Qualifying for merit is a competitive and contentious process in higher education. Many merit structures are based upon traditional faculty evaluation systems which do not reflect the changing nature of higher education and thus, yield inequitable results. This article presents the case of a large department at a mid-size regional university that…

The decrease in public funding and the subsequent increase in temporary employment in academia are often viewed as crisis symptoms. While the crisis rhetoric may be premature, the turn towards hyper-competitive qualification systems that generate unfixed career advancement models may indeed mark a break from the tenure-oriented career structure.…

Supporting scholars is crucial for promoting academic development in higher education institutions (HEIs). While organisational support for academic careers has been widely researched in various contexts, little attention has been paid to factors influencing Chinese scholars' perspectives on such support, which could significantly impact their…

How have inequalities in job stability evolved in the twenty-first century between demographic groups? I compute expected job tenures, akin to life expectancy in demographic research, for the population as a whole and by subgroups defined by selected ascribed characteristics (sex, race, and ethnicity) over biennial periods from 1996 to 2020.…

This study explores the tenure-track experiences of two junior faculty Black men in higher education, while growing still remains vastly unexplored in higher education. Using an autoethnography approach with a critical race theory lens, the authors explore how race and institutional expectations shape their experiences along the primary components…

This study examines the diversity of institutional human capital at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) by analyzing faculty educational backgrounds using a large data set on faculty hiring and placement. The analysis includes approximately four thousand faculty members employed at 10 research-intensive R2 HBCUs between 2011 and…

There has been a marked increase in attention to educators' well-being since the pandemic. The majority of this research activity, however, has been focused on the well-being of early childhood teachers while the challenges of early childhood leaders have gone largely undocumented. Using a holistic conceptualization of leader well-being along with…

This article builds on a 2018 study and reports on a survey conducted in 2022 to examine the value of advanced subject degrees in addition to the Master of Library Science for academic librarians. This study explores the impact of advanced subject degrees on scholarly contributions, compensation, teaching roles, and tenure status in academic…

This article employs narrative inquiry and counter-storytelling as methodological and analytical tools to unpack the collective experiences of racially minoritized student affairs practitioners and faculty during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors' narratives underscore factors that impeded their success during the pandemic and the nuances of…

Neoliberalism occupies the walls of academia, seeping into the pulse and pace of faculty work and engendering precarity into academic life and the promotion and tenure process, particularly for Women of Color (WoC) scholars. Building on research on early-career faculty and Faculty of Color and informed by the theoretical concept of liminality, we…

While interdisciplinarity has been promoted in universities for decades, research suggests that untenured faculty struggle to receive recognition for their interdisciplinary research. Informed by the microfoundations of institutional theory and discursive legitimation, we examine how members of academic departments participate in the legitimation…

The objective of this study is to compare the levels of acceptance of occupational technology among police officers and middle school teachers in the Eastern Anatolia region of Turkey. Analyses based on the UTAUT2 model evaluated the impact of demographic variables, including gender, occupation, age, and tenure, on technology acceptance processes.…

The aim of this paper is to discern the difficulties tenure track faculty face as they attempt to balance their new faculty roles amid a transition from PhD student to faculty. Based on the theoretical Lazarus model of stress, this research analyzes the stressful transition of a PhD student to a tenure track professor and the underlying reasons…

As in several other countries, Canada's research-focused universities have seen an expansion in recent decades of tenurable or tenure-like teaching-focused faculty (TTFF) roles. TTFF streams are not new in Canada, but they have experienced growth in number and re-definition in scope at many universities. Despite its definitive impact in…

This article explores how researchers adapt to disruptions that cost them access to their field sites, advancing a uniquely sociological perspective on the dynamics of flexibility and adaptation in qualitative methods. Through interviews with 31 ethnographers whose access was preempted or eliminated, I find that adaptation varied systematically…