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COVID-19 has caused the closure of university campuses around the world and migration of all learning, teaching, and assessment into online domains. The impacts of this on the academic community as frontline providers of higher education are profound. In this article, we report the findings from a survey of n = 1148 academics working in universities in the United Kingdom (UK) and representing all the major disciplines and career hierarchy. Respondents report an abundance of what we call ‘afflictions’ exacted upon their role as educators and in far fewer yet no less visible ways ‘affordances’ derived from their rapid transition to online provision and early ‘entry-level’ use of digital pedagogies. Overall, they suggest that online migration is engendering significant dysfunctionality and disturbance to their pedagogical roles and their personal lives. They also signpost online migration as a major challenge for student recruitment, market sustainability, an academic labour-market, and local economies.

This longitudinal study explores persistence in research productivity at the individual level over academic lifetime: can highly productive scientists maintain relatively high levels of productivity. We examined academic careers of 2326 Polish full professors, including their lifetime biographical and publication histories. We studied their promotions and publications between promotions (79,027 articles) over a 40-year period across 14 science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) disciplines. We used prestige-normalized productivity in which more weight is given to articles in high-impact than in low-impact journals, recognizing the highly stratified nature of academic science. Our results show that half of the top productive assistant professors continued as top productive associate professors, and half of the top productive associate professors continued as top productive full professors (52.6% and 50.8%). Top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top transitions in productivity classes occurred only marginally. In logistic regression models, two powerful predictors of belonging to the top productivity class for full professors were being highly productive as assistant professors and as associate professors (increasing the odds, on average, by 179% and 361%). Neither gender nor age (biological or academic) emerged as statistically significant. Our findings have important implications for hiring policies: hiring high- and low-productivity scientists may have long-standing consequences for institutions and national science systems as academic scientists usually remain in the system for decades. The Observatory of Polish Science (100,000 scientists, 380,000 publications) and Scopus metadata on 935,167 Polish articles were used, showing the power of combining biographical registry data with structured Big Data in academic profession studies. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).

This study examined job satisfaction and job stress across 19 higher education systems. We classified the 19 countries according to their job satisfaction and job stress and applied regression analysis to test whether new public management has impacts on either or both job satisfaction and job stress. According to this study, strong market driven countries are in the high stress group and European countries are in the high satisfaction group. The classification implies that market oriented managerial reforms are the main source of academic stress while the high social reputation of academics in their society and academic autonomy are the source of job satisfaction. Our regression analysis also shows that the new public management which is measured by the performance-based management in this study is the main source of academic job stress. In addition, this study highlighted the higher education systems that are classified as the high satisfaction and high stress group. These countries represent the conflicting nature of current academic society—on the one hand they are satisfied, but on the other they are highly stressful.

What is the central research activity in modern universities? This paper uses a comprehensive survey among individuals from 15 countries to map differences in orientation towards basic/fundamental research, applied/practical research and a combination of the two. Despite some claims in the literature that basic research is no longer a preoccupation of universities, our findings point at a continued strong presence of basic research in universities but with large variations between countries and academic disciplines. At the individual level, most academics engage in a combination of basic and applied research, rather than specialising, with applied orientations generally more common. Academics specialising in basic research tend to receive less external funding, work in environments where applied research is less emphasised and hold weaker professional obligations to apply their knowledge to problems in society.

While there is increasing awareness of the contributing effect of the academic mobility imperative on gendered inequalities in the academic profession at large, there is a missing link in current research on this topic. Namely, while ‘care’ is often named as the explanatory factor for why women, and to an extent professionals of any gender at peak childrearing age, are less mobile, this article argues that care is insufficient as an explanatory factor for immobility. Care and other terms such as ‘family responsibilities’ and ‘domestic obligations’ come to serve as a shorthand or explanatory factor for gendered immobility, but these terms elide the complexity of the relationship between care and mobility. This article argues that, without a fuller understanding of how care and mobility intersect, inclusivity drives run the risk of misunderstanding or even reproducing the problem. The specific mobility addressed here is international conference travel as a form of short-term academic mobility which contributes to academic career success and the perpetuation of a mobile academic ideal. The article elaborates a novel conceptual construct, ‘sticky care’, which is applied to empirical data from a diary-interview study of the impact of caring responsibilities on academics’ conference participation. Two dominant mobility-related strategies are elaborated: ‘night/s away’ and ‘get back’. The overarching ambition of this article is at a conceptual level: to bring more complexity and nuance to the concept of care when it is mobilized as an explanatory factor for (gendered) immobility and indeed for inequalities in the academic profession at large.

In this paper, we focus on a rare scholarly theme of highly productive academics, statistically confirming their pivotal role in knowledge production across 11 systems studied. The upper 10 % of highly productive academics in 11 European countries studied (N = 17,211) provide on average almost half of all academic knowledge production. In contrast to dominating bibliometric studies of research productivity, we focus on academic attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions as predictors of becoming research top performers across European systems. Our paper provides a (large-scale and cross-country) corroboration of the systematic inequality in knowledge production, for the first time argued for by Lotka (J Wash Acad Sci 16:317-323, 1929) and de Solla Price (Little science, big science. Columbia University Press, New York, 1963). We corroborate the deep academic inequality in science and explore this segment of the academic profession. The European research elite is a highly homogeneous group of academics whose high research performance is driven by structurally similar factors, mostly individual rather than institutional. Highly productive academics are similar from a cross-national perspective, and they substantially differ intra-nationally from their lower-performing colleagues. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).

The academic profession is challenged by the changing environment. Global trends, such as managerialism and new public management, have been influencing all public organizations, including universities. The academic profession is dynamic by its nature; it reflects any changes in its environment. However, the academic profession is also characterized by continuity. In this study, we describe the current changes and continuities of the academic profession in Finland, as perceived by top and middle managers employed in Finnish Universities. We found out that logics and values by organizational professionalism are emphasized; however, occupational professionalism is also deeply rooted in the practices of Finnish universities. Additionally, we found out that changes are often associated with managerial values, such as control and evaluation, and in contrast, the continuities of academic work are commonly related to professorial authority and academic identity. These two aspects of the profession and organization are not opposite, they occur simultaneously; however, there are tensions between them. In this article, we would like to emphasize that change of the academic profession is a hybrid, there exists both, changes and continuities in the logics and values related to the profession and the organization.

The article analyzes Post-Soviet academic profession, focusing on the challenges it has to meet. It starts with the historical overview of the higher education and professoriate in Russia and Soviet Union, then gives a general description of the academic profession in Post- Soviet Russia. The issues of special interests are the system of academic appointments and promotion, remuneration, motivation, evaluation of the faculty, academic freedom. In the context of economic crisis, massification and internationalization of education, Russian higher education and its academic staff face the challenges of adaptation to financial constraints, improving appointment and evaluation procedures, formation of younger generation of faculty and many others that are discussed in the article. (HRK/text adopted).

Conventional wisdom suggests that when institutional logics overlap, the production of hybrids signifies collapse, blending, or easy coexistence. The author provides an alternative interpretation: hybrids can maintain a distinctive boundary and can emerge from contestation, not coexistence. This alternative interpretation is grounded in an analysis of a critical moment at the academic-commercial boundary: the enforcement of patents to a key technology on academic geneticists. In their reaction to commercial encroachment, skilled actors (scientists) took the resources of the commercial logic and transformed their meaning to establish hybrid strategies that preserved the distinctive institutions. Thus, hybrids must be reconsidered as emerging from conflict and produced through boundary work to maintain the distinction and resilience of logics. Adapted from the source document.

This essay probes tensions between our professional practices and the quality of our professional output in the field of international studies. We organize ourselves into academic \"sects\" that engage in self-affirming research and then wage theological debates between academic religions. This occurs at both the level of theory and epistemology. Unfortunately, this academic sectarianism produces less understanding rather than more. Theoretically, we should focus on developing contingent, mid-level theories of specific phenomena. Epistemologically, we should recognize there are multiple valid and perhaps even complementary paths to understanding.