Research Handbook on Academic Careers and Managing Academics

Book excerpt: This timely Research Handbook provides a broad analysis and discussion on how academics are managed. It addresses key issues, including the changing nature of academic work and academic labour markets, issues of power, leadership, ageing, human resource management practices, and mobility. As academia is increasingly questioned as an elite profession, a narrative of casualisation, precarity, inequality, long hours, surveillance, austerity, erosion of pay, exacerbated competition, and harmful power relations has come to dominate. Expert contributors provide multiple perspectives on how academics are managed and how the management of academics influences their roles and careers. Chapters consider how academics' characteristics, such as gender, age, and position in their academic career, influence or are influenced by the way in which academics are managed. Drawing together a range of theoretical approaches as well as a broad geographical coverage, this Research Handbook offers an important contribution to the debates surrounding the shifting frontiers of managing academics and the questions raised for individuals, higher education institutions, and higher education systems. This Research Handbook will be a useful resource for academics and advanced students with an interest in human resource management, management and universities, and management education. Higher education professionals and policy makers will also find it to be a helpful guide.