'Enough to make you sick!' Pathological Characteristics of the Australian Academic Workplace (original) (raw)
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Trouble at Mill: quality of academic worklife issues within a comprehensive Australian university
Studies in Higher Education, 2000
This study describes the quality of academic worklife (QAWL) within a comprehensive university in Australia. Academics responded to the Academic Work Environment Survey, a diagnostic instrument designed to assess the relationships between and among academics' demographic characteristics (age, gender, position, discipline area), work environment perceptions (role, job, supervisor, structure, sector characteristics), and work attitudes (self-estrangement, organisational commitment). Findings revealed positive QAWL features such as role clarity, motivating job characteristics, and low levels of self-estrangement (alienation). Negative QAWL features included role overload, low levels of job feedback, and limited opportunities to in¯uence university decisionmaking. Comments indicated that many academics feel disenchanted and demoralised with the tenets and practices of managerialism. The study concludes that comprehensive universities suffer from strategic dissonance. They want to deliver cost ef® ciencies and maintain institutional reputation (i.e. centralise), but also want to serve distinct market sectors and expand their revenue base (i.e. decentralise).
Trouble at Mill: Quality of academic worklife issues witin a comprehensive Australian university
This study describes the quality of academic worklife (QAWL) within a comprehensive university in Australia. Academics responded to the Academic Work Environment Survey, a diagnostic instrument designed to assess the relationships between and among academics' demographic characteristics (age, gender, position, discipline area), work environment perceptions (role, job, supervisor, structure, sector characteristics), and work attitudes (self-estrangement, organisational commitment). Findings revealed positive QAWL features such as role clarity, motivating job characteristics, and low levels of self-estrangement (alienation). Negative QAWL features included role overload, low levels of job feedback, and limited opportunities to in¯uence university decisionmaking. Comments indicated that many academics feel disenchanted and demoralised with the tenets and practices of managerialism. The study concludes that comprehensive universities suffer from strategic dissonance. They want to deliver cost ef® ciencies and maintain institutional reputation (i.e. centralise), but also want to serve distinct market sectors and expand their revenue base (i.e. decentralise).
In a provocative article published in 'Minerva' in 2015, Halffman and Radder discuss the Kafkaesque worlds that academics in the Netherlands now find themselves in, as an underfunded university sector predates upon itself and its workforce (2015, p. 165-166). Their Academic Manifesto observes that Dutch tertiary institutions have become obsessively focused on ‘accountability’ and pursue neoliberal-style imperatives [forced upon them] of ‘efficiency and excellence’. They paint a portrait of academics under siege, untrusted, and constantly micro-managed. The pursuit of so-called efficiency has involved accountability systems that are themselves wasteful, driving seemingly endless institutional restructuring. Moreover, institutions have become obsessed with star-performers in research, driven by competitive targets that undergird global rankings. Metrics – publication outputs, journal quality, citations, impact and grant revenue – produce a culture of competition and sometimes, mercenary behaviours, on the part of academics and managers. While there may be beacons of light, they are heavily shielded in the article, which makes for depressing reading. Their provocation prompts two questions, to which we will try to respond through our own experiences and review of Australia's adoption of,and resistance to, higher education reform: 1.How does Australia compare? 2.What can Australian universities and their staff do?
Corporate reforms to Australian universities: views from the academic heartland
2017
This paper presents survey findings relating to academics' work attitudes, values and responses to corporate reforms within eight Australian universities. Academics (n= 1,041) responded to the Academic Work Environment Survey, a diagnostic questionnaire designed to examine the quality of academic work life within universities in Australia (Winter, Taylor, & Sarros, 2000). Academics indicated strong positive responses to items indicative of corporate reforms across the higher education sector (i.e., decreased public funding, rise of consumerism, business-related managerial practices, quality assurance mechanisms, appraisal systems), reported high levels of role overload (stress) and moderate levels of job involvement and organisational commitment. Value conflict statements indicated academics felt market behaviour mechanisms and business-related principles were compromising the primary goals of teaching, learning and scholarship and exerting a strong negative effect on academic m...
Occupational stress in Australian university staff: Results from a national survey
International Journal of Stress Management, 2003
This article presents results from a study of occupational stress in Australian university staff. The authors report data on psychological strain and job satisfaction from nearly 9,000 respondents at 17 universities. Academic staff were generally worse off than general staff, and staff in newer universities were worse off than those in older universities. At the aggregate level, selfreport measures of psychological well-being were highly correlated with objective measures of university well-being (investment income, student-staff ratios, and recent cuts in staffing levels and in government operating grants).
2012
In the last few years, a scholarly critique of current forms and directions of higher education has become increasingly prominent. This work, often but not exclusively focussed on the American and British systems, and on humanities disciplines, laments the transformation of the university into ‘a fast-food outlet that sells only those ideas that its managers believe will sell [and] treats its employees as if they were too devious or stupid to be trusted’ (Parker and Jary 335). Topics include the proliferation of courses and subject areas seen as profitable, particularly for overseas students;1 the commensurate diminution or dissolution of ‘unprofitable’ areas; the de-professionalisation of academic staff and limitation of their powers in decisionmaking; the dismantling of academic disciplines and department-based academic units; the growing size and authority of management in determining priorities in research (see Laudel) and teaching; quantification and evaluation of academic work...