Although the nature of the academic profession and related career advancement has been well documented, little empirical evidence has been provided on the professional agency that academics employ to advance from one academic rank to another. Adopting an agency focus, this study therefore investigates what strategies academics adopt when seeking…

Australian higher education has faced both global economic and environmental challenges, including most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. To deliver in this resource constrained environment, academic workforce and academic roles are being reshaped. Teaching and education focused academic roles are rapidly increasing but come with opportunities and…

Australian academics are being squeezed from all sides, facing ever-intensifying bureaucratic expectations around research output, coupled with increased teaching commitments and mounting administrative duties. These demands are occurring in an environment where most academics are still employed under traditional arrangements whereby, notionally,…

This statistical note updates earlier work on the salaries paid to general staff working at Australia's public universities, and the levels at which universities classify those staff. In 2017, higher proportions of general staff in more senior grades could be found at the University of Technology Sydney, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology,…

The study on which this article reports investigated the internationalisation of higher education studies by examining collaborations in the form of international co-authorships. We analyse how network-based mechanisms, related to structural relationship between authors (preferential attachment, i.e., higher tendency to collaborate among the most…

Purpose: This research is situated at a metropolitan university in Melbourne (Australia) where the authors work in initial teacher education programs within the same faculty. The purpose of this study is to raise awareness that collegial, collaborative and "co-caring" environments can foster an improved sense of belonging, acceptance and…

Within higher education student evaluations of teaching (SET) are used to inform evaluations of performance of courses and teachers. An anonymous online survey was constructed and implemented using Qualtrics. This study was situated within a more extensive study investigating the impact of narrative SET comments on teaching quality and the health…

The research underpinning this article explores the impacts that parenting and primary caring responsibilities have upon academic careers. It takes an innovative approach by exploring three under-researched aspects of this issue: the longitudinal impacts that extend past the years immediately following the birth or adoption of a child; the…

Gender implications of nationally competitive teaching awards were examined to determine whether women receive sufficient accolades, given their dominant position in university teaching. Quantitative methods and secondary data provided objective analysis of teaching awards for Australian universities, for an 18-year data set with 2046 units of…

The study had two main aims: (i) to develop a model incorporating research self-efficacy and research disposition as predictors of publication output; and (ii) to assess the fit and robustness of this model to dichotomous groups based on gender, academic qualifications and rank. Data were drawn from a survey of lecturers (n = 331) working in two…

The achievement of gender equity in universities continues to warrant attention. Globally, universities have much work ahead of them if they are to redress the gender imbalance in senior positions and remuneration rates. To examine this issue, multiple sources of evidence were used to observe teaching and research workload of academic staff…

To date western feminist scholarship on gender and work has primarily focused on women providing valuable information as to their discrimination and invisibility, especially in the echelons of power and in senior decision-making positions. Feminist scholars have needed to explore women's under representation in senior leadership positions because…

This paper presents findings from an empirical study of key aspects of the teaching and research priorities, beliefs and behaviours of 72 professorial and associate professorial academics in Science, Information Technology and Engineering across four faculties in three Australian universities. The academics ranked 16 research activities and 16…

This paper examines the transition that classroom teachers experience moving into the academy as teacher educators, considering the change in professional identity and the subsequent alignment of situational and substantial selves. We outline the findings of a qualitative case study that utilised self-study and teacher narrative to explore the…

Analysis of aggregated data files on staff sent by all Australian universities to DEST in 2007 and of salary schedules posted on university websites reveals a considerable variation between salaries paid to general staff at each salary level and the relative seniority of those staff. This paper outlines the differences in staffing structures and…