Changing Nature of Academic Work

Due to the change in the work environment, an employee is playing multiple roles in a competitive job environment in the organization. To enhance employee job satisfaction, an organization must provide good infrastructure, flexible working hours, job security, etc., so that the employees can make a balance between work and life. The main objective of this paper is to determine the relationship between change in the nature of work and employee’s job satisfaction in the education sector. Data was collected through a questionnaire. Exploratory Factor analysis was used to determine the variables of changing nature of work (relationship with peers, Challenging job, and Technology-Based Profession). Correlation and multiple regression analysis were used to determine the relationship between variables of changing nature of work and employee job satisfaction. The result shows that there is a positive relationship between variables of changing nature of work and employee job satisfaction.

Research shows that the ascendency of managerialism in the higher education sector and its fundamental contradictions with the professional values has placed misaligning identity claims upon academics. However, the identity tension that arises from the misfit between the professional ethos and the organisations' market-driven requirements, and the ways in which academics cope with it has received insufficient attention. In this article, grounded on a conception of identity that describes it as in-progress narratives available to people, I analyse the routine work of academics in a Canadian public university. The results reveal that they reflexively and situationally construct different versions of their professional selves to minimise the tensions between the co-existing yet contradictory identity claims. In so doing, I found that the academics undertake two discursive strategies of embracing and distancing. I explain how these 'identity work' mechanisms help to strike a balance between the two contradictory discourses and suggest some directions for future research.

Education policies worldwide are increasingly being realigned to the economic prosperity, vertical mobility and social citizenship of the people. Human capital theorists have long underlined the need for investment in building productive human capital in any organisation
or a society. Our educational policies developed at the national level are often driven by some overarching goals. Such a top-down approach in implementing those policies on the ground, especially in a specific region like North East India, needs a bottom-up restructuring. There
is an urgent need to re-examine our education policies at the regional level to provide an environment where individuals can utilise their education and training to gain employment, improve their living standards, and contribute to the social development of the area.

At the Margins of Academia offers a broad approach to the challenge of academic labor precarity and the ever-growing academic migration from Turkey to European academic labor markets, based on the author’s own experiences and on in-depth interviews with the exiled Peace Academics. To this aim, it provides a detailed analysis of the systemic background of precariousness, the specifities of the case of the exiled Academics for Peace with regard to the precarization of academic labor force in general, and the socio-emotional expressions of being kept ‘in reserve’, drawing on the exiled academics’ own narratives.
The book consists of 5 chapters that start with the structural background of precariousness, then proceed to set a framework for understanding the relation between precariousness and subjectivity, and present insights on that relation with the help of the references made to individual and focus group interviews conducted with 11 academics in exile.

Yükseköğretim, kâr potansiyeli yüksek, stratejik bir meta haline gelirken, yükseköğretimin tanımının hızlı bir şekilde değişmekte olduğu
görülmektedir. Bu değişen bağlamda, artan bir şekilde metalaşmakta olan yükseköğretimin parçası olan tarafların da farklı konumlara
geçtikleri görülmektedir. Hizmet sağlayıcısı konumuna geçen akademisyenlerin, öğrencilerin birer müşteri olarak ele alındıkları ‘Neoliberal Üniversite’de profesyonellik statülerini yitirmeleri söz konusudur. Bu durum, çalışmada ele alınacağı üzere, kurumlar, akademisyenler ve öğrenciler arasındaki ilişkinin dönüşümü çerçevesinde ortaya çıkmaktadır. Bu çalışma, İstanbul ve İzmir’de bulunan devlet ve vakıf (özel) üniversitelerinde çalışmakta olan 28 akademisyenle gerçekleştirilmiş niteliksel bir Doktora çalışmasının sonuçlarını, akademisyenin konumu temelinde ele almaktadır. Akademisyenlerin öğrencileri ile olan ilişkilerinin artan bir şekilde denetlendiği ve müşteri konumuna geçen öğrencilerin taleplerine ilişkin akademisyenlerin deneyimi temelinde bu çalışmada sunulacak olan vaka, yükseköğretimin değişen yapısına ilişkin tartışmanın ışığında yürütülecektir. Bu tartışma, akademisyenlik mesleğinin, ‘Neoliberal Üniversite’ çatısı altında geçirmekte olduğu değişime ilişkin daha geniş bir tartışmanın parçasıdır.

Despite the rise of teaching academic (teaching only) roles in Australia, the UK, the USA, and Canada, the experiences of teaching academics are not well documented in the literature. This article reports from a university-wide study that responded to the introduction of teaching academic roles during a major restructure of academic staff. Thirteen focus groups involving 115 academic staff employed in a range of roles were held approximately 12 months after teaching academic roles were introduced. In conveying the results, we first report on the teaching academic experience, highlighting the perceived low value of the teaching academic (TA) role and confusion about what the role entails. We then focus on teaching academic career pathways. The findings highlight the uncertainty surrounding career paths for teaching academics, who noted the absence of career or promotion scripts. Respondents noted also an absence of role models within the professoriate. They expressed widespread concerns about developing the traditional academic skill set required to transition between roles and institutions, with many TAs finding themselves in boundaried careers with an uncertain future. The construct of career or promotion scripts is used to examine multiple perceptions of career pathways for teaching academics. The findings highlight the importance of systematic change management processes when new academic roles are introduced within the context of university-wide academic restructure, and the critical role of human resources in designing and implementing the same.