This paper examines the micro-political experiences of Adam (a pseudonym), a newly appointed fitness coach at a Football Association Premier League club, in his search for acceptance by senior colleagues. Data were collected through a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews, before being subject to a process of inductive analysis. Goffman's…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore patterns of importance ratings of managerial competencies in 22 countries in different regions around the globe, to guide specificity in assessing and developing managers in multiple geographies. Additionally, this study examined the utility of clustering countries based on shared culture, as…

The article explores the role of the Registrar (Chief Operating Officer) in a university, and the ways in which we value the contributions of professional, managerial and administrative (PMA) staff. It assesses the conditions in which PMA staff work and describes the professional development opportunities they enjoy. The article goes on to analyse…

This study was aimed at identifying the critical interactions within work environments that support the development of early career academics as researchers in institutions with lower order research profiles, that is, environments that differ from research-intensive universities. Ten early career academics, five from Australia and five from the…

This article explores the impact of superdiversity on linguistic practices in Southampton, UK. Our focus seeks to identify what these practices are in an environment that we describe as superdiverse, and what is influencing, determining, shaping and contributing to these practices. Southampton is characterised by twenty-first century social…

Purpose: This paper seeks to consider employees' perceptions of engagement from their lived experiences of UK employees following the global credit crisis, post 2008. It draws from the prior studies of Hassard et al. (2009), which researched work practices in the period preceding the study. Design/methodology/approach: The research utilised focus…

From a time when laws on health and safety applied only to some industries and much was unregulated, we have moved to a time when health and safety laws seem, if you believe some reports in the news, to pervade every aspect of working life with silly restrictions. This article looks at the development of the legislation from the 1960s and suggests…

In the second year module "Professional Contexts for Modern Languages" at Lancaster University, students take 20-25 hour placements, and using a multimodal forum, they articulate their challenges, development and understanding of the varying contexts in which they are working. In summative assessment, students across languages and types…

Wearable devices and ambient sensors can monitor a growing number of aspects of daily life and work. We propose to use this context data as content for learning applications in workplace settings to enable employees to reflect on experiences from their work. Learning by reflection is essential for today's dynamic work environments, as employees…

Intensification, speed of change and faster pace of life have recently emerged as significant issues in studies analysing the current academic climate. This article takes up the "social acceleration thesis" as a conceptual resource for capturing the relationship between the individual experience of time and the changing structure and…

Objective: Work Place-Based Assessments (WPBAs) were introduced into psychiatry along with the new curriculum in 2005. The Royal College of Psychiatrists decided to pilot several WPBAs to ascertain their suitability. Method: Eight types of assessments (Case-Based Discussion, Assessment of Clinical Expertise, Mini-Assessed Clinical Encounter,…

It is assumed in the current policy environment that higher education should lead to graduate employability, although understandings of employability are generally limited. In this paper, we discuss issues relating to graduate employability with reference to a case study of an information technology (IT) student progressing to a graduate role in…

This project explores women and educational leadership from the perspective of an individual who moved from the UK to Australia in order to take up the position of Dean of an education grouping in a university. Emails sent by the Dean to the group are analysed after nine months in post and categorised according to the requirements of the position…

Increasingly PhD graduates who wish to take up traditional academic positions (full-time teaching and research leading to permanence) are unable to find such jobs. They end up in fixed-term appointments as post-doctoral fellows or researchers on others' grants. Few studies document their experiences and most that do draw on data from the late…

In multinational corporate companies, multilingualism is often a daily reality for employees and the negotiation of language practices for work and social purposes, a routine. Despite the role of English as a lingua franca, the linguistic ecology of modern workplaces is dynamic, rich and diverse. While English is often used for communication…