This study measures the perceptions of departmental culture from both the adjunct faculty and departmental administrator perspectives. The preparation for this study included the development of a validated survey designed to collect mirrored perception data from both groups. Multiple factors in higher education have led to an overreliance on…

The evolution from new faculty to department chair, through tenure and promotion, has been widely studied, yielding ideas for success. The move from department chair back to faculty status is less studied, with fewer insights in the literature. This article offers a brief review of literature related to becoming and stepping down from the role of…

The purpose of this study was to understand the extent to which novice department leaders believe they have been supported in their roles. Previous research has suggested that department leaders have unique needs due to the lack of clarity in their roles and responsibilities. The literature further reflected the inconsistent support provided to…

Department heads are central in the university setting as an important buffer between university leadership and academic staff. However, taking on a middle management role can lead to significant disruptions in academic careers. To investigate the career trajectories of 31 academics in middle management roles, two waves of semi-structured…

Australian academics are being squeezed from all sides, facing ever-intensifying bureaucratic expectations around research output, coupled with increased teaching commitments and mounting administrative duties. These demands are occurring in an environment where most academics are still employed under traditional arrangements whereby, notionally,…

Since their advent as supplemental staff at community colleges four decades ago, part-time instructors, or adjuncts, have since been employed with increasing frequency and in escalating numbers across all institutional types of American higher education. Currently comprising approximately forty percent of all postsecondary faculty, part-time…

In 2017, there were 941 public community colleges enrolling 7 million credit students and 5 million noncredit students accounting for 41% of all undergraduates enrolled in higher education (American Association of Community Colleges, 2019). While enrollment has increased, the complexity of the mission of two-year colleges has also increased. Part…

The purpose of this study is twofold. The first purpose is to inform faculty who are thinking of becoming a department head about the challenges they face if they choose to pursue a department head opportunity. The second purpose is to provide insight into the leadership of the accounting departments by looking at various workload aspects of…

Much has been written about the university department chair, but little is known about whether the community college chair position is different. The profile and job perceptions of community college department chairs, and how the job of the community college chair compare to the university chair profile illustrated in the literature remains…

Historically, empirical research exploring the roles, responsibilities, and challenges of department chairs has been limited and narrow in scope. In addition, these studies have not kept pace with the rapidly changing nature of higher education. The current study consists of data collected from a survey of current and former chairs at a small,…

The Czech higher educational system has transformed over the past three decades from a state-centred model evolving via strong academic autonomy to the current system, which is characterised by academic freedom but also heightened pressure to produce measurable research output. The purpose of this study was to explore how Czech academic middle…

This article examines the developments and challenges of higher education in developing countries. Using a thorough qualitative interview of deans, directors and heads of Department of the University of Ghana, this paper draws on their analysis to discover unexplored issues that affect the universities in developing countries. The study identifies…

Management is one of the most studied phenomena in higher education. Most of these studies are conducted in the framework of higher education policy, academic work and quality of education and research. The management is often seen as an independent variable explaining the changes in higher education in the context of New Public Management and…

The 1994 democratic government of South Africa brought greater responsibility and growth of school-based management in schools which impacted on the role and workload of school leaders (Rosenfeld, Ehrich & Cranston, 2009). Principals of public secondary schools delegated greater responsibility to Heads of Departments who had to ensure that…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss the findings from research on the relationship between leadership theory and policy reform in Malaysia. Distributed leadership is normatively preferred in the Malaysia Education Blueprint (MEB), the country's major policy reform document. The research was conducted in two dissimilar…