Troubling the concept of the ‘academic profession’ in 21st Century higher education

Williams, Kevin

doi:10.1007/s10734-007-9109-x

Cited by 35 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…She argues that the 'increased corporate strength of universities is part of the context which explains how academic autonomy has become, for many academics, something that must now be set against competing rights ' (2005: 173). In the current higher education sector the concept of the 'academic profession' is contested (Williams 2008) and new visions of the 'academic workforce' are being considered (Coates & Goedegebuure 2012).…”

Section: Changes In Higher Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The contemporary academic: orientation towards research work and researcher identity of higher education lecturers in the health professions

Boyd

Smith

2014

Studies in Higher Education

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Boyd, Pete and Smith, Caroline (2016) The contemporary academic: orientation towards research work and researcher identity of higher education lecturers in the health professions. Studies in Higher Education, 41 (4). pp. 678-695.Downloaded from: http://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/1671/ Usage of any items from the University of Cumbria's institutional repository 'Insight' must conform to the following fair usage guidelines.Any item and its associated metadata held in the University of Cumbria's institutional repository Insight (unless stated otherwise on the metadata record) may be copied, displayed or performed, and stored in line with the JISC fair dealing guidelines (available here) for educational and not-for-profit activities provided that• the authors, title and full bibliographic details of the item are cited clearly when any part of the work is referred to verbally or in the written form AbstractInternationally, the increasing emphasis in universities on the quality of teaching, on student employability and on a corporate approach to entrepreneurial income generation, has created a tension around the primacy afforded to published research outputs as a focus for academic work and status. In this study a framework for academic socialisation is developed and used to understand how lecturers in health professional fields attempt to 'juggle' four areas of work -teaching, leadership, knowledge exchange and research activity. Studying academics in professional fields, with a well-developed focus on employability and strong partnerships with employers, provides useful insight into contemporary academic work and identity. A significant proportion of lecturers in health professional fields, even of those working in research intensive universities, appear to 'subvert' the paradigmatic primacy afforded across the higher education sector to research outputs and identity as a researcher.

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Section: Changes In Higher Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The contemporary academic: orientation towards research work and researcher identity of higher education lecturers in the health professions

Boyd

Smith

2014

Studies in Higher Education

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“…It was a concept of 'professional' quite distinct from that informing the professionalism discourses cited above (Dent and Whitehead 2001;Williams 2008). The traditions of hierarchy and service invoked here provided a further source of tension in the attempted integration into a suite of higher education programmes.…”

Section: Analysis-academic Identity Inclusion Autonomy Status and mentioning

confidence: 89%

“…Discussion about academic identity has shifted focus, from the specific quality of academic work (Clark 1987), to locating 'academic' in broader professionalism discourses where 'professional' is traditionally seen as a badge of autonomy. That is, of practitioners' power to define their collective business and control its boundaries (Kreber 2000;Henkel 2000:216-217;Williams 2008). In its academic form, autonomy is defined as the freedom to actively produce knowledge (Akerlind and Kayrooz 2003).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Higher education change and professional-academic identity in newly ‘academic’ disciplines: the case of nurse education

Findlow

2011

High Educ

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This article is a study of the competing academic and professional identity frameworks of lecturers whose discipline has only recently become part of the business of higher education. The article engages with important questions about higher education change and purpose, standards and parity among disciplines. Taking a critical ethnographic approach, it combines policy discussion of shifting higher educational and nurse education regimes with an insider investigation into the attempts of a group of new nurse lecturers in a pre-1992 English university to make sense of their work and identity in an already contested site. These experiences and perceptions are analysed from the perspectives of autonomy, status and rival knowledge regimes. By underlining the diversity of lecturer experiences in these terms, the article contributes to discussion of new stratification. It suggests that despite the apparent merging in many respects of professional and academic frameworks, higher education practitioners in such newly 'academic' disciplines can still find traditional professional identities more reliable conferrers of meaning than academic ones.

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“…Professions became a social feature from the mid-nineteenth century, interpreted as a specialised occupation (Williams, 2008), which has expert knowledge and skills required to perform different tasks in a division of labour (Freidson, 2001). There are different ways to understand the ideological character of professions and their practice.…”

Section: Academic Work: a Profession?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Others have questioned the assumption that academic work is a profession (Piper, 1994;Williams, 2008). Piper (1994) argued that academe should be regarded as a range of professions tied to disciplinary identity, instead of a single profession.…”

Section: Academic Work: a Profession?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Academics’ Professionalism and Quality Mechanisms: Challenges and Tensions

Cheng

2009

Quality in Higher Education

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This paper provides an insight into the debate about academic work as a profession. It refers to the sociology of professions and explores how academics in a pre‐1992 university in England understood their work as a profession and how they interpreted their professionalism in the context of an audit culture for teaching. It reveals that academics’ professionalism has affected their attitudes towards audit‐related quality mechanisms and resulted in a perceived tension between professional values and the audit. This tension was caused by the perceived bureaucracy of the audit, its time cost and the perception that the audit is a symbol of distrust in the professionalism of academics

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Troubling the concept of the ‘academic profession’ in 21st Century higher education

Cited by 35 publications

References 38 publications

The contemporary academic: orientation towards research work and researcher identity of higher education lecturers in the health professions

The contemporary academic: orientation towards research work and researcher identity of higher education lecturers in the health professions

Higher education change and professional-academic identity in newly ‘academic’ disciplines: the case of nurse education

Academics’ Professionalism and Quality Mechanisms: Challenges and Tensions

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