This article explores the diversity of time perspectives in academic work. The background of the study stems from recent changes in university management and funding, which impose new demands for academic work, including its temporal order. Drawing on focused interviews with 52 academics, we discern four core time perspectives according to which academics experience their work: scheduled time, timeless time, contracted time and personal time. Scheduled time refers to the accelerating pace of work, timeless time to transcending time through immersion in work, contracted time to short-term employment with limited future prospects and finally, personal time to one's temporality and the role of work in it. In addition, we discuss the relationships between the different time perspectives, focusing on dilemmas and tensions between them.

This article sets out to explore how academics make sense of the current transformations of higher education and what kinds of academic identities are thereby constructed. Based on a narrative analysis of 42 interviews with Finnish academics, nine narratives are discerned, each providing a different answer as to what it means to be an academic in the present-day university. Narratives of resistance, loss, administrative work overload and job insecurity are embedded in a regressive storyline, describing deterioration of academic work and one's standing. In a sharp contrast, narratives of success, mobility and change agency rely on a progressive storyline which sees the current changes in a positive light. Between these opposites, narratives of work-life balance and bystander follow stable storylines, involving a neutral stance toward university transformations. The paper concludes that academic identities have become increasingly diversified and polarized due to the managerial and structural changes in higher education.

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This article argues that one of the core narratives within the present-day university is a nostalgic story line. Drawing on focused interviews with 23 senior researchers in three academic environments in Finland, the article shows that although the nostalgic plot structure cuts across the data, it has different contents in each of the three settings, thus emphasizing the internal diversity in academic life. However, in all cases nostalgic yearning refers to the loss of academic freedom and autonomy in work. The article concludes that nostalgia does not describe the actual past but rather the problems and tensions of the present. It is an idealization of the past, the function of which is to clarify the values and morals of the organization, which in turn can help to come to terms with the conflicting pressures of the current situation.

Drawing upon the notions of academic capitalism and the transformation of academic research from traditional academic orientation into market orientation, the paper sets out to empirically scrutinize the changing nature of academic research, focusing especially on disciplinary differences. The paper is based on a survey of heads of departments and research units at Finnish universities representing all disciplinary groups (n = 255) and on in-depth interviews with Finnish academics (n = 31) in the fields of humanities, social sciences, technology and natural sciences. Based on the survey data, the funding, selection of research topics, collaboration partners, audiences and publication forums in research are analysed. Following this, five research markets are discerned: academic, corporate, policy, professional and public market, each characterized by its own values and rationality as to what is considered the reference group, basic objective and outcome of research. The paper concludes that the transformation thesis needs to be revisited and specified since on the one hand, academic orientation still remains crucially important in all disciplinary groups, and on the other hand, market orientation entails several kinds of markets, pointing to the versatility of the university-society relationship.