Satisfaction in Stages: The Academic Profession in the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth
Academic staff are often presented in analysis as though they are a homogenous entity, but little could be further from the truth. In this chapter, we argue that academics differ in their responses to the changes and new influences in higher education and
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Satisfaction in Stages: The Academic Profession in the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth William Locke and Alice Bennion
The academic profession in the United Kingdom consists of a diverse range of academic staff both in their demographic profile and in the roles they undertake. Often treated as a homogeneous entity, individual academics are positioned within much of the existing literature on United Kingdom governance and management as rational actors, performing largely similar roles and operating on the basis of a core of common academic and collegial values. As we have argued elsewhere, adopting such an approach can be problematic when it comes to explaining changes in the academy (Locke and Bennion 2011). It has also generated a dominant discourse about academics which is preoccupied with loss, alienation and the retreat of ‘the profession’. In this discourse, academics have been proletarianised, their work industrialised and their autonomy eroded, and they have been deskilled. The result, according to this discourse, is that the profession is demoralised, disaffected and disengaged – or worse, excluded – from institutional decision-making. In an attempt to move beyond this dominant discourse, we have analysed the United Kingdom CAP dataset according to several variables including institutional type, age, gender, professional grade and mode of employment (Locke and Bennion 2009). We have argued that academics differ in their responses to the changes and new influences in higher education – whether this takes the form of active support, compliance, resistance or subversion – and that this might be partly explained by differences in status within academic and institutional hierarchies, subject characteristics and generational differences (Locke 2008). This initial analysis indicated particular differences between academic staff at different stages of their career and
W. Locke (*) Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Bennion Centre for Higher Education Research and Information (CHERI), Open University, Bristol, UK 223 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_12, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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W. Locke and A. Bennion
with different career trajectories. With the expansion of the United Kingdom higher education system, there has not only been an increase in the number of young people entering the profession via the traditional route but also in the number of staff entering the profession at a later stage in their working lives, having already pursued a career in another profession. In this chapter, we focus on these two groups and compare them with their more established counterparts who entered the profession via the traditional route.
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Background: The United Kingdom Context and Key Management Challenges
For our purposes, the main contextual factors in t
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