Chinese universities are being continually subjected to new managerial practices and technologies that have fundamental consequences on the university faculty's academic life. Within a predominantly communitarian theoretical framework of academic identity, this qualitative case study draws upon interviews with 25 academics in Mainland China to…

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…

A focus on academic performativity and a rationalizing of what academics do according to measurable outputs has, in the era of higher education's (HE) neoliberalization and marketization, engendered debate regarding the "authenticity" of academic identity and practice. In such a context, a "performative" prioritization of…

This paper presents the preliminary findings of a case study of the merger of two higher education institutions in France. The paper's main focus is not the politics that gave rise to the institutional merger, nor the rights or wrongs of the decision, nor the merger process itself; rather, it is the extent to and the ways in which these features…

In education literature there is a distinct lack of scholarly work on issues of leadership other than on functional leadership at lower levels or high-level individual leadership activity which dominates existing studies. This empirical research is based on the result of a merger of education providers within the North East of England. A crucial…

A key role for educational leaders within undergraduate medical education is to continually improve the quality of education; global quality health care is the goal. This paper reports the findings from a study employing a power model to highlight how educational leaders influence the development of undergraduate medical curricula and the…

Threshold concepts were used to underpin a major curriculum reform endeavour in occupational therapy. After rigorous interrogation of troublesome knowledge and ensuring that the emergent concepts conformed to the five characteristics of previously proposed threshold concepts, we identified five threshold concepts. Two years into the rollout of the…

Generational differences in the way knowledge-makers negotiate shifts in relation to interdisciplinary knowledge-making at one Canadian university are studied. Semi-structured interviews with 20 participants in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines were conducted. Using a Foucauldian approach, transcripts were read to…

In some international contexts, for example in South Africa, Norway, Australia and New Zealand, teacher education has recently shifted into the academy. Concurrently research performance funding measures have been introduced. Both changes have placed pressure on teacher educators to become "research active". The literature indicates that…

With rising vocational expectations of higher education, universities are increasingly promoting themselves as preparing students for future professional lives. This makes it timely to ask what makes professionalism meaningful to students. In addressing this question, we first identify aspects of professionalism that might represent appropriate…

This paper focuses on a generational change taking place in the Polish academic profession: a change in behaviors and attitudes between two groups of academics. One was socialized to academia under the communist regime (1945-1989) and the other entered the profession in the post-1989 transition period. Academics of all age groups are beginning to…

The growing influence of the Bologna Process on higher education around the world has raised concerns about the applicability of this set of reforms in diverse cultural contexts. Ukraine provides an instructive case study highlighting the dynamics occurring at the convergence of the new framework with a state-centred model of higher education. The…