and different analytical procedures. We conducted a systematic review to investigate previous scholarly contributions to organisational climate and health. The reviewed articles were obtained from three databases: ISI Web of Knowledge, PsycINFO and EBSCOHost Academic Premier Search. After reading the abstracts and full texts, we included 56 articles in our review. We found that the influence of organisational climate on employee health has been supported in prior research. However, hypotheses at the individual level are more frequently supported than those at the organisational level. Even though most studies analysed self-reported data and, thus, possibly suffered from common method bias, half of the studies were explicitly or implicitly trying to reduce the bias. Studies with and without remedies for reducing common method bias yielded similar results, suggesting that common method bias has little impact on organisational climate research. Overall, almost no differences were found among the different organisational climate constructs. The current review includes several recommendations for future research.
This chapter addresses the experiences of academics who have chosen to leave the profession early, or are seriously considering doing so. Drawing on thirty-four interviews with academics or former academics from Australia, the UK and beyond, it explores five themes: who is leaving; why they are leaving; the decision-making process; impact on their self; and the impact on others. The paper contributes to the literature on academic identity by analysing times when it is rendered precarious, actively negotiated or reformulated. Among its findings are: the importance of gender, the distresses of casualisation, the persistence of a strong sense of academic vocation, the impact of work intensification on physical and mental wellbeing, and academics’ discovery of healthy and intellectually satisfying professional lives outside the academy.
Institution-centric governance focusses on the university’s reputational capital as driven by quasi markets, tied to the career advancement of an increasingly powerful managerial caste. Entrenching across the Australian university sector, this approach to governance has whittled away multiple democratic functions of the Australian university, leaving central senior management and Council able to remove core capacities of the university in teaching, research and community service. We argue in contrast for a de-centred institution, through a community-oriented and community-participatory research agenda on problems that matter for the community as a way to regenerate the social justice mission of the university. Drawing on the pragmatist philosophical resources of the activist scholar, Isabelle Stengers, our proposed focus suggests a way out of the “enterprise university” and its institution-centric, authoritarian governance.
In Designs for the Pluriverse Arturo Escobar presents a new vision of design theory and practice aimed at channeling design's world-making capacity toward ways of being and doing that are deeply attuned to justice and the Earth. Noting that most design—from consumer goods and digital technologies to built environments—currently serves capitalist ends, Escobar argues for the development of an “autonomous design” that eschews commercial and modernizing aims in favor of more collaborative and placed-based approaches. Such design attends to questions of environment, experience, and politics while focusing on the production of human experience based on the radical interdependence of all beings. Mapping autonomous design’s principles to the history of decolonial efforts of indigenous and Afro-descended people in Latin America, Escobar shows how refiguring current design practices could lead to the creation of more just and sustainable social orders.
In his forward to The Postmodern Condition, Fredric Jameson distinguishes Lyotard's theories from Habermas. Using Habarmas' idea of the legitimation crisis as a starting point, Jameson outlines two legitimizing myths: the liberation of humanity and the speculative unity of all knowledge. He explains the trend in philosophy to express skepticism for totalizing philosophical narratives as part of the linguistic turn in philosophy. In the introduction to the book, Lyotard establishes the differences between modern and postmodern thought. He defines modern as a science that uses a grand narrative to legitimate itself. Conversely, postmodern is a general distrust of such metanarratives.
Despite whistle-blower protection legislation and healthcare codes of conduct, retaliation against nurses who report misconduct is common, as are outcomes of sadness, anxiety, and a pervasive loss of sense of worth in the whistle-blower. Literature in the field of institutional betrayal and intimate partner violence describes processes of abuse strikingly similar to those experienced by whistle-blowers. The literature supports the argument that although whistle-blowers suffer reprisals, they are traumatized by the emotional manipulation many employers routinely use to discredit and punish employees who report misconduct. "Whistle-blower gaslighting" creates a situation where the whistle-blower doubts her perceptions, competence, and mental state. These outcomes are accomplished when the institution enables reprisals, explains them away, and then pronounces that the whistle-blower is irrationally overreacting to normal everyday interactions. Over time, these strategies trap the whistle-blower in a maze of enforced helplessness. Ways to avoid being a victim of whistle-blower gaslighting, and possible sources of support for victims of whistle-blower gaslighting are provided.
There is by now a large consensus that ‘something’ happened to the universities of the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia over the past few decades. There is less agreement about the way this should be described, explained, and evaluated. I wrote this book to make sense of what has happened to universities in Britain, America, and Australia and describe how academics and students now experience the modern university. I also wanted to evaluate what has happened. This was never going to be an easy task.
In this article, I address six particular challenges that autoethnographers may face during their journey to understand how culture flows through the self while the self flows through culture. I ask how autoethnographers zoom into personal lives while staying focused on the study of culture, whether they should prefer hard data or soft impressions, to what extent autoethnography can be done collaboratively, whether evocative autoethnography is better than the analytic one, whether we own the stories that we tell in our texts, and in what way autoethnographers are either self-indulged narcissists or self-reflexive and vulnerable scholars. Addressing these challenges, I refer to the existing literature to illuminate the choices that autoethnographers have and to elaborate on the responsibility that they have for others and themselves, alike.
The objective of this paper is to explore the way internal organizational control processes are changed in response to external demands. It does this by investigating the organizational change undertaken by an Australian university in anticipation of, and in response to, an externally imposed research assessment exercise (RAE), specifically focusing on the university's internal research-related performance management system (PMS) and its impact on academics. It adopts a case study method, using data from publicly available documents, interviews with senior management, and a survey administered to academics. The data is interpreted and analyzed using Broadbent and Laughlin's organizational change model. The findings reveal that RAE was anticipated with the appointment of new senior leadership, a new vision, restructure of faculties and departments, and changes to the research PMS. The changes to both the university's mission (significant and longlasting, second order change) and its internal systems (less significant, first order change) are evident. In the context of the global proliferation of PMSs in the higher education sector, this paper contributes to the literature on PMSs, indicating its relevance to universities. Its empirics provide useful insights for university managers and regulators and, more broadly, the paper contributes to our understanding of organizational change.
Health system changes may increase primary health care workers’ dilemmatic space, created when reforms contravene professional values. Dilemmatic space may be a risk factor for burnout. This study partnered with six Australian primary health care services (in South Australia: four state government–managed services including one Aboriginal health team and one non-government organisation and in Northern Territory: one Aboriginal community–controlled service) during a period of change and examined workers’ dilemmatic space and incidence of burnout. Dilemmatic space and burnout were assessed in a survey of 130 staff across the six services (58% response rate). Additionally, 63 interviews were conducted with practitioners, managers, regional executives and health department staff. Dilemmatic space occurred across all services and was associated with higher rates of self-reported burnout. Three conditions associated with dilemmatic space were (1) conditions inherent in comprehensive primary health care, (2) stemming from service provision for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and (3) changes wrought by reorientation to selective primary health care in South Australia. Responses to dilemmatic space included ignoring directives or doing work ‘under the radar’, undertaking alternative work congruent with primary health care values outside of hours, or leaving the organisation. The findings show that comprehensive primary health care was contested and political. Future health reform processes would benefit from considering alignment of changes with staff values to reduce negative effects of the reform and safeguard worker wellbeing.
Starting with initiatives dating back to the mid-1800s, we provide a high-level review of the key trends and developments in the application of applied psychology to the field of occupational safety. Factory laws, basic worker compensation, and research on accident proneness comprised much of the early work. Thus, early research and practice very much focused on the individual worker, the design of their work, and their basic protection. Gradually and over time, the focus began to navigate further into the organizational context. One of the early efforts to broaden beyond the individual worker was a significant focus on safety-related training during the middle of the 20th century. Toward the latter years of the 20th century and continuing the move from the individual worker to the broader organizational context, there was a significant increase in leadership and organizational climate (safety climate) research. Ultimately, this resulted in the development of a multilevel model of safety culture/climate. After discussing these trends, we identify key conclusions and opportunities for future research.
Long workhours erode health, which the setting of maximum weekly hours aims to avert. This 48-h limit, and the evidence base to support it, has evolved from a workforce that was largely male, whose time in the labour force was enabled by women's domestic work and care giving. The gender composition of the workforce has now changed, and many women (as well as some men) combine care-giving with paid work, a change viewed as fundamental for gender equality. However, it raises questions on the suitability of the work time limit and the extent it is protective of health. We estimate workhour–mental health thresholds, testing if they vary for men and women due to gendered workloads and constraints on and off the job. Using six waves of data from a nationally representative sample of Australian adults (24–65 years), surveyed in the Household Income Labour Dynamics of Australia Survey (N = 3828 men; 4062 women), our study uses a longitudinal, simultaneous equation approach to address endogeneity. Averaging over the sample, we find an overall threshold of 39 h per week beyond which mental health declines. Separate curves then estimate thresholds for men and women, by high or low care and domestic time constraints, using stratified and pooled samples. We find gendered workhour-health limits (43.5 for men, 38 for women) which widen further once differences in resources on and off the job are considered. Only when time is ‘unencumbered’ and similar time constraints and contexts are assumed, do gender gaps narrow and thresholds approximate the 48-h limit. Our study reveals limits to contemporary workhour regulation which may be systematically disadvantaging women's health.
This chapter focuses on a proposed framework of irresponsible leadership (IRL) that might emerge in our schools under certain circumstances. A second purpose is to analyze potential ways to prevent its rise, based on previous models of educational leadership. Broadly, IRL is composed of five elements: narrow view of education, a business-like view of the teacher-student relations, a Narcissist and ego-centrist view, self-centered decision making, and emotional unawareness and poor emotion regulation. Unsurprisingly, IRL results in decreased levels of teachers' and students' well-being unethical school climate, a lack of social responsibility in the teacher lounge and school failure. To prevent these and related results, three major leadership models in education-participative, moral and social justice, and instructional-were analyzed. Copyright © 2017 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
This book provides a rigorous examination into the realities of the current university system in Britain, America and Australia. The radical makeover of the higher education system which began in the 1980s has conventionally been understood as universities being transformed into businesses which sell education and research in a competitive market. This engaging and provocative book argues that this is not actually the case. Drawing on lived experience, Watts asserts that the reality is actually a consequence of contradictory government policy and new public management whose exponents talk and act ‘as-if’ universities have become businesses. The result of which is ‘market crazed governance’, whereby universities are subjected to expensive rebranding and advertising campaigns and the spread of a toxic culture of customer satisfaction surveys which ask students to evaluate their teachers and what they have learned, based on government ‘metrics’ of research ‘quality’.
This has led to a situation where not only the normal teacher-student relationship is inverted, academic professional autonomy is eroded and many students are short-changed, but where universities are becoming places whose leaders are no longer prepared to tell the truth and too few academics are prepared to insist they do. An impassioned and methodical study, this book will be of great interest to academics and scholars in the field of higher education and education policy.
Rob Watts is Professor of Social Policy at RMIT University, Australia. His books include The Foundations of the National Welfare State, Sociology Australia, and States of Violence and the Civilising Process: On Criminology and State Crime.
This book investigates the intensifying struggle for excellence between universities in a globalized academic field. The rise of the entrepreneurial university and academic capitalism are superimposing themselves on the competition of scientists for progress of knowledge and recognition by the scientific community. The result is a sharpening institutional stratification of the field. This stratification is produced and continuously reproduced by the intensified struggle for funds with the shrinking of block grants and the growing significance of competitive funding, as well as the increasing impact of international and national rankings on academic research and teaching. The increased allocation of funds on the basis of performance leads to overinvestment of resources at the small top and underinvestment for the broad mass of universities in the middle and lower ranks. There is a curvilinear inverted u-shaped relationship of investments and returns in terms of knowledge production. Paradoxically, the intrusion of the economic logic and measures of managerial controlling into the academic field imply increasing inefficiency in the allocation of resources to universities. The top institutions suffer from overinvestment, the rank-and-file institutions from underinvestment. The economic inefficiency is accompanied by a shrinking potential for renewal and open knowledge evolution.
We analyse data from the largest survey of university staff in Australia to determine whether bullying and harassment are more common in regional than metropolitan and Go8 universities, and to what extent any differences could be attributed to other factors. While professional staff showed no difference in harassment rates between regional and metropolitan and Go8 universities, academic staff at regional universities reported significantly higher levels of harassment. This probably reflected the labour market and resource context of regional universities. Binary logistic regression indicated that a perceived lack of support for professional development partially explained the effect of regional status on differences in the rates of harassment/bullying across university types. Markers of organisational culture only partially account for differences in the rates of harassment/bullying between university types. © 2015 Association for Tertiary Education Management and the LH Martin Institute for Tertiary Education Leadership and Management.
In this article, Henry Giroux addresses the corrosive effects of corporate culture on the academy and recent attempts by faculty and students to resist the corporatization of higher education. Giroux argues that neoliberalism is the most dangerous ideology of the current historical moment. He shows that civic discourse has given way to the language of commercialization, privatization, and deregulation and that, within the language and images of corporate culture, citizenship is portrayed as an utterly privatized affair that produces self-interested individuals. He maintains that corporate culture functions largely to either ignore or cancel out social injustices in the existing social order by overriding the democratic impulses and practices of civil society through an emphasis on the unbridled workings of market relations. Giroux suggests that these trends mark a hazardous turn in U.S. society, one that threatens our understanding of democracy and affects the ways we address the meaning and purpose of higher education.