"The Academic Life: Small Worlds, Different Worlds" represented an impressive investigation of the largest and most complex national academic community in the world, which seriously attempted a detailed representation of the variations in its form. Its ethnographic orientation to understanding the internal academic life through exploratory interviews with individual faculty in different types of institution and a range of disciplines provided subtle and complex insights. The strength of its subsequent influence on scholars in this field, however, may have restricted analysis of broader transformations in higher education and society and the related restructuring of academic work and careers. (Contains 1 figure.)