Using social realist theory and critical discourse analysis, this article examines a number of discourses which construct academic staff attitudes to teaching and learning in their disciplines. It seeks to explain academics' resistance to engaging in activities aimed at professionalising academic practice. The research described in the article identified four overarching sets of discourses--disciplinary, student deficit, skills and performativity--which represent contradictory positions to academic staff development activities. Understanding this resistance might enable institutions to create ideational contexts in which these discourses, which have a constraining influence, can be critiqued and possibly replaced by discourses which create enabling conditions for staff development activities in higher education.