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The Career Perceptions of Academic Staff and HumanResource Discourses inEnglish Higher EducationTony Strike and John Taylor, University of Southampton

Abstract

This paper sets out ndings from research that considered the interplay betweenEnglish national policy developments in human resources management inhigher education and the personal stories of academic staff as career participants. Academic careers are pursued in an institutional and national policy context but it was not clear that the formal management agendacoincided with the real concerns of the objects of these policy initiatives,academic staff themselves. Twenty-one academic participants, across six casestudy sites, were interviewed. Signicantly, the research found that the policyissues that dominate the national and institutional human resource manage-ment discourse such as pay and conditions of service, bargaining structures,tenure and competitiveness are not the same as those issues that academicsraise.The research highlights a found disjuncture between the national humanresources policy discourse and the social reality of academic staff as objects of that policy and suggests changes as a result.

Introduction

In early twenty-rst century England, the public prole of higher edu-cation has never been higher. The emerging knowledge economyrequires educated, skilled, knowledge workers and the creation of newknowledge to fuel economic growth. At the same time, the extension of opportunities to participate in higher education is critical to social

Higher Education Quarterly , 0951–5224DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2273.2008.00404.xVolume 63, No. 2, April 2009, pp 177–195

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resource available to any institution) is critical. Against this background,there has been an increasing emphasis from policy bodies and higher

education institutions on the need to improve their management of human resources in higher education. This paper sets out ndings fromresearch that considered the interplay between national policy develop-ments in human resources management and the personal stories of academic career participants. The research involved semi-structuredinterviews of 21 academics, maximising the variation by choosing sixEnglish pre-1992 higher education institutions of varying status, acrossve non-cognate disciplines and representing both genders. Post 1992,

Irish,Welsh and Scottish Universities were not included in the scope andthose academics views may differ from those reported here. Signicantly,the policy issues that dominate the national and institutional manage-ment discourse such as pay and conditions of service, competition forstaff in a global context, future demand for recruits, affordability andmodernisation are not properly connected to those issues that academicsas participants raise. Academic staff are, by contrast, within the contextof their particular subject discipline, concerned about early career inse-curity and their progression towards career grade and institutionalseniority. This career goal seems to be pursued against a perceivedimplicit age based timetable, while challenged by increased workloadand hindered by issues relating to gender and ethnicity.

English national management policy context for human resourcesmanagement in higher education

Universities in England are, relative to much of Europe, autonomousand self-governing institutions with their own charter and a governingcouncil. These institutions do, however, receive public funding, tovarying degrees, for both teaching and research and so are subject topublic policy asserted through legislation, or through other forms of public funding, such as the research councils or the Higher EducationFunding Council for England. These bodies are all capable of and doinuence human resource management in universities through strings orconditions associated with their funding.

The report of the National Committee of Inquiry into HigherEducation (Dearing 1997) was published in July 1997. The DearingCommittee recommended that:

178 Higher Education Quarterly

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Dearing in particular was concerned that the then current arrangementsfor determining pay and conditions were hindering the development of

the sector.This proposed review was to cover the framework for negotiating payand terms of service, whether pay levels needed adjustment, new ways of working, arrangements that respect the autonomy and diversity of insti-tutions and the need for each to ensure its own nancial well-being andappropriate transitional arrangements.

Changes had already been made to university employmentarrangements. In the pre-1992 universities, the removal of the University

Grants Committee’s imposed maximum of 40 per cent senior (that is,those staff holding grades at senior lecturer level and above) to juniorstaff ratio, meant that universities had been able to recruit staff to suittheir own plans. Before the Education Reform Act 1988, tenure in UK universities was governed by each university’s charter and statutes.Mostly, staff in pre-1992 or chartered universities enjoyed a ‘hard’ formof tenure or protection against dismissal except for ‘good cause’, butdegrees of tenure differed between universities. The ancient universitieshad particularly hard tenure rules. The Act (Section 203) required uni-versities to have internal statutes that allowed dismissal for redundancyor for good cause. Disciplinary and grievance procedures were alsointroduced with provisions for appeals by dismissed staff.

Dnes and Seaton (1998) argue that the 1988 Act softened tenure inthe United Kingdom in pre-1992 universities in relation to redundancybecause previously, unless a whole university closed, redundancy wouldhave been difcult to establish. They state that universities effectivelyhad no option but to buy out incumbents, presumably at the expecteddifference between their academic remuneration and their earnings intheir next best occupation. After the passage of the Act, universities onlyneeded to pay statutory redundancy pay based on a fraction of historicalearnings. It was made much cheaper, at least in principle, for universi-ties to create redundancies if they could meet the criteria specied in theAct.

More recently Universities and Colleges Employers Association(UCEA) and Universities UK produced a report (Universities UK &

UCEA 2003), known as the Zellick report, following consultation withthe Privy Council, which provided a revised model statute. This model

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With regard to pay and gradings, higher education institutions inEngland wholly, but not exclusively, voluntarily belong by subscription

to the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA), anemployers association. UCEA had traditionally, through national collec-tive bargaining, set the staff pay, grading and conditions rules for highereducation institutions in the UK with their consent. UCEA, whichrepresents the great majority of higher education employers, took for-wards Recommendation 50 of the Dearing Report and after consultationacross the sector, constituted the Independent Review of Higher Edu-cation Pay and Conditions; with terms of reference as recommended by

Dearing. This review, chaired by Sir Michael Bett, reported in 1999.One outcome of the Bett Report (1999) was the establishment of anew national Joint Negotiating Committee for Higher Education Staff.The Bett Report, as well as recommending a National Council to replacemulti-table bargaining, also sought two closely linked pay spines, anational grading framework, job evaluation and institutional exibility toreect markets and performance.

This new negotiating body agreed a national framework agreement(Sir Michael Bett 1999; UCEA 2003) allowing each higher educationinstitution to design its own pay and grading arrangements provided thatthey used a new, single, national 51 point pay spine (not the dual spineBett had recommended and the Association of University Teachers hadsupported) and adhered to certain common agreed principles.This cameabout arguably as a result of pressure from some larger higher educationinstitutions that threatened to leave UCEA unless more latitude wasgranted to reect their priorities in their human resource managementpolicies.These institutions faced the challenge of attracting and retaininghigh quality faculty in a competitive national and international market-place and so increasingly strained against national grades and pay scales.

In the grant letter to the Higher Education Funding Council forEngland in 2000, the Secretary of State for Education (for England)made £330M of funding available for the three year period (2001–2 to2003–4) to higher education institutions in England against certainobjective criteria requiring each to produce and submit for assessmenta human resources strategy for the funds to be released; the so called

‘Rewarding and Developing Staff’ initiative (HEFCE 2001).The ‘Rewarding and Developing Staff’ funding was paid directly to


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equal pay for equal work, using institution-wide systems of jobevaluation. This objective, combined with the resulting national frame-

work agreement from the Joint Negotiating Committee for Higher Edu-cation Staff permitting members of UCEA to develop as sought local paystructures and using the ‘Rewarding and Developing Staff’ funding,created a dynamic for local design of institution-specic pay and gradingstructures.As a result, higher education institutions were given a nationalmandate, the freedom and the nancial resources, and had the competi-tive motivation to localise and improve human resource management,including pay structures.The Trades Unions, through the national single

pay spine, a model grading structure, a library of national job proles(UCEA 2004) and their negotiating stance, sought to get as muchuniformity of outcome between higher education institutions as theycould achieve. This tension, between institutions seeking to maximisetheir freedom, and Trades Unions, aiming to retain commonality acrossthe system, remains to date.

The national and institutional human resources management agendahas, therefore, been dominated by issues of pay structures, removal of tenure, changed bargaining arrangements and revision of formal workconditions and procedures.

Research methods and process

Meaning is created amongst people who share a context and, therefore,behaviour should only be interpreted according the groups meaningsystem. Meaning, therefore, has prime value. As Blaikie (2000, p.251)put it, qualitative research uses the social actors point of view:

The chief characteristic is a commitment to viewing the social world – socialaction and events – from the viewpoint(s) of the people being studied. Thiscommitment involves discovering their socially constructed reality and pen-etrating the frames of meaning within which they conduct their activities.

This sense of reality is a relevant characteristic to this research as incareer theory it is said, for example, by Block (2005, p. 198) that:

Given the actuality of life and the predisposition to seek order, individualsoften experience their careers as illogical, having no clear relationshipbetween actions and reactions. They believe there is some sequence of work


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Academic careers are pursued in an institutional and national policycontext for human resources management but it is not clear that the

formal management agenda coincides with the real concerns of theobjects of these policy initiatives, academic staff themselves.In the above context, the aim of the study was to understand the views

of participants about their experience of their personal academic careersand their perceptions of institutional management. Face-to-face inter-views were considered the most appropriate as they allowed trust to beestablished and the ability to connect with the participant academicwithin their own institution. The result was a set of themes or issues

about academic work and careers that academics considered important.Given that the practicing academics who were interviewed were vol-unteers who agreed to be seen, it was assumed that those who agreed toparticipate were interested in and had something to say, reecting ontheir academic work and career, and would be willing to make their viewsknown to the researcher. It was not intended to obtain personal data, asopposed to professional data, about the lives of those interviewed exceptwhere the respondents felt one had positively or negatively impacted onthe other and then it would be the nature of the impact that would be of interest.

The nature of the research militated against a structured interview asthe language used and issues raised were given by the participants and soallowed concepts to be built from what was offered.The intention was togive voice to the participants.

Six deliberately varied English pre-1992 higher education institutionswere selected and agreed to participate. They were asked for a list of allrecently-appointed or promoted academic staff in selected non-cognatedisciplines and the nominees were e-mailed to invite them to participate.All the positive respondents were seen. At each interview the purpose of the interview was explained and permission was requested to record theinterview. Topics were introduced in turn without necessarily asking aquestion and where questions for clarication were asked they tendedto be open-ended so the interviewees were not guided to foregoneconclusions. Twenty-one academics were interviewed. The interviewswere arranged, recorded and transcribed between January and April

2007.Then they were transferred to NVIVO for analysis and coding.Theacademics interviewed were selected to represent as much variation as


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The academic staff sample included eight women and thirteen men.After detailed analysis of the interviews, looking at their content, a set

of categories of description emerged that was used to start a codingstructure for the interview narratives. The ve initial coding categoriesset up were; life impacts, career goals, academic work, career models andpromotions procedures.

It soon became clear through the iterative coding process that sub-

codes or categories existed under each of the primary headings. Thisprocess led to the emergence of the nal coding template for the analysisof the interview data.The narrative was re-coded from the initial codingcategories into inductively generated sub-codes.

Academics as career participants

Academic staff is a term that, once given thought, quickly opens up intoa diverse and complex world that dees easy denition or categorisation.Interviewing academics about their lived experiences of following theircareer allows a clear participant perspective or voice. This researchsought out that narrative that gave insight into those issues raised byacademics about their own careers, amplied by the relevant researchliterature surrounding those issues raised by them.This provides a set of issues that, as will be seen, does not coincide with the present nationalpolicy narrative.

Research Findings

TABLE 1Sample frame for interviews

Institution: A B C D E F Total

Subject:Medicine 1 5 1 1 1 9Languages 1 3 1 1 1 7Engineering 1 1Economics 1 1 2Mathematics 1 1 2Total 2 5 6 2 4 2 21


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differences that formal organisational promotions procedures do notacknowledge. Becher (1987) argued that, while many studies viewed

academics as belonging to one single homogeneous profession, they werewrong and that the differences between disciplines outweighed thesimilarities. Trowler (1987, p. 309) emphatically stated ‘Disciplinarycharacteristics do shape academics’ attitudes . . . ’ Thus, theoretically atleast, we have to talk about the academic professions, one for eachdiscipline. Becher (1987) accepts that disciplinary groupings may existand cites the pure sciences, humanities, technologies and applied socialsciences and having clearly different natures of what knowledge is and

how to work with it but nevertheless holds that the individual disciplinesare engaged in distinctive intellectual tasks each with their own knowl-edge tradition. These differences between disciplines, in the minds of many academic staff, challenge present procedures. Thus, while aca-demic promotion criteria, for example, in individual higher educationinstitutions presently do not treat each discipline differently, the aca-demic participants took it for granted that the disciplines were not thesame and that the measured outputs for promotion, for instance, werenecessarily different one from the other. For example:

You know because in Physics it could be ten publications, in particularjournals. In Economics it could be three publications three particularjournals. So that . . . that has to vary widely across discipline. There is notformula . . . that . . . I don’t . . . that you know, could be university-wide. Itwould have to be . . . the criteria in a particular department.

(Interviewee 12: HEI C, male)

Another stated:

I’m in a eld, where you’re expected to produce two-to-three high-qualityjournals a year to be considered research active. Now in other elds you areexpected to produce much bigger pieces of work over a long period of time.You know. . . . So yes, I think the discipline factor inuences hugely. It alsoinuences what you teach and how different subjects are taught.You know it’sa very different teaching philosophy classes through seminars to not morethan 20 students than teaching 120 students basic optics and physics, like Ido.

(Interviewee 1: HEI F, female)

Further, the lack of clear disciplinary measures in promotion criteria wasi d t i t f i l di i li f l


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responsibility. I think scientists on the whole get promoted at a younger agethan people in the humanities.

(Interviewee 2: HEI A, male)

Debate as to whether the formalised qualities or criteria describingacademic roles and seniority should be explicitly disciplinary seems to beculturally contentious although the socially-constructed reality suggestsdifferent objective standards do apply.

Many universities are now looking to implement new organisationalstructures, with larger multi-disciplinary schools, colleges or faculties:traditional departmental structures based on single disciplines are being

replaced. Within this movement, there is opportunity to address per-ceived unfairness between different disciplines, by offering the potentialfor comparison across cognate disciplines rather than across the entireorganisation (Taylor 2006).

Many Sectors

Academics do seem to trade, through job moves, their institutional andcareer seniority because they are aware that academic status is a factor of both. Also, it is clear that status is not only derived from their academictitle. Ruscio (1987) argues that in America the tasks, attitudes andbehaviours of academics, and their sense of professionalism, are func-tions of the institutions to which they are attached. He accepts that theinstitution is not the sole determinant and that the discipline also exertsan inuence but gives causal primacy to the institution. Ruscio suggeststhat, as academics move across the same discipline in many institutions,each will have its own culture as a product of place. In his research, he,therefore, views the American academic profession as a creature of itsorganisational setting.What distinguishes academia is not its disciplinarygenotype but more its organisational phenotype, characterised by anarray of diverse organisational settings. Becher & Trowler (2001, p. 81)explain ‘One of the striking features of academic life is that nearlyeverything is graded in more or less subtle ways. Leading researchers arequite clear about the most prestigious journals in their discipline . . .

Established academics are also willing, when pressed, to list institutionsand departments in order of intellectual precedence . . . ’ This view is


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institutions) was almost always accompanied by advancement in aca-demic rank.’

The academics interviewed for this study had a strong sense of insti-tutional prestige, as a known rank order, which strongly inuenced theircareer decisions. For example:

I was offered a fellowship to stay at the University of X, working in thatresearch group and I was also offered a lectureship here in Y. Obviously,everyone was . . . kept reminding me that X was not as good as a university asY.


Moving at the same academic grade to what was perceived to be a morehighly ranked institution was seen as favourably as grade promotion inthe same institution, for example:

I certainly felt here that when I got my post here . . . when I moved from theUniversity of X to the University of Y . . . I felt that for myself that was a bigleap. Because I was moving from a new university to an old one.

(Interviewee 6: HEI E, female)

This awareness of differing relative institutional status impacting onacademics’ career choices, combined with the fact that institutionalprocedures differ one from the other, suggests that academia is at leaststrongly inuenced by its organisational setting and that more, ratherthan less, differentiation is likely and should be recognised.

Age as an issue for academic careers

Age can be used as a factor affecting the design of an ‘implicit careertimetable’ (Lawrence 1984, p. 23). It can be a criterion for people toshow whether they are ‘on’ or ‘off ’ schedule. Employees seem concernedabout whether their progress follows this timetable. It is also believedthat the environment inuences people to form ideas and attitudes aboutthe link of age and their career. Strong expectations create the appropri-ate behaviour. Thus, some have found it is necessary to categoriseemployees to those who are ahead of time, on time and off time, againstwhat has been internalised as typical, and to form judgments on this

basis. Being behind schedule is found to create negative effects. Forexample, one of the participants said:


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It is, therefore, assumed that academics who believe they are ahead of time have more positive attitudes towards work than those who are on

time or behind time (Lawrence 1984, p. 28). It is necessary to examineindividual perceptions about what age is appropriate for each level of theorganisation and the years of stay at a specic level of work. The aca-demic participants interviewed carried a strong sense of an implicit agerelated career timetable. For example, three typical interview extracts areprovided below:

It’s certainly hard I think to get a chair early you know. I am sure there is a sortof a . . . not a minimum age limit, but there are ages below which I think you

have to be really, really exceptional to get . . . to get a chair.(Interviewee 5: HEI E, male)

You can put it like this. I know of colleagues in the sciences and hearing them,so . . . on . . . who . . . are professors by 40 or early 40s.That’s pretty unusualin Humanities disciplines. 50 if you’re very lucky.

(Interviewee 2: HEI A, male)I think if you’re 45 and you’re still senior lecturer, it looks a bit funny.

(Interviewee 3: HEI A, female)

Ageing and later retirement are relatively new issues and ‘there is limitedresearch on the work experience of older academics’ (Koopman-Boyden& MacDonald 2007, p. 29) . However, academics do seem to be part of a wider trend towards older aged employment. According to Clark(2005, p. 3) this:

. . . rapid ageing of the faculty reects past hiring patterns, turnover rates andretirement decisions. . . . As a large cohort of older faculty approaches tradi-tional retirement ages, many academic leaders have expressed concerns overthe elimination of mandatory retirement policies a decade ago and the pros-pects that senior faculty will remain on the job into their 70’s.

This concern seems justied as Berberet et al. (1995, p. 82), in a surveyof older academic staff in America, found ‘a prole of highly productive,generally satised senior faculty who plan to retire well past age 65 andare anxious to play meaningful roles at their institutions . . . ’

This was a feature in the interview data, for example:

I am 60. I don’t regard it in that way, as what’s left. Because, I have a lot of professional things to do. I feel like I am in the prime of my career. I’m in theheight of my career. I am not reaching the end of my career. I think I’m in the


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seniority timetable against which they measure themselves and theircolleagues, which needs to be addressed in institutional policy.

Gender as an issue in academic careers

Gender in academia produced the most numerical and emotionalcontributions from the academic participants in the research. Waaldijk(2006, p. 1) addresses emotively the ‘heartbreaking question of whetherit is possible to combine a paid job with the joys and duties of non-commercial love, sex and care’ which she says is a problem not conned

to higher education academics. She concludes that ‘men and women allover the world have – often long ago and often to their disadvantage – discovered the answer is a clear and resounding no’.

Female academics, more typically than men, have to deal with manyissues that affect their performance. Women, more than men, havehousehold and family responsibilities and have to resolve this multipleand conicting workload at best without career detriment. Some of theinterviewees said this practical impediment alone explained their careerdilemma, for example:

I believe that women that do not have families and men have the sameopportunities in academia.


A common assumption is that it is easier for women academics thanother women to balance duties and responsibilities due to the inherentexibility of the academic job. Indeed, the work of the female academiccan be done at home, on weekends and holidays and not necessarily in

the university campus. Morehead (2003) argues this is a disadvantage asother women, particularly where their work pattern is different fromtheir spouses, have the power of absence from the home which forciblyshifts the burden of domestic responsibility. The exibility of academicwork is counter-productive as it makes it more difcult to assert thepower of their necessary work-related absence on their partners.

However, Probert (2005, p. 51) found that the relative failure of women to progress to reader or chair positions were related to ‘high

rates of separation and divorce, far higher rates of partnering among[academic] men than women and the impact of older children’s needs.’


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be in the position in which I am. I am very successful in applying for externalfunding . . . , I mean I have quite a lot of research activity . . . But that is donein a way . . . because I work. I mean what I do religiously, when I do thetransparency review I actually write down what I work. I then take out thetime I spent going to the toilet, so it’s really the time that I work. And I workanything from 45 to 70 hours a week. Now I know very well that if I had afamily I would not be willing to do that. No, I never wanted a family.


She then explained why men with partners or children do not suffer thesame difculties:

I don’t really think that a woman who has a family would be able to do it.What I see is that my male colleagues, in many cases have a very traditionalwife.That supports the household and the family. So they have a family, butthey’re still able to work a very high number of hours. So that’s the reality of academia.


A male interviewee reported exactly that:

My wife you know stayed at home to look after our children while I worked(Interviewee 18: HEI B, male)

Kurtz-Costes et al. (2006, p.152) argue that ‘academia continues to betraditionally male and patriarchal, in spite of growing numbers of womenfaculty and doctoral students . . . The majority of senior ranks and pow-erful positions at most universities are occupied by men . . . ’ In otherwords, ‘merely allowing women faculty to meet the criteria for academicsuccess, on terms which have been dened by men and represent theirlife experiences, does not necessarily guarantee equity’ (Bailyn, 2003,p. 140)

Similarly, Knights and Richards (2003, p. 233) assert that women areless likely to be promoted because of their commitment to teaching-based activity or disciplines (a feminine activity, even if it is sociallyconstructed to be so) which is undervalued by male-dominated promo-tion panels concerned with glamorous publication records. They alsoargue that male-dominated promotion panels are more likely to privilegemale (hard) academic disciplines over female (soft) disciplines ‘largelybecause they are made up of predominantly male senior academics.’Certainly, some of the women interviewed felt this, for example:


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This view is contradicted by Probert (2005, p. 58) who asserts fromquantitative data in the UK and Australia that ‘women [academics] are

more likely to be successful than men when they apply for promotion’but that they do not seem to attack the career structure as vigorously asmen.Women are proportionately less likely to apply for promotion thanmen (although they are more successful when they do); and men applywith greater intensity, that is each man applies more often. One womaninterviewed explained why men apply for academic promotion earlier inher view:

This university is the rst institution where I feel that gender is an issue. I havenever been anywhere before where I felt I was at a disadvantage because I wasa woman. Here that’s certainly the case. But it’s not latent. So, I don’t thinkthere’ll ever be a committee that says something like ‘she’s a woman, so she’snot good enough.’ But I think that people who actually apply for this . . .whether the selection is made much earlier . . . so it’s who gets encouragedand who’s been . . . you know, proposed for prizes, or promotion or specialteaching courses or whatever.

(Interviewee 3: HEI A, female)

Another female academic led on the same theme:

If there’s any encouragement to be given, it might be given to the men. Thatwould make them tend to apply earlier. But that encouragement in some casesmay be too soon.

(Interviewee 10: HEI C, female)

The research seemed to validate the view that many structural and societalissues act to disadvantage academic women, which they directly experi-ence as participants in the career structure, and this issue is perhaps themost commonly raised by women but also by concerned men.

Part-Time,Temporary and Casual Staff

Contractually, academic staff can work on a fractional permanentcontract (part-time), or have a xed-term whole time appointment(temporary) or be hired on an hourly basis (casual) and each of these

groups may have their own network and sub-culture. Any of thesecategories may represent functionally-specialised appointments


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casual academics; the ‘aspiring academic’ (who has recently nisheda research degree), the ‘industry expert’ (who holds a job elsewhere),

the ‘career ender’ (who has recently retired) and the ‘freelancer’ (whochooses to hold a variety of jobs.)The claimed growth of this group by the University and Colleges

Union (UCU) is given as evidence of casualisation of UK academia(Court, 2005). Handy (1993) describes organisations, not just universi-ties, as shamrocks with a shrinking core of professional permanent careeremployees, a growing pool of freelance professionals and technicians ontemporary or ad hoc contracts and an expanding group of contingent

workers hired by the hour who lack any discernable career track. Claimsexist that Higher Education has ‘. . . a two-tiered academic workforce inwhich the tenured core has secure employment and conditions and thetenuous periphery experiences insecurity and poor conditions’ (Kimber,2003, p. 44). With the effect that:

The University, consequently, is becoming an institution with two streams of professionals: a reduced and prestigious core of faculty represented by theregular professors, and a large set of less qualied, changing, just-in-time

knowledge workers who enter degree programmes to t specied tasks.’(Stromquist et al., 2007, p. 131)

The participants interviewed typically had an early career experience of part-time or temporary work, which they wanted to share, and to stressthe insecurity they felt in their early career. The example below wastypical:

I suppose, the key moments were starting to do a PhD, nishingthe PhD, applying for a post-doc here in X towards the end of my PhD andbeing offered that post-doc.That post-doc was just for one year originally. SoI didn’t come to X expecting to stay very long. But then a few different thingshappened.The project got extended, by six months I think and then after it Igot a one year temporary Lectureship, just at the right time and I got that andthen I think a second year. A post-doc position came up in managing aresearch network. Half-time. And so the department organised a half-timelecturing post and half-time RA. And then when that nished I got a perma-nent ofce. I think I had been a Lecturer then for a sufcient number of yearsthat the post became permanent.

(Interviewee 5: HEI E, male)


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Colour, Race and Ethnicity

While gender can perhaps be treated in a homogeneous way, this is saidnot to be true of different racial groups (Neal, 1998). This issue iscomplex, as the factors overlay and defy easy categorisation. Academics,like the population at large, can be non-white but British or white andnon-British or hold British passports but consider themselves as belong-ing to a particular ethnic group and so on. In an analysis of the HESAdata set in 1996–97 (Carter et al., 1999), it was found that minorities areon average younger, have shorter lengths of service, allowing for age and

length of service are less likely to be in senior posts, more likely to be inresearch-only posts and more likely to be xed term.The participants interviewed reported on this impact:

I can speak from my own personal experience that as somebody who wasn’tborn in this country, but who is a resident of this country I have felt some sortof institutional racism sometimes. Basically, because a lot of people felt thatthere were great minds from all over the world coming there, visiting and yet,there were very few non-British residents who were permanent employees.There were very few permanent employees there. So to a certain extent there

was an exploitation of the fact that it was a centre of excellence to a certainextent I would say.(Interviewee 4: HEI B, male)

Workload Academics are said to be challenged by increased accountability andworkload. Coaldrake and Stedman (1999, p. 9) noted that as academicwork expanded to meet growing expectations, universities and individualacademics have responded through ‘accumulation and accretion’ rather

than adaptation. One participant described this growing accountability:My students evaluate me quite well, on the whole. And I mark their workmethodically. I give them enormous amount of support and feedback. Andthey all rate that highly. And I don’t think this is particularly recognised.WhatI am counted for is purely the outputs of the papers that I publish and theresearch income that I bring in. Or the amount of students that I bring in.Never mind what I do to them. But if I bring in more students, it means formoney for the University. If I bring money on research it means money tothem. If I publish it means I do well for the RAE. So I do feel like that; kind

of this little machine that the University wants to put in place and get outputfrom me.(Interviewee 14: HEI D female)


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things that are valued by academics attracted to university careers – thelifestyle of an academic will be affected and the original motivators for careerchoice may dissipate.

The research participants clearly supported this view, for example:

I talk to colleagues in other universities. And we’re all in a similar situation,where there are more things for us to do and less time for us to do and lessresources. So I don’t think that that is unique. And so . . . that’s why I wouldnot go from this academic job necessarily to another one. Because I thinksuch problems will arise. It’s not the job I had hoped it would be. I think it’sbecome increasingly difcult. And a lot of my colleagues, who . . . have comeinto academia late, which is what I’ve done obviously, have felt much thesame. Should they just get out and go into other jobs? And I think that’s whata number of people will end up doing.

(Interviewee 14: HEI D, female)

A direct connection seems to exist between increased institutionalaccountability and targets and individualised targets and performanceindicators for academics, which are perceived as being stretching andincreasingly onerous.

Conclusion

The research reveals a disjuncture between the national humanresources policy discourse and the social reality of academic staff asobjects of that policy (Table 2).

Academics seem to be creatures of their discipline.They move betweeninstitutions, which they perceive as having different relative status, to builda career in that discipline. In doing so, the participants seemed to be

conscious of both their career rank and their institutional seniority.Academics careers appeared often to have an insecure beginning asindividuals self-managed their progress through short-term or casualappointments on to the career ladder (perhaps hindered by gender or

TABLE 2Dominant human resources-related discourse

National Policy Academic Staff • Pay • Workload and accountability


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ethnicity.) They seem to be aware of an implicit age-to-grade timetablethey must meet to be perceived as on track. This career construct

combined with greater accountability and workload has caused doubtsabout career choice in some.This suggests the policy agenda at nationaland institutional level, if it is to be grounded in the concerns of academicstaff in the English higher education sector, should be focussed less on payand bargaining structures or revisions to terms but on better recognitionof disciplinary and institutional divergence; age, race and gender diversity,career planning and increasing workloads. It may be useful to explorewhether the academicTrades Union is mainly pre-occupied with national

changes, so losing touch with or not reecting the real concerns of itsmembers. It may be there is an institutional level of analysis that, givenproximity, better reects staff priorities and should have greater domi-nance nationally. Further, it may be interesting to explore any differencesin perceptions found in post-1992 universities, in the UK principalities orinternationally with the ndings reported here.

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