The Academic Profession: Quality Assurance, Governance, Relevance, and Satisfaction
The academic profession has been changing, hopefully improving. These changes affect the profession’s internal modes of regulation and its autonomy and ability to avoid the intervention of external forces. The professional tensions with which the academic
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1 The Academic Profession: Challenges of Its Environment The academic profession has always been changing. This profession is adaptive and responsive to external changes, and it seeks to interact with its own environment. While reading historical research or looking at academics’ reflections on their situation over time (e.g. Wilson 1980; Rice 1986; Altbach 1980, 1996, 1998; Clark 1987), it is striking that, whatever their particular historical moment, these writers all comment that the academic profession is no longer the same. There is clearly no ideal, universal, and stable state of the academic profession. These developments affect the relationships between the academic profession and other parts of society, as well as the position of this particular profession within society. These changes also affect the profession’s internal modes of regulation and its autonomy and ability to avoid the intervention of external forces. Finally, the content of academic activities themselves and the norms according to which they are to be achieved are also subject to change (Altbach 2000; Musselin 2007). Academic careers are influenced by various contexts (Steyrer et al. 2005; Hall 2002). Whereas career research traditionally emphasises personal contexts at the expense of global or societal ones, research on academic careers tends to stress structural factors and conditions influencing careers. Academic careers have been seen as the prototype for “new” careers (Baruch and Hall 2004) and as an opportunity to develop an international academic career (El-Khawas 2002) and to change employment conditions (Enders 2004). There are many international comparative research studies of the academic profession (Altbach 1996, 2000) and of faculty members’ working conditions (Enders 2001b; Enders and de Weert 2004). There is literature on academic labour markets that is international in scope (Musselin
L. Moraru () · M. Praisler · S. A. Marin · C. C. Bentea Dunărea de Jos University, Galaţi, Romania email: [email protected] B. M. Kehm, U. Teichler (eds.), The Academic Profession in Europe: New Tasks and New Challenges, The Changing Academy – The Changing Academic Profession in International Comparative Perspective 5, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4614-5_8, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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2003; Sørensen 1992) and studies concentrate on national higher education system descriptions (Breneman and Youn 1988; Enders 1996; Halsey 1992). A lot of studies have sought to develop typologies of staff structures that support academic careers (Neave and Rhoades 1987 or Enders 2001a). The public reflection on the academic profession is not characterised by satisfaction and equilibrium. There are opinions that the concept of the traditional academic profession might be history. The professional tensions with which the academic profession has to live nowadays are included by experts in at least four categories: massification, knowledge economy, managerialism, and competition (Teichler and Yagci 2009, p. 107).
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