Forming Recruiting And Managing The Academic Profession

This book focuses on the changes in academic careers and their implications for job attachment and the management of academic work. Against the background of an ageing profession, with different demands on academic staff, increasing insecurity, accountability and internationalisation, it discusses important, common themes in detail. This book examines such aspects as the nature of academic careers and recent changes in careers, changing biographies, rewards of academic work such as income and job satisfaction, internationalisation of the academy, and the organisation and management of academic work sites. This book is the second of two books highlighting findings from research on the academic profession, notably, the Changing Academic Profession Study and the European project supported by the European Science Foundation on changes in the academic profession in Europe (EUROAC). An adapted version of the CAP questionnaire has been used to carry out the survey in those countries that had not been involved before in the CAP survey. Altogether 19 countries are covered by the CAP project and an additional seven European countries are covered by EUROAC.

This timely Research Handbook provides a broad analysis and discussion on how academics are managed. It addresses key issues, including the changing nature of academic work and academic labour markets, issues of power, leadership, ageing, human resource management practices, and mobility.

The book draws on the 2007 Changing Academic Profession international survey in order to document the personal characteristics, career trajectories, sense of identity/commitment and job satisfaction of academics in 14 countries with different levels of economic and social development and different higher education systems. With nearly 26,000 academics surveyed in 19 countries (of which 14 are reporting their results in this volume), the empirical basis of the book is the most up-to-date and far-reaching in the area. With major changes taking place both in the local and global contexts of higher education and in the working conditions within individual universities, as exemplified by increasing managerialism and performance-based funding, it is important to consider the impact of these changes on the profiles and working lives of the academic profession across different countries. But it is also important to look at the ways in which the faculty’s changing profile impacts on the organisation and management of universities and on the delivery of their central functions. Although not always obvious in the short-term, academic work and its conditions attract, incorporate and promote different types of individuals who, in turn, exert considerable influence on the nature of academic work, higher education institutions and, potentially, society. As faculty members are central to the teaching, research and service enterprise activities of higher education, it is important to understand their personal characteristics, career trajectories, sense of identity and commitment, and job satisfaction. These are central for understanding the academic profession in general and, in particular, the factors affecting their involvement and productivity in the work of their institutions. These are a complex result of a mixture of contextual factors (e.g. the status and regulatory framework of the higher education system, the features and atmosphere of the particular institution) and personal factors (e.g. gender, educational attainment, family background, attitudes to work and broader social values).This book examines the different situations facing the academic profession in individual countries and provides comparative studies of country differences.

Drawing on empirical research, this book develops the concept of career scripts to show how contemporary academic faculty in the UK and other English-speaking countries approach their roles and careers. The career paths of individuals may be informed by personal strengths, interests and commitments, by activity associated with professional practice (represented by Practice scripts), and by formal career structures (represented by Institutional scripts). Internal and Practice scripts have in turn led to new forms of activity, within both formal and informal institutional economies. Whereas the formal economy is represented by, for example, promotion criteria and career pathways, with visible, quantifiable markers, the informal economy is represented by personal interests and initiatives, together with professional relationships and networks that may be unique to the individual. This book shows how, by drawing on Internal and Practice scripts, individuals develop concertina-like careers, stretching the spaces and timescales available to them. At the same time, they are able to address misalignments and disjunctures that they encounter, including those associated with disciplinary and departmental affiliations, job profiles, progression criteria, and work allocation models. As a result, the authors identify a shift towards more open-ended approaches to roles and careers.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. The most comprehensive book about practitioners working in research management and administration, with insights from around the globe and across disciplines to provide a comprehensive account of RMAs as a profession.

This book explores some of the major forces and changes in higher education across the world between 1945 and 2015. This includes the explosions of higher education institutions and enrollments, a development captured by the notion of massification. There were also profound shifts in the financing and economic role of higher education reflected in the processes of privatization of universities and curricula realignments to meet the shifting demands of the economy. Moreover, the systems of knowledge production, organization, dissemination, and consumption, as well as the disciplinary architecture of knowledge underwent significant changes. Internationalization emerged as one of the defining features of higher education, which engendered new modes, rationales, and practices of collaboration, competition, comparison, and commercialization. External and internal pressures for accountability and higher education’s value proposition intensified, which fuelled struggles over access, affordability, relevance, and outcomes that found expression in the quality assurance movement.

This book explores the perceptions of academic staff and representatives of institutional leadership about the changes in academic careers and academic work experienced in recent years. It emphasizes standardisation and differentiation of academic career paths, impacts of new forms of quality management on academic work, changes in recruitment, employment and working conditions, and academics’ perceptions of their professional contexts. The book demonstrates a growing diversity within the academic profession and new professional roles inhabiting a space which is neither located in the core business of teaching and research nor at the top level management and leadership. The new higher education professionals tend to be important change agents within the higher education institutions not only fulfilling service and bridging functions but also streamlining academic work to make a contribution to the reputation and competitiveness of the institution as a whole. Based on interviews with academic staff, this book explores the situation in eight European countries: Austria, Croatia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Romania, and Switzerland.

This book makes a major contribution to the scholarship on internationalization in higher education by focusing on the perceptions and experiences of the academic profession in a comparative perspective. Drawing from data collected by the Academic Professions in the Knowledge-based Society (APIKS) project, the contributors to this volume are uniquely positioned to explore the impact and implications of internationalization on those who play the central role in the teaching and research functions of higher education: the professoriate. The core chapters address issues such as the roles of gender, discipline, and career stage in the international activities of academics in different countries, national differences in the perceptions and behaviors of university faculty in the internationalization of teaching, and of research within higher education systems on the perceptions and behaviors of academics. Each of these chapters draw on the existing research literature in these thematic areas as a foundation for the systematic analysis of the international APIKS dataset to illuminate and discuss key findings. This book offers a highly original and unique contribution to the study of internationalization in higher education because its editors and contributors, as participants in the APIKS project, have been able to raise and address key research questions using comparative international empirical data on the academic profession that has never before been available. Given the tremendous importance of internationalization and the global dimension of higher education, this volume offers unique, distinctive insights on the implications of internationalization for the academic profession and the very different ways in which these transformations are understood by academics both within and between systems.