Internationally, changes to university funding arrangements have put pressure on the workloads of tenured academic staff and increased the reliance on casual academics to backfill teaching and research positions. Limited research has focused on the effects of casualisation on research academics and the institutions in which they work. This paper…

Temporary contracts are increasingly used in academia. This is a major concern for non-tenured researchers, since weak job security may hamper job satisfaction. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the role of academic tenure for job satisfaction of researchers in European countries. The work uses data from the MORE2 survey, a large-scale…

The McDonaldization of higher education refers to the transformation of universities from knowledge generators to rational service organizations or "McUniversities". This is reflected in the growing dependence on a casualized academic workforce. The article explores the extent to which the McDonaldization thesis applies to universities…

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…

Based on role theory suppositions, the following study explores how role stress which follows occupational insecurity influences the professional considerations of pre-tenure faculty. In-depth interviews were conducted with ten Israeli pre-tenure and six tenured faculty members working at three different Israeli universities in the faculties of…