This article analyses academic work and the academic workforce in the context of current dynamics and likely futures. It discusses the significance of academic work, reviews workforce characteristics, and analyses tensions and pressures. Prevailing conceptualisations, it is argued, do not reflect the current situation in which the profession finds…

This article presents an original application of Q methodology in investigating the challenging arena of emotion in the Higher Education (HE) workplace. Q's strength lies in capturing holistic, subjective accounts of complex and contested phenomena but is unusual in employing a statistical procedure within an interpretivist framework. Here Q is…

This article has dual aims. First, it proposes an explicit focus on emotion as a means of enriching thinking about employee health and wellbeing in the higher education (HE) sector. Second, in order to bring conceptual clarity to a highly complex area, it presents and illustrates (using a fictional scenario) a framework for understanding emotion.…

Increasing demands on academic work have resulted in many academics working long hours and expressing dissatisfaction with their working life. These concerns have led to a number of faculties and universities adopting workload allocation models to improve satisfaction and better manage workloads. This paper reports on a study which examined the…

A salient characteristic about the U.S. workforce is the continual process of voluntary employee turnover, which can be problematic for employers who invest a substantial amount of time and money in recruiting and training employees. This paper discusses the effects of workplace policies and practices on the voluntary turnover of women…

The aim of this article is to shed light on some aspects of professional responsibility by investigating students' visions of future work and notions of professional responsibility. The data is based on interviews with samples of freshmen in three educational programmes at the University of Oslo in Norway. The data has been analysed in relation to…

Various studies have focused on self-regulated student learning. However, little attention has been given to the self-regulation processes in teacher learning. In this study, we focus on the work-related learning processes reported by experienced higher education teachers. The aim of this study was to discover whether teachers actively…

No institution of higher education in the world can make valid claims that it is immune to the effects of change and transformation. An array of trends such as the massification of higher education, widened access, response to new demands of technology, globalisation, internationalisation, increased accountability, the use of new modes of delivery…