Purpose: Much of the existing literature note how students' academic difficulties result from their background and lack of cultural capital. This paper aims to focus on internal structural inequality where people with particular backgrounds are disadvantaged within an institution. Design/methodology/approach: The authors use a case study approach…

Since 2011 the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University has been actively supporting an ethos of belonging throughout their learning and teaching. In 2017 'belonging' became a formal university priority, embedded in the institution's strategy and dispersed across Colleges and Schools through a range of activities and interventions.…

Peer review has been the focus of an ongoing study at a series of recent annual conferences of the Australasian Association for Engineering Education (AAEE). A further development of this study has been to explore the perspective/s of the authors of these conference papers and the impact that peer review can have on their development as…

This paper explores the enormous variation in views, championing behaviours and impacts of liaison people: staff nominated to facilitate, tailor and promote SPIRIT (a research utilisation intervention trial in six Australian health policy agencies). Liaison people made cost/benefit analyses: they weighed the value of participation against its…

Despite receiving growing international recognition and regard, the scholarship of engagement remains undervalued internally at academic institutions, especially in relation to career development and academic promotion. This form of scholarship presents difficulties relating to evaluation, assessment, and evidencing that are not generally present…

This study was aimed at identifying the critical interactions within work environments that support the development of early career academics as researchers in institutions with lower order research profiles, that is, environments that differ from research-intensive universities. Ten early career academics, five from Australia and five from the…

Internationalization of the curriculum points to the interdependent and interconnected (globalized) world in which higher education operates. However, while international awareness is crucial to the study of journalism, in practice this often means an Anglo-American curriculum based around Western principles of journalism education and training…

This article aims to contribute to understandings of youth homelessness and subjectivity by analysing identity construction in terms of young people's negotiation of the structural and institutional environment of youth homelessness. I suggest that while existing literature on this topic concentrates mainly on micro-social encounters, the…

Purpose: This article outlines the emergence of programme teams in the Australian dairy farm sector as a response to counter weaknesses in the institutional environment for agricultural innovation which favours technology adoption/diffusion approaches. Design/methodology/approach: The strengths, weaknesses and risks of different approaches to…

The purpose of the current study was to benchmark a broad range of work practices and outcomes in Australian universities against other industries. Past research suggests occupational stress experienced by academic staff is worse than experienced by employees in other industries. However, no other practices or outcomes can be compared confidently.…

The metaphor of "monoculture on the intellectual landscape" is used to analyse the effects of large-scale research management regimes. The metaphor of "monoculture on the intellectual landscape", derived from Shiva's "monocultures of the mind", is developed and illustrated with respect to gender and ethnicity. The…

In this paper I use a governmentality framework to explore the growth of women's mentoring programmes in Australian universities over the last 10-15 years. These programmes are supported because they speak to institutional concerns with improving performance in a performative culture, while being seen to deal with the problem of gender inequity. I…

In Australia, there has been a tendency to rely on quantitative indicators of university teaching quality. This has occurred partly because the indicators are perceived as objective and reliable and partly because they are relatively simple to gather and collate. A national project currently underway is based on the assumptions that teaching…

Learning in workplaces is always mediated through talk. It is tempting for management to seek to utilise everyday talk as part of learning and therefore enhance productivity. This paper examines the responses of workers to interventions that aim to formalise informal conversations at work as part of an explicit workplace learning strategy. It…

This paper explores the relationship between the diversity within a higher education system and five key factors, namely: the environment, policy intervention, funding, competition and co-operation, and ranking. The exploration is based on the extent to which higher education systems, particularly those of Australia and New Zealand, have…