Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemEvolution and resilience of academics in Higher Education ecosystems in Australia(2023-05)For several decades, higher education has been facing rapid change and successive challenges. This is in part due to global and Australian economic trends which are also experiencing accelerating change and challenges from social-cultural, technological, geopolitical tensions and aggression, climate and environmental factors and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. Higher education is seen as key in finding solutions to this diverse array of challenges. First, through creating employable, adaptable, and entrepreneurial graduates who become a key part of the future workforce with the promise to create a more equitable society. Second, through research which produces knowledge to provide the basis for improvements and even solutions to global and Australian challenges. Questions, however, have been raised this century about the extent to which higher education can continue to deliver on the promise of quality outcomes from education and research in the current strained environment and inflexible academic workforce. Many posit for higher education to succeed alternative academic workforce models and changes to the academic role will need to be made. Such alternative workforce models include increased diversity of professional staff to better match activities and differentiation of academic roles which are better fit for purpose in either education or research, the former with an emphasis on teaching and the latter including greater emphasis on academics with entrepreneurial and commercialisation skills. In many higher education institutions, it is now common to have academic roles differentiating into three distinct categories; teaching or education-focused, teaching and research integration (also known as the 40:40:20 traditional academic role) and research focused with education-focused roles growing most rapidly. This growth has not necessarily happened in a systematic and coherent manner. Instead change to academic roles can be seen as largely unplanned local decisions caused by institutional pressures and system wide drivers. Expectations are that these roles will deliver on the promise of educational quality and the student experience and enable higher education to serve communities more ably, but this is not necessarily a given. There are many unknowns about the long-term impact of differentiated academic roles, especially those teaching and education-focused academic roles where disciplinary research has been removed. The theoretical framework of resilience, adaptive capacity and cycles and psychological development and self-determination were powerful heuristics to investigate the responses of academics to these roles. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data collected through analysis and interviews with academics mostly in science, three main findings emerged. First, teaching and education-focused roles have been increasing most rapidly. Second, academics in these roles experienced a range of consequences as a result of moving from disciplinary research to teaching. Third, while all academics undergo adaptive cycles in response to stress, education-focused academics and women were perhaps most vulnerable to stress and loss from the ecosystem, even after their heroic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. While theory predicts greater academic role diversity will increase resilience and adaptive capacity, this is not necessarily a given without changes to the higher education ecosystem in Australia in which academics operate.
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ItemAcademic Performance Management and the Nature of Academic Work: A Proposal for Australian Public Universities(2020)This research focuses on academic performance management at select Australian universities. Academic performance management in this study is broadly understood as universities’ holistic and integrated approach to defining, organising and optimising academic performance, with a view to achieve their mission and development goals. Whilst academic performance management is concerned with academics and their quality of work, which constitute the core of the university, previous studies have consistently shown that it does not adequately support academics in their work or reflect the nature of the work itself. The literature has revealed a range of issues related to misalignments between academic performance management policies and the nature of work, and a mismatch between polices and their implementation. Whilst various suggestions have been made to improve the system, little has been done at a holistic and conceptual level to address the core misalignment issues. In response to this research gap, this study proposes an empirically based conceptual framework to better align academic performance management with academic work. It argues that such alignment better reflects and supports academic work and the universities’ attainment of their mission. The study explores what constitutes this framework through examining the nature of academic work at universities, academics’ experience of academic performance management and their suggestions for the policies and implementation of academic performance management. The overall research question of this study is: What constitutes an academic performance management framework proposed for Australian public universities? As this research uses the locus of academic work as the lens to conceptualise academic performance management in university contexts, three sub-questions are asked to guide the inquiry: 1. What is academic work like at three Australian public universities? 2. To what extent did existing academic performance management align with the nature of academic work at these universities? 3. What should academic performance management be like to better reflect and support the nature of academic work at Australian public universities? To that end, qualitative multi-case study methodology was employed to seek the views of academics on their work and academic performance management at select Australian public universities. The study’s qualitative data included interviews with thirty-seven academics across different roles, levels and disciplines, as well as policy documentation collected from three university sites: an urban research-intensive university (University A), a regional dual-sector university (University B) and an urban dual sector university (University C). Data was analysed using a content analysis approach involving case-by-case analysis and cross-case analysis. The study found that within the changing university context, academic work reflects a very broad and multi-dimensional profession. Academic roles in education, research, and engagement involved a large range of activities and inherent complexity, and were underpinned by key values such as scholarly and intellectual pursuit, self-efficacy, disciplinary norms, collegiality and dignity at work. Here the study proposes the concept of the ‘community locus’ of academic work to describe a distinctive characteristic of academic work, which challenges the common approach to academic performance management as solely based on individual performance. In terms of the issues of existing academic performance management, the study reveals misalignments between policies and the nature of academic work, misalignments between policies and their implementation, and a range of suggestions from academics to address these issues. Academic perspectives varied only slightly across the three university cases, and these small variations were often associated with differences in the type of institution, discipline, academic role and/or perceptions of the supervisors/line-managers.