Job Satisfaction in a Diverse Institutional Environment: The Brazilian Experience
Brazilian higher education is a known case of extreme diversity with 89 % of its more than 2,300 institutions being private. Institutions range from small, family-owned professionally oriented schools to huge research universities with major annual budget
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Job Satisfaction in a Diverse Institutional Environment: The Brazilian Experience Elizabeth Balbachevsky and Simon Schwartzman
4.1
Introduction
Brazilian higher education is a known case of extreme diversity, in terms of both institutional settings and ownership. Among its more than 2,300 institutions, one can find examples of almost everything: from small, family-owned, isolated professional schools to huge research universities with annual budgets of more than two billion dollars. In the public sector, there are institutions owned by the federal government, state governments and municipalities. In the private sector, there are small, family-owned institutions; religious and community-based non-profit institutions and for-profit institutions of all sizes, including large universities owned by strong companies with shares listed on the stock market. One would expect that job satisfaction of academics would vary according to the type of institution they work. Surprisingly, we find that satisfaction tends to be uniformly high regardless of the institutional setting. Moreover, the patterns of distribution of answers to questions that cover different aspects of job satisfaction tend to be the same, regardless of the huge differences in contracts and working. This chapter seeks to explore this paradox and to shed some light on how it is possible that academics working in such different conditions could sustain the same (high) degree of job satisfaction. In order to achieve this goal, the chapter starts with an overview of Brazilian higher education, providing crucial information about Brazilian higher education and proposing a typology of institutions that underline the more relevant divides
E. Balbachevsky (*) Department of Political Science, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] S. Schwartzman Instituto de Estudos do Trabalho e Sociedade, do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
P.J. Bentley et al. (eds.), Job Satisfaction around the Academic World, The Changing Academy – The Changing Academic Profession in International Comparative Perspective 7, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5434-8_4, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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inside both the private and public sectors. Secondly, we look at the differences in contract and work conditions that characterise the academic world inside different types of institutions. Then, this chapter considers the issue of job satisfaction and the overall attitude towards the academic profession expressed by Brazilian academics. Although there are no relevant differences in the overall job satisfaction in different settings, it is possible to show that this satisfaction has different dimensions and characteristics according to the academic’s place and standing within their institutions. The data used in this chapter come from the third Brazilian National Survey on the academic profession, supported by the São Paulo Foundation for Science Support (FAPESP) and implemented in 2008, under the international project The Changin
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