The Changing Face Of Academic Life

Bringing together an international line-up of contributors, this collection provides a transnational examination of recent developments within the academic profession in the light of changes to higher education systems, globalization and marketization.

Bringing together an international line-up of contributors, this collection provides a transnational examination of recent developments within the academic profession in the light of changes to higher education systems, globalization and marketization.

The children of immigrants account for the fastest growing segment of the U.S. population under eighteen years old—one out of every five children in the United States. Will this generation of immigrant children follow the path of earlier waves of immigrants and gradually assimilate into mainstream American life, or does the global nature of the contemporary world mean that the trajectory of today's immigrants will be fundamentally different? Rather than severing their ties to their home countries, many immigrants today sustain economic, political, and religious ties to their homelands, even as they work, vote, and pray in the countries that receive them. The Changing Face of Home is the first book to examine the extent to which the children of immigrants engage in such transnational practices. Because most second generation immigrants are still young, there is much debate among immigration scholars about the extent to which these children will engage in transnational practices in the future. While the contributors to this volume find some evidence of transnationalism among the children of immigrants, they disagree over whether these activities will have any long-term effects. Part I of the volume explores how the practice and consequences of transnationalism vary among different groups. Contributors Philip Kasinitz, Mary Waters, and John Mollenkopf use findings from their large study of immigrant communities in New York City to show how both distance and politics play important roles in determining levels of transnational activity. For example, many Latin American and Caribbean immigrants are "circular migrants" spending much time in both their home countries and the United States, while Russian Jews and Chinese immigrants have far less contact of any kind with their homelands. In Part II, the contributors comment on these findings, offering suggestions for reconceptualizing the issue and bridging analytical differences. In her chapter, Nancy Foner makes valuable comparisons with past waves of immigrants as a way of understanding the conditions that may foster or mitigate transnationalism among today's immigrants. The final set of chapters examines how home and host country value systems shape how second generation immigrants construct their identities, and the economic, social, and political communities to which they ultimately express allegiance. The Changing Face of Home presents an important first round of research and dialogue on the activities and identities of the second generation vis-a-vis their ancestral homelands, and raises important questions for future research.

The Changing Face of Economics gives the reader a sense of the modern economics profession and how it is changing. The volume does so with a set of nine interviews with cutting edge economists, followed by interviews with two Nobel Prize winners, Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow, reflecting on the changes that are occurring. What results is a clear picture of today's economics--and it is no longer standard neoclassical economics. The interviews and commentary together demonstrate that economics is currently undergoing a fundamental shift in method and is moving away from traditional neoclassical economics into a dynamic set of new methods and approaches. These new approaches include work in behavioral economics, experimental economics, evolutionary game theory and ecological approaches, complexity and nonlinear dynamics, methodological analysis, and agent-based modeling. David E. Colander is Professor of Economics, Middlebury College. J. Barkley Rosser, Jr., is Professor of Economics and Kirby L. Kramer Jr. Professor of Business Administration, James Madison University. Richard P. F. Holt is Professor of Churchill Honors and Economics, Southern Oregon University.

Academics working in contemporary universities are experiencing unprecedented and unsustainable pressure in an environment of hyper-performativity, metrics and accountability. From this perspective, the university produces multiple tensions and moments of crises, where it seems that there is limited space left for the intrinsic enjoyment arising from scholarly practices. This book offers a global perspective on how pleasure is central to the endeavours of academics working in the contemporary university, with contributors evaluating the opportunities for the strategic refusal of the quantifying, stultifying and stupefying delimiters of what is possible for academic production. The aim of this book is to open up spaces for conversation, reflection and thought, in order to think, to be and to do differently – pleasurably. Contributors rupture the bounds of what is permissible and possible within their daily lives, habits and practices. As such, this book addresses increasingly significant questions. What are some of the multiple and different ways that we can reclaim pleasure and enhance the durations and intensities of our passions, desires and becomings within the contemporary university? How might these aspirations be realised? What are the spaces for the pleasurable production of research that might be opened up? How might we reconfigure the neoliberal university to be a place of more affect, where desire, laughter and joy join with the work that we seek to undertake and the communities whom we serve?

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 literature on gender and science shows that scientific careers continue to be characterised – albeit with important differences among countries – by strong gender discriminations, especially in more prestigious positions. Much less investigated is the issue of which stage in the career such differences begin to show up. Gender and Precarious Research Careers aims to advance the debate on the process of precarisation in higher education and its gendered effects, and springs from a three-year research project across institutions in seven European countries: Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Iceland, Switzerland, Slovenia and Austria. Examining gender asymmetries in academic and research organisations, this insightful volume focuses particularly on early careers. It centres both on STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and SSH (Social Science and Humanities) fields. Offering recommendations to design innovative organisational policies and self-tailored ‘Gender Equality Plans’ to be implemented in universities and research centres, this volume will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Gender Studies, Sociology of Work and Industry, Sociology of Knowledge, Business Studies and Higher Education.

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.