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Introduction to the Research Handbook on Academic Careers and Managing Academics
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Non-tenured academics are those who have a contract with a higher education institution (HEI) without possessing or carrying a guarantee of permanent employment. Non-tenured teachers can be in a tenure track position, if they are in a probationary period leading to a tenured position, or in a non-tenure track without necessarily having a probationary period and without the possibility of obtaining tenured.
By comparing two distinct settings–Portugal and Finland–and based on previous studies revealing similar trends in both countries, this article analyses the relationship between institutional and academic autonomy in the higher education sector. Based on crosschecking of the literature review and 47 interviews with key actors in both the Portuguese and Finnish higher education systems, the authors analyse the extent to which the political attempts to increase institutional autonomy are perceived by academics in these countries as leading to an increase in their professional autonomy. Data reveals that there is a lack of complete correspondence between the way different institutional dimensions have been changing at the organisational level and the way academics perceive the effects at the professional level. While there is a correspondence in the perceptions over organisational and interventional autonomy, no correspondence is found concerning policy autonomy in both countries. Furthermore, there are no homogeneous perceptions within academics group in each country concerning professional autonomy.
An increasing number of staff in higher education with both academic and professional credentials find themselves working on broadly based projects in what Whitchurch has described as Third Space environments (Whitchurch, High Educ Q 62(4), 377-396, 2008). Such environments do not sit easily in formal organisational structures and can be both ambiguous and uncertain. Those who work in them are likely to encounter a series of paradoxes and dilemmas, described in this chapter, and to develop their identities in relation to these. They are thereby extending ideas about what it might mean to be an academic or a professional in contemporary higher education.
This article sets out to explore how academics make sense of the current transformations of higher education and what kinds of academic identities are thereby constructed. Based on a narrative analysis of 42 interviews with Finnish academics, nine narratives are discerned, each providing a different answer as to what it means to be an academic in the present-day university. Narratives of resistance, loss, administrative work overload and job insecurity are embedded in a regressive storyline, describing deterioration of academic work and one's standing. In a sharp contrast, narratives of success, mobility and change agency rely on a progressive storyline which sees the current changes in a positive light. Between these opposites, narratives of work–life balance and bystander follow stable storylines, involving a neutral stance toward university transformations. The paper concludes that academic identities have become increasingly diversified and polarized due to the managerial and structural changes in higher education.
This article considers the academic profession and academic freedom in light of the results of the Changing Academic Profession (CAP) survey in Finland and four other European countries. Academic freedom is examined as a phenomenon that provides a setting for goal determination by members of the academic profession. It has a bearing on both institutional autonomy and individual academic freedom, i.e. the freedom of research and teaching. Academic freedom can be examined on the basis of material from the CAP survey through the questions about the freedom of teaching, the definition of work, working as a member of a community, the power of influence, funding, and the evaluation of quality. The concept of academic freedom varies slightly between countries, in part because of the growth of higher education systems and because of the increasing demand for being imposed on universities.
Despite the tendency to create a European Higher Education and Research area, academic systems are still quite different across Europe. We selected five countries (Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway and the UK) to investigate how the differences have an impact on a number of aspects of the working conditions of academic staff. One crucial aspect is the growing diversification of professional activity: reduction of tenured and tenure tracked position, the growing number of fixed-term contracts for both teaching and research, including the growing recruitment of academic staff from external professional fields. These changes are connected with the changing functions of higher education systems and signal the growing openness of higher education institutions to their outside social and economic environment. To understand these trends one has to take into consideration the different degree in which systems distinguish between teaching and research functions. A second aspect has to do with career paths, their regulation, their length and speed. Here, the history of recruitment and career mechanisms in different countries are of particular importance because the different systems went through different periods of change and stability. Also connected to career is the willingness and the opportunity to move from one position to another, both within and outside the academic world. A third aspect deserving attention that is connected to mobility is the professional satisfaction among academic staff in the five systems considered.
The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the emergence of higher education system rankings and other frameworks that attempt to make sense of the performance of higher education systems. It starts with a review of higher education system rankings and how they attempt to overcome the failings of institutional rankings. It then covers alternative approaches for monitoring higher education beyond traditional rankings. It introduces the approach of benchmarking higher education system performance rooted in the literature on performance, the performance of public services, and the performance of higher education. It offers a view of what is possible to do with an ontological approach to the performance of higher education systems instead of exercises driven by data availability and discusses the challenges of moving forward with such an approach. It concludes by discussing the likely coexistence of the discourses on world-class university with the world-class systems, and the challenge for countries to balance them.
This book analyses the structural and institutional transformations undergone by doctoral education, and the extent to which these transformations are in line with social, political and doctoral candidates' expectations. Higher education has gone through profound changes driven by the massification and diversification of the student body, the rise of neoliberal policies coupled with the reduction in public funding and the emergence of the knowledge society and economy. As a result, higher education has been assigned new and more outward-looking missions, which have subsequently affected doctoral education. The editors and contributors examine these transformations and changes at the macro, meso and micro levels: wider and more structural changes as well as doctoral candidates' experience of the degree itself. This book will be of interest and value to scholars of doctoral education and the transformation of the university more widely.
This paper explores sensemaking narratives from teaching academics undertaking identity work in the context of a rapidly expanding digital education sphere. It considers the implications for emotional labour and status of digitised higher education teaching academics from the imposition of a rejuvenated New Public Management. We discuss possible tainting from fractured and short-term contractual arrangements alongside growth in managerialism, metrics and accountability. This study combines photographic ethnography and interviews to gain insight into uncertainties, anxieties, identity legitimations and participant responses to imposed changes within digitally evolving workspaces. The paper explores teaching cultures within two higher education institutions, on different points of a digital continuum, finding discourses of alienation, liminality and validation. Resultant ‘sticky’ or resistant behaviours in rapid adaptations to digital teaching life were heard as we aimed to understand what it means to teach in a digitised, neoliberal context.
This paper analyses academics’ perceptions about their current working and employment conditions, academic profession’s social prestige and their willingness to change profession. The aim is to discuss the extent to which academics are being affected by changes in higher education institutions and the academic profession as framed by managerialism, New Public Management and neoliberalism. Collected through a survey to all Portuguese academics, perceptions suggest a contradiction: while evidencing the deterioration of working conditions, academics maintain a positive view regarding the academic profession, evidenced by a predisposition to consider it as socially valued and worth to recommend. So, despite all changes, it seems that to Portuguese academics, working in academia is still worth, at least to some extent. The question is to know for how long.
Higher education institutions in Portugal, as in many developed countries, have undergone deep transformations affecting their organisational structures and professionals. These reforms framed by new public management are said to induce changes in the traditional jurisdictional field of the academic profession with the administrative power being transferred to non-teaching staff. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this discussion by analysing the extent to which the academics jurisdictional field has changed and power relations were redefined. Resorting to empirical data obtained through an extensive online survey we analyse professionals’ perceptions on changes in institutional governance and on their professional autonomy and the way this may translate a reconfiguration of power between these professional groups. The empirical findings suggest that professionals perceive changes as affecting negatively their participation in institutions’ decision-making processes but this is not automatically translated in a perceived loss of professional autonomy.
New higher education professionals (HEPROs) are a heterogeneous group satisfying the growing need of university management for systematic knowledge about the university and releasing academic and administrative staff from a variety of tasks. HEPROs are not primarily active in teaching and research but prepare and support decisions of university management, establish services and actively shape the three missions of research, teaching and transfer of knowledge and technology. Reviewing the literature of the past two decades—mainly from Australia, Germany, Great Britain, Norway and the United States—two trails of research are identified: first, a quantitative research trail grasping the bureaucratisation of universities and growing numbers of personnel and, second, a qualitative research trail, shedding light on the differentiation of university personnel in a shifting working environment. The analysis is concluded by suggesting an Overlap Model, situating HEPROs on a continuum of roles between the two poles of academic and administrative personnel. The Overlap Model provides a simple clear-cut picture of the three spheres and the overlaps of functions and tasks of academic and administrative personnel and HEPROs; it makes the evolution of categories of university personnel explicit and aligns the functions, tasks and roles in the Academic and Administrative Overlap for further research.
This chapter considers the academic working environment in eight European countries and reports on academics’ impressions of the changes that environment has undergone in recent years. We focus on the extent to which the content of academic work in these countries is similar or different; the nature of academics’ working conditions and how they have changed; and what academics’ affiliations are. The analysis also considers differences according to seniority. Based on interviews with European academics, we consider how changes in working conditions, employment and modes of operation have affected scholarly work and related activities, and the impact change has had on academic freedom.
This paper primarily deals with the relationships between academics and their university in European countries. The aim of this paper is therefore not to produce new results but provide a synthesis of the main trends that can be identified from the literature and then suggest what can be borrowed from sociological theories to highlight the on-going evolutions. The first section of the paper reviews the main results to be drawn from previous research on this issue and focuses on the management of academic careers and the management of academic activities at the university level. The second section suggests alternative interpretative frameworks to be borrowed from sociological theory in order to complete the already existing research and develop new perspectives to explain and interpret these changes in the relationships between academics and their institutions. Four perspectives are successively explored particularly useful here: a sociology of work; a labor market perspective; an analysis in terms of careers and trajectories and finally considerations about the traditional tension between organizations and professions.
This paper presents some theoretical and methodological considerations associated with the geographical and professional mobility of science professionals, including the conduct by the authors of a large scale survey questionnaire in Poland in 1994. It does not directly relate to research conducted elsewhere in the region, but does reflect selected issues and problems encountered.
New public management (NPM) approaches have informed policy in the public sector in advanced countries in the last decade. Some authors suggest that the main objective of NPM at the organisational level is to change the traditional way professionals are regulated. This study examines the impact of NPM on the working conditions of Portuguese higher education academics. The empirical data are based on official statistics, and the analysis leads to the following conclusions. Changes have been slow, but already reveal a corrosion of traditional employment practices. Employment has become more precarious as professionals are increasingly employed on non-tenured contracts. This tendency is more evident in the polytechnic sector. In short, this means that the growth in skilled employment in higher education in Portugal is based on precarious employment relations.
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