Despite the diversity of entry points into academia, little research exists examining the experiences and impact of precarious employment at different life stages. Drawing on interviews with 19 academics employed casually or on fixed-term contracts in Australian universities, this paper illustrates how precarious employment is experienced at…

Significant world events such as the COVID-19 pandemic have shifted the way that people of all ages view their careers and the meaning of work in their lives. While campus career services hold a mandate to facilitate student career readiness and success, it cannot accomplish this ambitious goal alone. "Career influencers" are student…

The early stages of an academic career are fraught with insecurity. By focusing on the individual and his or her background, this article sets out to analyse and develop theories for this insecurity. We see academic career insecurity as a mix of how much someone wants to pursue a job in academia and what they feel is the probability of reaching…

The dual labor market theory (DLM) posited the existence of two distinct labor markets working in parallel. A primary one is a place where high wages, employment stability and high opportunities for advancement are the norms. On the other hand, low wages, arbitrariness and less desirable working conditions determine a secondary market. The main…

Discussions about tenure among postsecondary education dance faculty elicit a spectrum of perspectives and emotions ranging from excitement to confusion to fear. Faculty carefully weigh the potential for academic freedom and job security against the sometimes unclear and potentially unreasonable expectations regarding how to achieve tenure. These…

Tenure-track positions at institutions of higher education are often highly coveted because they offer job stability, academic freedom, and higher pay. Despite this allure, the academic career path is fraught with challenges, particularly during the first few years of a tenure-track position where one must balance new demands and escalating…

This article supports Bérubé's conclusion regarding the intellectual health of humanities scholarship. However, it argues that the case of "contingent faculty"--or academics with short-term or casual contracts--is in many respects different in Australia to the situation he outlines for the US. Whilst a variety of funding pressures have…

This paper addresses the topic of work-life interferences in academic contexts. More specifically, it focuses on early career researchers in the Italian university system. The total availability required from those who work in the research sector is leading to significant transformations of the temporalities of work, especially among the new…

This article documents the experiences of three early career academics trying to establish a network of early career academics (ECAs) in a middle-ranked university in Australia. The changing context of academia means that ECAs face considerable challenges in understanding and negotiating effective career paths. Some of the issues encountered…

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…

Sweden has the highest percentage of female university Vice Chancellors in Europe. Some of the factors that have promoted women's representation in senior management in Swedish academia are: political pressure in the form of goals and policies, quantitative target agreements concerning women's representation, top level commitment to gender…

Due to social, economic, and political changes, as well as changing institutional priorities, the permeation of managerialism has impelled universities to redefine the roles and functions of its faculty members. Therefore, researchers from various disciplines have focused on the career choices and paths of such members. In this context, the…

Without any doubt happiness among staff in any organization is pertinent to ensure continued growth and development. However, not many studies were carried out to determine the domains that will be able to measure the level of happiness among staff in universities. Thus, the aim of this study is to elicit the domains that explain the overall…

Non-tenure-track (NTT) research faculty are perhaps the most under-recognized group of academic professionals on the campuses today, despite their increasingly important role within the expanding academic research enterprise. The American Association for the Advancement of Science reports that the amount of federal spending on R&D has more than…