Academic dissatisfaction,managerial change and neo-liberalism

This paper examines perceptions by academics of their work in the Australian state of Victoria, and places such perceptions within the context of international and Australian debates on the academic profession. A 2010 survey conducted by the National Tertiary Education Union in Victoria was analysed in light of the literature on academic work satisfaction and on corporatised managerial practice (“managerialism”). The analysis is also placed in the context of neo-liberalism, defined as a more marketised provision combined with increased pro-market state regulation. Factor analysis was used to reduce 18 items we hypothesised as drivers of work satisfaction to four factors: managerial culture, workloads, work status and self-perceived productivity. Regression models show the relative effects of these factors on two items measuring work satisfaction. This analysis is complemented by discursive analysis of open-ended responses. We found that satisfaction among academics was low and decreasing compared to a previous survey, and that management culture was the most important driver. Concern with workloads also drove dissatisfaction, although academics seem happy to be more productive if they have control over their work and develop in their jobs. Work status had little effect. In the open-ended responses the more dissatisfied academics tended to contrast a marketised present to a collegial past. While respondents seem to conflate all recent managerial change with marketisation, we pose a crucial question: whether the need for more professional management needs to be congruent with marketising policy directions.     

The proletarianisation of academic labour in Australia

Australian universities over the last 25 years have been unified, internationalised, corporatised and become mass educational providers. This process is replicated globally as a response to rapid mass enrolments and marketisation. In the light of these changes, a corporate and managerial model has been identified, which has been the subject of growing discontent within the academic workforce. However, from a political economy perspective there is a lack of understanding on how and by what means academic labour has been commodified in this process. This paper, using Australia as its case study, argues that the managerial culture has alienated academics from their labour. This has resulted in them losing control over their skills and thus becoming disassociated from the educational purposes of their work. Higher education has been subjected to systemic regulatory governance that has fundamentally transformed the nature of academic labour. We contend that the regulatory state has reached so deep down into the university that academics have effectively become a de-professionalised and proletarianised labour force.     

Marketisation of adult education: principals as business leaders,standardised teachers and responsibilised students

The marketisation of education is a global phenomenon and has attracted increased interest during the last three decades, not least in terms of research on school choice and its consequences. However, while much research has been conducted on the marketisation of schooling, less attention has been directed at adult education. In this paper, focus is directed at institutional logics and institutional responses to the process of marketisation of adult education. More specifically, we focus on how a procurement system, implemented in order to create competition and to increase quality in adult education, influences how students construe themselves, as well as the way principals and teachers work. Our results indicate that teachers emerge as the main source of resistance towards an institutional logic emerging in the wake of marketisation, while principals and students to a large extent conform to the emerging institutional demands.     

Practices of conformity and resistance in the marketisation of the academy: Bourdieu,professionalism and academic capitalism

The paper reports on an empirical study based on qualitative interviews with staff from four Australian universities. These universities are shown to be undergoing significant social change as processes of marketisation impact on the everyday practices of academic workers. The universities are analysed as sites of contestation between the new professional managers and the established academic profession over the control of the conditions of work, the production of expert knowledge and the worksite itself. The theory of academic capitalism is examined, and the relevance of Bourdieu’s work for the analysis of a university sector in a context of marketisation is assessed. Bourdieu’s interlinked concepts of capital, habitus and the field are employed to investigate the nature of the contestation, revealing a dynamic process in which academics innovatively respond to threats to reduce their autonomy, to increased levels of surveillance and other constraints on practice. In addition, the study illustrates the processes through which actors within the sector, through acts of both conformity and resistance, contribute collectively to the growth of academic capitalism in the neoliberal university.     

The Market for Academic Knowledge: Its Historical Emergence and Inherent Tensions

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes to the discussion about the marketisation of universities by providing a historical perspective. Going back to the time when the market for academic knowledge emerged, I argue that it was created through incorporating a number of inherent tensions that have been, and still are, shaping its development. I show how these tensions affect the self-definition of the producers and consumers in the market as well as their valuation of the products the market has to offer. They also influence the rules of exchange.     

Absence of the academic from higher education policy

This article argues that the individual academic is all but absent from the assumptive worlds of policymakers in UK higher education. It is taken for granted in research on academic identity that those who work in higher education as teachers and researchers refer to themselves as, and indeed are referred to by others as, ‘academics’. Evidence is drawn from a study of policymakers in the UK to demonstrate that the word ‘academic’ is not a part of the lexicon of higher education policymaking. Moreover, the concept of the academic is cast into shade by an overwhelming emphasis on ‘the student experience’, and, from another direction, by a location of professional academic accountability at the level of the higher education institution rather than the individual. The article concludes with an exploration of what work this absence of the academic in policy does in disrupting the possibilities for engagement between the worlds of academia and policymaking and in perpetuating the discourses of marketisation and new management in higher education. It also suggests understanding the assumptive worlds of policymakers is a crucial counterbalance to a growing body of literature on academic responses to change, some of which has tended towards the self‐referential.     

Unearthing white academics’ experience of teaching in higher education in South Africa

The real and imagined racial differences and similarities between groups of students and staff have consequences in everyday experiences in South Africa. One aspect of engaging with the challenges facing higher education transformation post-Apartheid is through understanding how the racialized context interacts with the experience of teaching. This paper reports on what the narratives of four white academics reveal about their experience of teaching at the University of Cape Town (UCT). It analyses indicators of their identity as white academics and how they are both positioned and actively position themselves in relation to students and other academics at UCT. Their narratives reveal how academics simultaneously grapple with the privileges and limitations that accompany identifying as white. These tensions are explored through issues of black student development amid an alienating institutional culture and opposition to the behaviour of their white colleagues.     

Exploring Academic Identities and Practices in a Competitive Enhancement Context: a UK-based case study

This article proposes that in a context where the roles assigned to academics are increasingly complex, where academic work is visibly managed and monitored with an emphasis on teaching quality and professionalised practices, better understandings of academic identities might emerge from a focus on the teaching dimension of the academic role. It seeks to capture this dimension through a theoretical framework that takes account of the context and realities in which academics operate.
It examines this complexity through a set of policy initiatives aimed at enhancing the teaching function in UK universities, and a brief report on a study of 18 UK academics focusing on the nature of academic labour. It argues that the teaching dimension of the academic role cannot be usefully studied from outside the context in which academics evolve and construct their apprehensions of teaching practice, and without paying attention to the degree of agency available to them in the context where they operate. It points to the negative impact of competing initiatives directed disjointedly at teaching and research.     

Cultivating the next generation of academics in South Africa

Abstract

The academic workplace is experiencing numerous changes in South Africa and around the world, including increasing managerialism, declining governmental funding and massification of university systems. Global trends have impacted South Africa, and additional local contextual factors combine to create a situation in which the pool of prospective academics is limited, particularly with regard to individuals from diverse backgrounds, at the same time as vacancies for academic staff are expected to increase. In order to address the question of who will become the next generation of academics in South Africa, the author investigates potential barriers to developing academics through qualitative research conducted with postgraduate students, academic staff and administrators at two higher education institutions. Two central thematic categories are explored—induction into postgraduate studies and induction into the academic profession. The author posits that systematic socialization, both into postgraduate studies and into the academic profession, is a vital link toward cultivating emerging academics to fill academic positions for an equitable workplace in South African higher education institutions.     

An analysis of higher education staff attitudes in a dynamic environment

Abstract

Since 1980 the staff student ratio in the UK has halved. This has been contributed to, amongst other factors, by the massification policy of the UK government. The requirement to publish, the view of students as consumers, an increase in managerialism, and reduction in real pay levels as well as the threat of compulsory redundancies have also been changes which have affected the attitudes of staff. As a result of these factors, the experience of both academics and students has deteriorated, and this is likely to continue. This paper uses survey data from three higher education institutions, which indicates a reduction in the satisfaction of staff over a number of years. Interviews with key informants and a literature review also support the view that levels of stress are increasing amongst academic staff within UK Higher Education institutions.     

Challenges to the Academic Role of Change Agent

Through the dual tasks of teaching and research, academics have traditionally been in a prime position of influence; that is, to be an agent of change for both students and the social context in which they operate. There is little doubt that given the momentous changes presently taking place within universities in Australia and the UK, the academic workplace will continue to involve ongoing change. In this paper, it is argued that in the debates ranging over the effects of increased class sizes, reduction in time for research and the greater need for income-producing activities such as consultancies, effects on the university academic role are often overlooked. The shifting role of the academic from an agent of change through their academic activity to one of a victim of change is examined. The issue is explored through consideration of changes in the nature and expectations of the role as universities respond to external pressures. It is suggested that academic disengagement from the role of change agent through interaction and dialogue has potentially serious implications. These are explored in terms of possible effects on the quality of learning for students.     

Academics Hard at Work: the place of teaching and professional development related to teaching

Abstract

Recent studies of academic work have identified increasing pressures on universities and academics throughout the world. These pressures relate to such factors as diminishing resources available to the higher education sector, widening diversity of the student clientele, moves for increased accountability and tensions between the research and teaching goals of academic work. Among the pressures being placed on the teaching component of academic work are the need for increased accountability of teaching performance and the need to update professional competence related to teaching. This paper reports a study of a selected group of academics — relatively junior staff who have participated in significant professional development activities related to their teaching. The data provided by the interviews with these academics allow a glimpse at their academic lives and how they fit teaching and professional development related to teaching into their working lives. The study highlights how these academics structure their work around their teaching commitments and how, although they make time available for professional development related to their teaching, this is done in response to the activities offered rather than as a proactive component of their career planning.     

Students as consumers? A counter perspective from student assessment as a disciplinary technology

The notion of students as consumers who exercise educational decisions based on economic self-interest leads to interesting questions about their perceptions of current higher education assessment practices. Guided by a Foucauldian theorisation and the findings from focus groups carried out with students from two European universities, one from the UK and another from Estonia, the article argues that globally dominant consumerist policy discourses have altered but not removed the student experience of constraint in assessment. I argue that students’ response to disciplinary power in assessment has become highly strategic and differs depending on the institutional assessment systems: students from Estonia recognise the powerful position of academics as assessors and find ways to create a good social impression of themselves; their counterparts from the UK, however, demonstrate a tactical approach to their learning and study processes.     

Migrating selves: reconstructing and renegotiating Black immigrant academic identities

ABSTRACT

This study set out to explore how Black immigrant academics (BIAs) reconstruct their identities within academe. Utilising the research methodology of narrative inquiry, this article explores how BIAs came to see themselves across those communities, which were of primary importance to them in the reformation of their identities. Through the construction of narratives of experience, their lived and told stories emphasised the diversity of their identities that were negotiated with others within personal, historical and situational contexts. The study of BIAs’ lives from their perspective, in which they actively and socially develop their identities, not only provides a lens through which they can be understood as shifting constructions of identity but allows them to rethink who they are and have become and what influence power relations have in promoting or negating their sense of academic self.     

Globalisation and the Restructuring of Higher Education for New Knowledge Economies: New Dangers or Old Habits Troubling Gender Equity Work in Universities?

This article undertakes a feminist critique of the restructuring of the modern university in Australia. It considers the interaction of the processes of globalisation, corporatisation (through the twin strategies of marketisation and managerialism) and the social relations of gender, and their implication for gender equity work in the academy. The paper locates the reform of Australian universities within their Western context, and considers the gendered effects of the new disciplinary technologies of quality assurance and online learning on the position of women academics. It concludes with some comments about the shift in language from equity to diversity which has accompanied corporatisation, and how this has effectively coopted women's intellectual labour to do the work of the entrepreneurial university.     

Community engagement is … : revisiting Boyer’s model of scholarship

ABSTRACT

Criticisms have been levelled at academics at a time when funding of universities is increasingly tied to private and corporate purposes and when academics are held accountable through a hierarchy of functions. Claims are also made that academics work within narrow specializations and are removed from real-world experience and problems. Boyer’s model of scholarship offers four categories of scholarship that remain relevant to understanding and guiding the work of academics, including how they engage with communities. To explore the nature of academics’ work, we draw on data provided by a group of academics who participated in a research project using both sociological elicitation and visual arts-based research methodologies. The participants were asked to explore what various aspects of current academic work mean for them by providing an image and text, akin to creating a postcard. In this article, we focus on responses they provided to the prompt ‘Community engagement is?…?’ The postcards show how community engagement can be interpreted in diverse ways and that, along with teaching and research, community engagement are all integrated, mutually reinforcing drivers and outcomes of academic work.     

Nature/nurture and intelligence in current introductory educational psychology textbooks

Self-regulated learners understand, value, and engage academic learning in ways that are fundamentally different than their peers who have difficulty in school. We discuss how students become aware of themselves as learners and the kinds of theories that students construct about schooling. Children's ideas about success and failure, their awareness and attribution, and their metacognition and motivation, develop concurrently as they progress through formal education. We focus on developmental changes in students' theories about learning and how they are influenced by variables in school such as task difficulty, helping behavior, and standards of success. Instructional conditions that promote children's self-regulated learning are also discussed. We believe that self-regulated learning is a desirable educational outcome that can be fostered by teachers who minimize academic competition, explain appropriate strategies, provide assistance during problem solving, and promote an atmosphere of collaboration in classrooms.     

Research and teaching cultures in two contrasting UK policy contexts: Academic life in Education Departments in five English and Scottish universities

The paper explores academic staff and departmental research and teaching cultures in the Education Departments of five universities in Scotland and England, countries with increasingly diverging public policies in respect of education. The relationship between research and teaching, how the purposes of universities are defined and the status of research in Education are current UK higher education policy preoccupations. Data is drawn from interviews with 40 academics, observation of department settings, documentation and websites. The analysis draws on the work of Bourdieu, considering the changing habitus of individual academics, their departmental and academic subject context and the forms of symbolic capital now required in Scottish and English Education departments in response to new policies affecting their academic field. The paper also utilises recent literature on the research–teaching relationship. The career trajectories of respondents, their habitus and the forms of symbolic capital that they bring to academic life are examined, as are the extent to which the teaching and research cultures in each of the five departments studied mirror each other and whether these also reflect the two different policy contexts. The themes how academic cultures are shaped and research/teaching connections viewed have international as UK relevance.     

Mistrust in a multi-campus institutional context: a socio-spatial analysis

Higher education literature identifies mistrust as one of the prominent features of managerialism. Similarly, multi-campus institutional studies have interrogated mistrust in various ways. However, there is limited research on academics’ experiences of how mistrust relates to their understandings and values of their academic profession in multi-campus contexts. This article contributes knowledge to narrow this gap. It draws from a study that examined academics’ experiences of how space enables or constrains their practices towards academic identity construction in an open distance learning institution in South Africa. A total of 12 academics who work on satellite campuses of the institution were interviewed. The social production of space framed the analysis. Findings indicate that a multi-campus institutional context aggravates mistrust and impinges on academics’ interaction and prospects for development within a wider institutional space. Recommendations are made about how to reduce the influence of mistrust on academics’ practices in multi-campus contexts.     

R&D policy and social contribution in Japanese higher education

The Japanese academics have high recognition of themselves as the researchers rather than the teachers. This kind of climate developed in the national research universities including Teikoku Daigaku in the prewar time and even in the postwar time; it has extended to almost all academics not only in the research universities but also in the non-research universities. This fact was testified clearly in the CAP survey conducted in 2007, in which the Japanese academics’ research orientation belonged to the German type. A climate of academics in Japan is different from the counterparts in the USA as shown in the CAP survey, in which the American academics are oriented to research and teaching with a weight of half and half. Given the Japanese academic climate involved in research orientation, the national government offers in recent years the research grants to academics as the category of researcher on the basis of “selection and concentration principle” to the extent that only distinguished researchers in research productivity can be selected. Accordingly, Kakusa Shakai, or the social difference between the institutions with high productivity and those with low productivity, seems to be increasingly extending recently. The question that how the Japanese government disseminates research outputs to make these outputs be more socially utilized is likely to be not answered adequately for many years because there are few meta-evaluations to assess policy’s usefulness. However, such meta-evaluation of policy is expected to be done strictly since 2002 when it was introduced in the context that government policy’s contribution to society was functioned substantially.