Job Satisfaction Around The Academic World

Higher education systems have changed all over the world, but not all have changed in the same ways. Although system growth and so-called massification have been worldwide themes, there have been system-specific changes as well. It is these changes that have an important impact on academic work and on the opinions of the staff that work in higher education. The academic profession has a key role to play in producing the next generations of knowledge workers, and this task will be more readily achieved by a contented academic workforce working within well-resourced teaching and research institutions. This volume tells the story of academics’ opinions about the changes in their own countries. The Changing Academic Profession (CAP) survey has provided researchers and policy makers with the capacity to compare the academic profession around the world. Built around national analyses of the survey this book examines academics’ opinions on a range of issues to do with their job satisfaction. Following an introduction that considers the job satisfaction literature as it relates to higher education, country-based chapters examine aspects of job satisfaction within each country.

This book provides an overview on the major findings of a questionnaire survey of academic profession in international perspective. More than 25,000 professors and junior staff at universities and other institutions of higher education at almost 20 countries from all over the world provide information on their working situation, their views and activities. The study “The Changing Academic Profession” is the second major study of its kind, and changes of views and activities are presented through a comparison of the findings with those of the earlier study undertaken in the early 1990s. Major themes are the academics’ perception of their societal and institutional environments, the views on the major tasks of teaching, research and services, their professional preferences and actual activities, their career, their perceived influence and their overall job satisfaction. Emphasis is placed on the influence of recent changes in higher education: the internationalisation and globalisation, the increasing expectation to provide evidence of the relevance of academic work, and finally the growing power of management at higher education institutions. Overall, the academics surveyed show that worldwide discourses and trends in higher education put their mark on the academic profession, but differences by country continue to be noteworthy. Academics consider themselves to be more strongly exposed to mechanism of regulations, incentives and sanctions as well as various assessments than in the past; yet their own freedom, and responsibilities and influence shape their identity more strongly and are reflected in widespread professional satisfaction.

What does it mean to be starting an academic career in the twenty first century? What challenges and prospects are new academics facing and how are they dealing with these? This book provides answers to these questions through an investigation of the experiences of early career academics in New Zealand universities. Filling a gap in the international literature on the academic profession by providing a comprehensive overview of the experiences of New Zealand academics, the book includes research findings from a national survey covering all eight New Zealand universities. This research is also compared with various findings from the 2007 Changing Academic Profession survey in 19 other countries. The book encourages readers to think about the early career academic experience in New Zealand in relation to their own experiences of the academic profession internationally. Key areas of focus in the nine chapters include: the teaching, research, and service preferences and activities of early career academics; work-life balance; satisfaction; the experiences of Māori academics; and professional development and support for all early career academics. Underpinning the book is the issue of the socialisation of early career academics into the academic profession in the twenty first century, and how structure and agency interact to affect that socialisation. Suggestions are made, and links to freely available online resources are provided, for improving socialisation at the individual, departmental, institutional, and national levels.

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.

This book is about the job satisfaction or dissatisfaction of workers generally, and those in higher education in particular. The aim of the book is to explain how to determine the average level of workers’ job satisfaction as a basis for decision and policy making in organisations including the relevant government departments.

This volume explores the various issues that have an impact on the academic career of professionals in European higher education. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are currently subject to profound uncertainties and are more challenged than ever on quality issues, both with regard to their conceptual nature and in the extension and amendment of their mission. Divided into three parts, the first part of the book deals with the challenges and issues in higher education academic careers. It addresses such topics as the influence of European policies and changes, the cultural differences in the preferences of academics for teaching or research, the increasing inequality in working conditions for academics, and the changing nature of academic strategy in the transformational world of higher education with its implications for academic structures, work and careers. The second part of the book analyses the findings of a national study on satisfaction of academics in Portuguese higher education, carried out at the Centre for Research on Higher Education Policies (CIPES). The third part offers a comparative analysis of a number of national European case studies, focusing on the changing relevance of and increasing expectations around academic careers. The concluding chapter discusses whether the academic profession is merely an artificial term that has to do with a heterogeneous range of occupations, or if there are important common elements of the academic profession across European Higher Education systems.

Much of the existing literature on happiness in Japan has been produced in the field of economics and psychology and is quantitative in nature. Here, for the first time, a group of anthropologists and sociologists jointly analyze the state of happiness and unhappiness in Japan among varying social groups in its physical, interpersonal, existential and structural dimensions, offering new insights into fundamental issues. This book investigates the connections between sociostructural aspects, individual agency and happiness in contemporary Japan from a life course perspective. The contributors examine quantitative and qualitative empirical data on the processes that impact how happiness and well-being are envisioned, crafted, and debated in Japan across the life-cycle. Therefore, the book discusses the shifting notions of happiness during people’s lives from birth to death, analyzing the age group-specific experiences while taking into consideration people’s life trajectories and historical changes. It points out recent developments in regards to demographic change, late marriage, and the changing labor market and focuses on their significant impact on the well-being of Japanese people. In particular it highlights the interdependencies of lives within the family and how families are collaborating for the purpose of maintaining or enhancing the happiness of its members. Broadening our understanding of the multidimensionality of happiness in Japan, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Japanese Studies, Anthropology, and Sociology.

Managing Academics contrasts three alternative perspectives of managing (professionalism, quality of worklife, prosocial identity) with the dominant perspective of managerialism in higher education institutions. The intention of the contrast is to: (1) challenge the notion that managing academics is a unitary, values-free process; (2) raise awareness of managing as a social process in which values and identity questions resonate as issues of importance to managers and the managed; and (3) help academic-managers influence and balance “hybrid” perspectives of managing and scholarship.