Education-focused roles represent a large and rapidly increasing share of the academic workforce in UK higher education. This expansion has resulted in the emergence of dedicated career tracks running in parallel with established teaching and research routes. Role descriptors and promotion criteria for these roles typically require evidence of…

Publish or Perish has a variety of meanings. Most often, the term is understood as a reference to the material requirements of publishing relentlessly in order to make or advance a career in contemporary academia. In this article, I show that Publish or Perish is also a cultural narrative that appears to provide a formal rationalistic solution to…

Academic culture now places high expectations on researchers to demonstrate research productivity alongside teaching, leadership and knowledge exchange. In two studies of researchers across career stages in UK higher education institutions (HEIs), we examined workplace climate within academic departments as (1) supportive of researchers' needs for…

The current demands on higher education institutions (HEIs) to become more efficient and effective have led to increasing performance pressures on researchers, and consequently on the practices and outcomes of researcher collaborations. In this paper, based on a qualitative study of collaborative experiences of management and organisation studies…

This paper explores perceptions of the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF) and its implications for individuals, institutions and wider academia through an analysis of media coverage of the REF over a 2-year period. In recent years, the importance attached to the REF has become an increasing focus of concern for academics and other…

Intensification, speed of change and faster pace of life have recently emerged as significant issues in studies analysing the current academic climate. This article takes up the "social acceleration thesis" as a conceptual resource for capturing the relationship between the individual experience of time and the changing structure and…

The outcomes of educational systems continue to lag far behind expectations at all levels, primary, secondary, and tertiary. Meanwhile, the sheer amount of educational research published in refereed journals has expanded enormously. There is an obvious disconnect between the educational research papers published in professional journals or…