Background: The under-representation of women and other minority group members in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) academia is a problem internationally and is attributed in part to hostile workplace cultures. We draw on the social identity perspective to examine the dynamic inter and intragroup processes entailed in these…

In higher education, the ability to navigate and function well in a diverse digital ecosystem is now essential to student, academic, and professional flourishing and productivity. Universities had to respond to a pandemic that catapulted face-to-face offerings into online and hybrid environments. More recently, a preference for working from home…

Resilience training for Further Education (FE) managers has become an increasingly familiar aspect of management development. This paper challenges the accepted orthodoxies underpinning resilience as a 'learnable' skill required to succeed as a manager. In particular, it addresses the concepts of toxic positivity, growth mindset (Dweck) and Grit…

Through a phenomenological research design, this study explores experiences of precarity among early-career academics in the UK and the USA higher education sectors. These contexts, while similar, exhibit structural differences as pioneers of neoliberalization in the Global North. Conducting semi-structured interviews with 20 early-career…

Collegiality and the contribution to the sustenance of the academy through academic citizenship are central to commonly held conceptions of what it is to be a university. This study investigates the articulation and recognition of academic citizenship through institutional promotion criteria, including both traditional research and…

Inter-professional perspective-taking (the ability to take the perspective of colleagues with whom one is working, but who work in a different context or role type) is an aspect of empathy, with substantial benefits in the workplace, including environments where inter-professional collaboration is required, such as clinicians and administrators.…

This historical exploration of the development of the academic workforce in the UK and France was triggered by the observation of significant similarities in contemporary debates on casualisation, and segmentation despite their distinctive HE systems. We develop a quantitative history of academic staff to understand why the differences in the two…

In this article the role of Human Resource Management (HRM) in the UK Higher Education (HE) sector is interrogated, with a focus on the Gig Academy. A literature review of the casualisation of academics in the sector is undertaken and critiqued through the consultative unitarist values and behaviours of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and…

When a pronounced taste for science leads researchers to self-select themselves in academia, higher education systems must be able to protect it. By relying on the economic theory of higher education, the international mobility and the sociology of science literature, we compare the working condition in the four major European higher education…

The notion of borderlands implies a boundary demarcating a crossing to/from an unfamiliar territory. It is a productive metaphor for dual-status academics -- those employed in academic roles in universities who concurrently undertake doctoral studies. We argue that dual-status academics dwell in an extended form of boundary crossing, potentially…

This study examines the psychosocial hazards experienced by academic staff working in UK institutions over time. A risk assessment framework developed by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) was used to measure seven key hazards: demands, control, support from managers and colleagues, relationships, role and change management. Data were obtained…

Neoliberal reform of the university sector has resulted in increasing numbers of academics employed on casual or fixed-term contracts. While there is an emergent body of literature on issues of precarity in the academy, relatively little attention has been paid to the roles and responsibilities of those tenured academics who employ and…

University student wellbeing is increasingly seen as a concern, and as demands on university staff time for research, teaching, leadership and pastoral support also increase, this is mirrored in concerns about staff wellbeing. Dominant sectoral narratives frame student and staff wellbeing as oppositional, with initiatives to support student…

Academic culture now places high expectations on researchers to demonstrate research productivity alongside teaching, leadership and knowledge exchange. In two studies of researchers across career stages in UK higher education institutions (HEIs), we examined workplace climate within academic departments as (1) supportive of researchers' needs for…

Occupational stress has been constantly rising among academics in universities globally, which affects their health and well-being. Although some studies reviewed occupational stress in academics, there has been less systematic evidence reviewed occupational stress of academic staff through the lens of the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping…