Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemConvergence and diversification in the domain of institutional policy: The aftermath of Dawkins' reforms( 2022)This study is contextualised by higher education policy reforms initiated three decades ago by the Hawke-Keating Labor Government under the leadership of John Dawkins, then Minister for Employment, Education and Training. The profound changes that these policy choices signalled have since become known as the Dawkins reforms. In a fiscally constrained environment, the Dawkins reforms aimed to improve the higher education system’s capacity to respond efficiently and effectively to Australia’s changing economic, social, and cultural conditions, as part of a broader economic reform agenda. Dawkins prescribed recasting the role of central and state governments, modernising the system structure, changing financial policies, expanding the student population, refocusing programs, and extending research capacity. At the institutional level, reforms foreshadowed included establishing more robust governance, management, and accountability practices. One of the fundamental objectives of the Dawkins reforms was a desire to drive the system towards greater diversity, with universities encouraged to forge their own teaching offerings and research specialisations. However, in recent years it has become clear that progress towards this goal has been at best limited. Indeed, universities appear to have converged their structures and disciplinary profiles, and key institutional practices. This has led policy researchers to suggest there has been a trend across the Australian higher education system towards isomorphism. How might we understand and explain the extent and nature of this isomorphism? In the aftermath of Dawkins’ radical prescriptions for reform, extensive attention has focused on Australia’s shifting higher education policy settings and universities, including studies applying insights from new institutionalism. However, there have been only limited attempts to analyse institutional policymaking in Australian universities, despite extensive public policymaking research, as well as normative and ideology-focused studies analysing discrete academic and administrative institutional policies. There has also been only limited research analysing the mechanisms and processes instituted to govern, manage, develop, and review institutional policy, and the ways, if any, Australian university policy processes mimic particular public policy models, heuristics or theories. Furthermore, studies have yet to analyse the extent to which Dawkins’ promise of diversity has been realised within the domain of institutional policy, and whether institutional policy developments might potentially be a source of isomorphism. To address these gaps in knowledge, I adopted an overall research design involving empirical mixed methods of qualitative and quantitative data collection (i.e., interviews, documents, and a survey), and thematic analysis. This study finds that despite Dawkins central promise of diversity, Australian universities show remarkable homogeneity in policy governance, policymaking processes reflecting the policy cycle heuristic, and key policy suite inclusions. Notwithstanding differences between universities with respect to the form and substance of individual policies, policy management models and technologies, this study finds that isomorphism is expressed in university policy governance and policymaking due to coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures exerted by government, system regulators and the policy practitioner professional network. Updated Threshold Standards and COVID-19 disruptions suggest imperatives for Australian universities to accommodate rapid policymaking and policy implementation evaluation to ensure robust policy governance and legitimacy.
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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.