The author uses character to examine a group of mid-level academics' accounts of work and career in a British research-intensive university. Highlighting how people draw on good character to justify their approach to work under the pressures of new performance demands, she argues that good character is a central feature of contemporary academic…

Contemporary changes in higher education in Sweden are characterised by two educational discourses: marketisation and academisation. Demands to meet market requirements, as well as to make education more scientific, have created tensions between and within institutional cultures. Using interviews with 16 heads of departments, the authors…

Research supervisors' different ways of experiencing their supervision of doctoral students are analysed in terms of the students' questions and problems as they relate to the supervisor's research, and what consequences this connection, or non-connection, to the supervisor's research has for supervision and the role of supervisor. Thirty…

Ideas of "how we learn" in formal academic settings have changed markedly in recent decades. The primary position that universities once held on shaping what constitutes learning has come into question from a range of experience-led and situated learning models. Drawing on findings from a study conducted across three Australian universities, the…

The doctorate is an educative process for students but what is its impact on supervisors' learning about the practice of doctoral supervision? Internationally, there is an increased emphasis on formal training, monitoring and accountability of doctoral supervisors. Yet there is a striking silence about what doctoral supervisors learn through…

This article introduces the concept of "the implied student", through which the author discusses the complex issue of the expectations of students, teachers, the institutions and the educational system, and the encounter between them. The implied student is an analytical concept, not an empirical substance. The analytical potential of…

The purpose of the doctorate and the desirable outcomes of doctoral education are the focus of debates in the UK, the USA, Australia and other Organisation for Economic Development countries. Part of that reconceptualisation of the doctorate includes a growing international interest in university-industry research, which, as a consequence, has…

An ethnographic account of the community of academic physicists is based on interviews, and a picture of what physics is like as a discipline is constructed. The features of its epistemology that differentiate it from other disciplines and characteristics (career structure, value-system and preferred modes of communication) are described.…

This article is concerned with the complex role played by student assessment in the formation of the human subjects that are the product of higher education. Using a framework informed by the work of Foucault, it explores the productive effects of assessment regimes. Drawing on narrative data collected during in-depth, semi-structured interviews…