Abstract
What does it mean to be starting an academic career in the twenty-first century? What challenges and prospects are new academics facing and how are they dealing with these? This book attempts to answer these questions through an investigation of the experiences of early career academics in New Zealand universities. The introduction outlines the origins of the research that led to the inclusion of this book in the Changing Academic Profession series. The New Zealand context is explained, the research process described, and the themes for the book laid out. Key areas of focus in the book include: the teaching, research, and service preferences and activities of early career academics; work-life balance; satisfaction; Māori academics; and professional development and support for early career academics. Underpinning the book is the issue of how early career academics are being socialised into the academic profession, particularly in New Zealand universities, and the interaction of structure and agency within those socialisation processes.
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Keywords
- Early Career Academics
- Changing Academic Profession (CAP)
- Zealand Universities
- Zealand Context
- Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF)
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Setting the Scene
New Zealand is not a big country. A nation of just four and a half million people, we are geographically a long way from all other countries (even Australia – with whom we are commonly mistaken or conflated – is a minimum three-hour flight away). Sometimes this geographical distance can leave us feeling a little neglected, especially when we get left off maps, as seems to happen regularly.Footnote 1 So when I was asked to contribute a volume to this series on the Changing Academic Profession, I wondered what the New Zealand perspective could possibly add to an already impressive collection of international studies. It turns out that, in comparison with what is happening elsewhere, this little country might have a few useful ideas about the academic profession, especially from the perspective of those just starting out on their academic careers.
As well as being a small country, we are a young country – the ‘new’ in our English name hints at that. We haven’t had a lot of time to make a big entrance on the world stage. But we are proud of our accomplishments, in all arenas of life. Sir Edmund Hillary, the great mountaineer, was a New Zealander. The splitting of the atom couldn’t have happened without the scientific work of Ernest Rutherford. One of the world’s great opera singers, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, is a New Zealander, and we boast some of the world’s finest authors – Katherine Mansfield back in the early twentieth-century and Man Booker prize winner in 2013, Eleanor Catton, to name just two. World-famous movie director Sir Peter Jackson is one of ours, and we’re well known for our nuclear-free stance. We were the first country in the world to allow women to vote in 1893, and the first country in the then British Empire to award a Bachelor of Arts degree to a woman (in 1877, to Kate Edger). You could say that we ‘punch above our weight’. As many of my colleagues will tell you, I am not a fan of violent imagery – impact is one of my least favourite words (see Sutherland 2015) – but this boxing metaphor fits the story this book will tell in more ways than one.
The twenty-first century has ushered in an era of global competition for higher education, with universities jostling for students against one another on various world ranking systems. Much like the sport of boxing, which awards “World Champion” titles through at least four sanctioning bodies,Footnote 2 universities are fighting in a global ring in several different competitions: the QS World University Rankings, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, U-Multirank, and SCImago Institutions Rankings, to name a few. In this global ring, New Zealand is a bantamweight battling against heavyweights. Yet, we hold our own. We pack a mean punch, in fact. We are the only country in the world with all its universities in the top 500 (that is, the top 3%) in the world (Universities New Zealand 2016a). We are one of the most ‘international’ higher education systems in the world (Universities New Zealand 2016b). We have high participation rates in tertiary education (Crossan 2015). We rank second among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries for total public expenditure on tertiary education (Joyce and Parata 2015), although statistics are open to interpretation. Another view is that we spend US$1000 less per student on tertiary education than the OECD average, and US$3000 less per student on tertiary education than Australia (Grey 2016).
All of this is information you can find in any quick Google search or glance at OECD statistics (see for example, OECD 2016). What you’ll find in this book is, instead, the insiders’ take on being an academic in this system. What does it mean to be starting an academic career in New Zealand in the twenty-first century? And, in a globalised world, how does that career look in comparison to what others are experiencing elsewhere? This book will offer some examples of how New Zealand academics and universities ‘punch above their weight’ even though some may often feel they’re ‘against the ropes’.
Challenges for Academia
New Zealand universities have come a long way since the establishment of the four colonial university colleges of the University of New Zealand in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Staffed by imported Professors, attended by (mostly) young, wealthy men, and sending examination scripts back to the UK for marking, these university colleges fought against an anti-intellectualism that pervaded the new colony. Eventually, though, New Zealand ended up with a dynamic, growing, and integrated tertiary sector that now includes eight universities, three wānanga (Māori tertiary organisations), 16 institutes of technology and polytechnics, and many industry training organisations and private training establishments. Vast changes have been occurring in the New Zealand higher education system over the last three decades (described in more detail in Chap. 2). Like many higher education systems around the world, New Zealand universities face mounting pressures and challenges, all of which filter down to affect the lives of academic staff already within or contemplating becoming a part of the academy.
Key trends in higher education around the English-speaking world that are also evident in the New Zealand context include: a diverse and growing student population; changing technologies; internationalisation of the student body and the curriculum (all encouraged and exacerbated by the more and more prominent aforementioned international ranking schemes); and increasing government intervention with accompanying calls for accountability and competition. In their volume on the future of the university, Shin and Teichler (2014) identify the modern university as moving through three phases, from an elite system, to massification, and now to post-massification. In the elite system, they argue, knowledge production held sway and students did not require much effort to teach (coming as they did from similar backgrounds as their professors). With massification, teaching became more important in light of the need to teach a broader range of people who were less well-prepared for university study. Now, in what Shin and Teichler describe as the post-massification era, academics must be good at both research and teaching, in order to respond to increasing government expectations and changing student populations.
New Zealand universities are not immune to these changes on the global scene, even if we are comparatively well-protected from the worst of what some countries are undergoing in higher education. For example, New Zealand universities have not encountered the kinds of terror attacks experienced in Kenya in 2015 and Pakistan in 2016.Footnote 3 Nor is individual and institutional academic freedom severely curtailed in New Zealand in the way it has been in places like Turkey.Footnote 4 Women are able to participate as students and staff in New Zealand higher education in ways they are not elsewhere (Morley and Crossouard 2014). Still, our staff: student ratio is bad (see Chap. 3), attrition among both staff and students is troubling, overall funding is decreasing, and women are still not well represented at senior levels in New Zealand universities.
Furthermore, academic staff worldwide are reported to suffer significantly higher levels of stress than other workers (Bentley et al. 2014; Winefield et al. 2008) and New Zealand academics, it seems, are also at risk. Wilf Malcolm, a former Vice Chancellor of Waikato University and Nicholas Tarling, a Professor of History, declare that they detect “among staff, academic as well as general, a feeling of helplessness, of alienation, even at times of fear, that seems to us utterly alien to the proper spirit of a university, and utterly incompatible with its proper aspirations” (Malcolm and Tarling 2007, p. 219). Similarly, a group of researchers at Lincoln University discovered that the breakdown of what they refer to as academics’ “psychological contracts” with the universities in which they work, is causing problems due to “‘changes and pressures associated with marketization and creeping managerialism” (Tipples et al. 2007, p. 32).
Such changes and stressors are both global and local. In New Zealand, for example, the Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) has shifted the focus of many institutions, and individual academics, to a more intense concentration on research output and performance than ever before. This has brought with it varying responses from academics, and a different environment into which early career academics are being socialised than the system their academic managers and leaders came through. As changes such as massification and marketisation happen globally, it is important to consider how they affect academics locally. In their important work on the early career paths and employment conditions of academics in 17 countries, Bennion and Locke (2010) remind us that national perspectives are important in an expanding and globalising world: we must “begin to assess the balance of national particularities and global trends, of similarities and differences as experienced by academics in these systems and, in some cases, when moving between them” (p. S27). Therefore, in this book I look at early career academics in one national system (New Zealand) but draw comparisons with other similar systems. I focus on the experiences of early career academics and the challenges and prospects they face as they are socialised into the academic profession.
While this book will not address all of the changes and challenges facing New Zealand higher education, I pick up on several that affect early career academics directly. In particular, I look at academic staff activities in terms of the core teaching and research missions of the university, as well as at work-life balance, the influence of performance-based funding, and the internationalisation of the academic profession in New Zealand, a phenomenon that has a longer history than elsewhere. I also demonstrate how New Zealand was one of the first countries in the world to implement a broad sweeping system change to higher education modelled on neoliberal principles of competition, marketisation and managerialism, in the 1980s, and how those changes continued through into the twenty-first century with deep effect.
Why Concentrate on Early Career Academics?
Newcomers entering the academic workforce in twenty-first century New Zealand clearly face a different environment from the one in which their academic leaders trained and served. It is important, then, to find out just what has changed and how these changes are being experienced. Investigating satisfaction levels and job experiences will help us determine what will be needed to attract new academics to an aging profession from which many workers are likely to retire in the coming decade (Nana et al. 2010). Moreover, uncovering the developmental paths, career aspirations, and socialisation experiences of early career academics, in particular, will enable us to discover how and why they choose to stay or leave, what keeps them engaged in their work, and what support they need to get up to speed as quickly as possible (Hemmings 2012). Such research may also reveal how we might attract more academics to the profession who come from similar backgrounds and experiences as the diverse and historically underrepresented students that are increasingly joining our institutions (Austin 2003; Lindholm 2004).
With often limited power, fewer resources, and widely varying expectations in regard to teaching, research, and service activities, early career academics require both our attention and our support. As Teichler et al. (2013) have noted in their research on the changing academic profession worldwide, studies of those they label “junior academics” are vitally important because they help us to understand how academics learn about their profession and what we can do to support them in their double functions of learning and productive work during the formative years of their careers. Furthermore, if, as much of the research on doctoral student socialisation suggests (Austin 2002; Weidman and Stein 2003), academic staff are instrumental in the adequate preparation of doctoral students for a future academic career, we need to make sure that those academic staff have themselves been well supported, socialised and prepared.
Socialisation and the Interaction of Structure and Agency
In theoretical terms, this book is framed by the idea that socialisation happens in the interaction between structure and agency (Archer 2007, 2008; Bandura 2001; Billett 2006; Edwards 2005; Kahn 2009; Neumann et al. 2006; Trowler 1998), and that we need to recognise structure and agency as relationally interdependent. Below, I give explanations for how I view these three key terms: structure, agency, and socialisation.
Structure relates to “the properties which give coherence and relative permanence to social practices in different times and locales” (Trowler and Knight 1999, p. 182). In academia, such structures include but are not confined to disciplines, departments, and universities. Some have ventured that the discipline represents the first community “in which individual academics engage in the project of identity building” (Henkel 2002, p. 138), followed by the university. Others argue that too much weight has been given to the structural influences of academic disciplines, and that more consideration needs to be given to the wider cultural practices and preferences that shape academic professional communities (Trowler 1998). Either way, in this book I subscribe to a social theory approach, which acknowledges that individuals both learn from and influence the various academic communities with which they identify, and that structure and agency are “interdependent and mutually causative” (Trowler 1998, p. 137).
Agency refers to the capacity that individuals have for acting on and changing the world around them: “To be an agent is to intentionally make things happen by one’s actions” (Bandura 2001, p. 2). Central to this agentic action are intentionality (Bandura 2001; Archer 2007; Neumann et al. 2006) and reflexivity (Archer 2007; Luckett and Luckett 2009). That is, individual agency requires a person to act with intention and to develop the capability of reflecting on the success or otherwise of that action, particularly in relation to the structure in which the action occurred. In terms of being socialised into the academic career, we can argue that individual academics work, and exert their agency, within the context of structures over which they may have limited or no control, and which present various opportunities and constraints (Austin 2003; Henkel 2002, 2005; Neumann et al. 2006; Reybold 2008; Tierney 1997). These interactions therefore strongly influence the socialisation process.
Socialisation involves newcomers to an organisation (or discipline, or department) learning about and interacting with structural norms, values and cultures in both agentic and passive ways. Academics learn how to be academics by observing and being involved in the “microscopic aspects of the culture of their organizations” (Tierney 1997, p. 12). A norm might be, for example, that everyone in the new academic’s department works long hours and over the weekend. A value might be that research is given more prominence than teaching in the promotions system within the university. A culture might be that peer reviews of research submissions to scholarly journals are always anonymous. All of these examples have counterparts, of course: where long hours are the norm in one department, there will be no such expectation in another; where one university privileges research, another will favour teaching; and where one discipline expects anonymous reviews, another encourages the nomination of potential reviewers by the authors themselves. These are aspects of academia that new academics encounter, absorb, and in some instances, resist, during their graduate school or doctoral degree experience (Austin 2002; Gardner 2010) in what has been described as an apprenticeship-type model (Reybold 2008) or “anticipatory socialisation” (Tierney 1997). New academics then move on to an “organisational socialisation” process provided from within their institution (Reybold 2008; Tierney 1997) in their first years in a postdoctoral or academic position. For many, however, as Chap. 3 will show, this anticipatory and organisational socialisation happens simultaneously, as people complete their graduate degrees on the job, or a long time apart, because many academics enter the profession from other careers.
Tierney (1997) outlines two views of this socialisation experience. One view posits that new recruits are expected to assimilate the organisational norms and cultures with little room for diverse responses or for the possibility of the newcomer themselves influencing or changing the culture. Another perspective involves a more reciprocal relationship between individual agency and the cultures, norms, and values encountered during the socialisation process. This view holds that academics are influenced by and make sense of their institution/career at the same time as actively participating in “the re-creation rather than merely the discovery of a culture” (Tierney 1997, p. 16). As various researchers have argued, the ability of individuals to exert their agency and reflect upon their developing identity/ies as they experience the socialisation process can lead to the potential transformation of both the individual and the workplace (Billett et al. 2005; Kahn 2009; McAlpine et al. 2013). So, it is important for us to consider both the perspectives of the early career academics themselves, as well as looking at the structures in which they are working, and the expectations (their own and those of their universities) under which they operate.
Some researchers have argued that too much research on higher education in the twentieth century privileges the views and experiences of “high-status” academics and disciplines (Trowler 1998) and that more diverse voices are needed in research on academia. It is therefore important that we listen to the voices of those early in their academic careers. Furthermore, recent research on academic staff has focused on the loss of an idealised collegial past (Mathieson 2011; Tight 2010), highlighting the effect of work intensification and degradation (Trowler 1998) and pointing out the encroaching expectations of accountability to government and relevance to industry (Leišytė and Dee 2012). Yet, for early career academics beginning their careers in the twenty-first century, theirs is not an environment experienced through the “lens of loss” but the “only reality they know” (Mathieson 2011, p. 243). We must not assume that our memories and experiences of entering the academic profession will necessarily resonate with what our new colleagues are experiencing, nor that we will be able to anticipate what they need. The new generation of academics is diverse, with varying prior experiences, “biographies, expectations, self-image and dispositions” (Knight 2002, p. 13), and is working within dynamic structures. The socialisation processes that earlier generations experienced may not be relevant, appropriate, or sufficient for twenty-first century academics.
The Research Itself
In light of these differences between generations, disciplines, contexts, and countries, this book offers the voices of early career academics from New Zealand to the conversation. The project on which this book is based investigated the work experiences and socialisation of early career academics at all eight New Zealand universities in the year following the completion of the most recent national Performance Based Research Fund assessment exercise. In 2012, I conducted a survey on the experiences of early career academics in all New Zealand universities, with funding from Ako Aotearoa: the National Centre for Tertiary Teaching Excellence (Sutherland et al. 2013). Many of the questions in the survey followed the phrasing of questions used in the international Changing Academic Profession (CAP) questionnaire.Footnote 5 The research reported in this book offers a comparative perspective, from the New Zealand context, of the experiences of early career academics.
The research included two questionnaires and follow-up focus groups. The first questionnaire was sent to all early career academics (those within the first 7 years of their first permanent academic appointment) in all eight New Zealand universities. This choice was made on the basis that the literature identifies early career academics as anywhere from 5 years in the role (Bazeley 2003; Gonzales and LaPointe Terosky 2016) to 6 years (Bland et al. 2006) to 8 years since receiving a PhD (Laudel and Gläser 2008). In New Zealand, our academic scale mirrors the UK model and has four key positions: Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Associate Professor, and Professor. There are also positions (such as Assistant Lecturer, Teaching Fellow, and Post-Doctoral Fellow) that people may occupy before being appointed on the full academic scale. Some end up in recurring fixed-term contracts without moving into permanent employment, but if a new academic started on the bottom rung of the Lecturer scale in New Zealand (at my university, at least) it would take 7 years (without applying for an accelerated promotion) to move through the steps on the Lecturer scale before that person could apply to be promoted to Senior Lecturer. Consequently, I chose 7 years as the cut-off for defining “early career”.
The early career questionnaire generated 538 responses (a healthy 47% response rate). A second questionnaire surveyed academic leaders and managers at all eight universities, and generated 104 responses (representing a good spread across all universities and all levels of senior leadership). Follow-up focus groups were held at four universities with 26 academics and academic managers. I provide more detail on the questionnaire method and data analysis in the appendix.
The questionnaire for early career academics was based on my earlier research (Sutherland and Petersen 2010) and aligned closely with other international surveys on the academic profession, including the CAP survey (Teichler et al. 2013), the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE 2010) survey on Tenure-Track Faculty Job Satisfaction, and Bryson’s survey on the UK academic workforce (Bryson 2004). The questionnaire included statements to which participants responded using four- and five-point Likert Scales, as well as demographic and open-ended questions, and included the following sections (the full questionnaire is available upon request):
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Demographics, Qualifications, and Job Information – including nationality, age, job title, discipline, highest qualification, length of time in job, promotion success, home situation (i.e. raising children or not, spouse working or not), etc.
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Research and Teaching Activity – including number of publications, awards, conferences attended, students supervised, etc.
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Institutional Policies, Support, and Services for New Academics – including ratings of different policies, support mechanisms and services for new academics in terms of their importance to a new academic’s success and the effectiveness of each at their own university
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Work-Life Balance and Satisfaction – including questions on intent to stay in academia, satisfaction with time spent at work and with family, finding time for exercise, and recommending one’s department and institution as places to work.
These questionnaire sections represent an attempt to uncover some of the structural influences on the socialisation of new academics (resources, policies, workload, etc) and to identify where and how new academics experience and exercise their agency and encounter structural supports and constraints. Underpinning the book, then, is the question of how early career academics are being socialised into the academic profession in the twenty-first century, and the interaction of structure and agency within those socialisation processes.
What to Expect in the Following Pages
The inclusion of this book now, in the Springer series on the Changing Academic Profession, is an attempt to give voice to a country that has not been included in many international studies on higher education. My intention is to lay out a sense of what has been occurring in New Zealand higher education over the last century and a half, to map the changes that have taken place both historically and more recently, and to highlight the experiences of a particular cohort of academics – those early in their careers. I outline below the order of the book and what readers will encounter in each chapter. Each chapter is separately downloadable and can be read as a standalone document, but some cross-referral to other chapters is inevitable and readers may wish to dip in and out of the various chapters and sections of chapters that interest them, or to read through the whole book in progression.
New Zealand academics and historians have recorded the history of higher education in New Zealand in some excellent monographs and edited collections over the years. In Chap. 2, I draw on these, my own PhD research, and statistical information from government departments, and from universities’ own websites, to provide an overview of the changing academic profession in New Zealand universities. This chapter identifies the current and historic structural influences – some dramatically changed, and some still pervasively powerful – that both inspire and constrain early career academics in New Zealand.
I follow this chapter with a detailed description of the people working in New Zealand universities, and some information on students, too. Chapter 3 outlines the kinds of data collected previously about New Zealand academics, and sets out the key demographic findings from my own survey. In particular, I describe their age, nationality, ethnicity, and gender, and compare some of this with international data. I also provide information about their academic roles, appointment and contract types, qualifications, and training. This chapter is heavy on tables, but it is important to lay out these descriptive data here to provide a comprehensive overview from which comparisons can be made with other countries, and with which future New Zealand research can be compared. The tables in this chapter also lend demographic data to analyses later in Chaps. 5, 6, and 7, in particular. They help us to understand the wide diversity of the people undergoing socialisation into the academic profession, and reveal the varying structures in which they have been previously socialised.
Chapter 4 follows on from the demographic focus of the preceding chapter with an extensive overview of the kinds of activities early career academics in New Zealand universities engage in on a daily basis. It outlines their preferences in relation to teaching and research and compares these findings with what is happening elsewhere in the world. The chapter provides detailed summaries of the teaching, research, service, and supervision activities of early career academics within the structures of the eight New Zealand universities. It also considers these activities from a disciplinary perspective, and in comparison with academics elsewhere in the world. The chapter also provides information on early career academics’ confidence levels in relation to these activities. It concludes with a consideration of the influence of the Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) on early career academics in New Zealand. The PBRF is a particular structural influence not encountered in quite the same way by academics anywhere else in the world because of the individualistic nature of its assessment process. This chapter unravels some of the structural complexities that inflect early career academics’ responses to the PBRF. This chapter is data-laden and the longest in the book, and it may take some navigating for readers to uncover the information of most interest to them (for which the sub-headings should be useful). The chapter as a whole will be of particular interest to researchers interested in the role preferences and daily activities of early career academics.
As structural influences from within institutions are widely reported to affect academic satisfaction, and, potentially, retention within the profession, Chap. 5 investigates the satisfaction levels of early career academics in New Zealand universities. With the help of my colleague, Marc Wilson, who served as a statistical consultant during the data-gathering phase of this project, I apply Hagedorn’s model of academic satisfaction to the New Zealand context. We find that, encouragingly, New Zealand academics appear to be generally more satisfied than academics elsewhere.
Despite the mostly positive findings in Chap. 5, satisfaction does not automatically equate to a good balance between all the work activities outlined in Chap. 4 and the home lives and family expectations of early career academics. Therefore, Chap. 6 looks more deeply into the home and work experiences of early career academics to find out how well, if at all, they are managing to balance their working and family lives. The chapter outlines key differences in men’s and women’s experience in this regard, and notes that agency may not be equally exerted by all early career academics, depending on the domestic and institutional structures that constrain them. The chapter also calls for new perspectives on how we socialise people into the academic profession and its sometimes debilitating expectations around commitment.
Chapter 7 is written with Meegan Hall, a colleague at my university, who wrote her PhD on the experiences of Māori academics in New Zealand. Māori are the Indigenous people of New Zealand and make up 15% of the national population. In Chap. 7, we aim to give clear and loud voice to Māori academics at the beginning of their academic careers in New Zealand universities. The chapter draws on the findings from Māori respondents to my survey, as well as findings from Meegan’s own PhD, and some other excellent research that has been conducted around New Zealand over the last couple of decades. Like other chapters, it identifies some structural constraints but emphasises also how Māori academics are working positively against these constraints and exerting their agency in powerful ways. It also identifies that Māori academics often have to juggle more interactions, with more people, in more structures than other academics because of their concomitant commitments to their discipline, university, and also – and often most significantly – their iwi (tribe).
Chapter 8 emphasises the project’s theoretical framework, highlighting the interaction of structure and agency to demonstrate how important it is that we consult with and include early career academics in decision-making processes, and find out more about their actual needs. It outlines what early career academics say they need to do their jobs well, identifies their own desires around socialisation into the profession and the institution, and presents data from both early career academics and academic managers that show a troubling gap in expectations.
Chapter 9 offers some concluding thoughts on the early career academic experience in New Zealand universities and suggestions for improving the ways that we socialise and support our new colleagues. It argues for more story-telling, different metaphors, and more listening.
In an effort to allow the voices of the participants in my project to be heard in a slightly different way, many chapters in this book finish with a short poem. I have composed each poem solely from the words of respondents to the survey. The poems are intended to follow the themes of the chapter in which they appear, and serve as a lead in to the following chapter, all the while reminding readers of the voices of early career academics.
A Personal Perspective on Academic Socialisation
I began my own university education in New Zealand in a year (1990) that turned out to be the cusp of massive change in the university system. In my first year as a student, I paid a very small amount of money for my annual course fees and received a generous bursary (student allowance) every week. That year, I also marched in protest, with my fellow students and many concerned staff and members of the public, against the proposed introduction of changes to the funding of tertiary education, but to no avail. The following year, thanks to the implementation of changes stemming from the Education Amendment Act 1989, I had to pay more than four times as much in fees and I no longer received an allowance, instead being forced to draw on the newly introduced student loan scheme for my living and course expenses. This student loan scheme charged me interest on my loan at a rate that at times was higher than the interest banks were charging. Meanwhile, the student fees I had to pay increased every year on average around 13% (Healey and Gunby 2012, p. 35) until the end of the decade when I finished my tertiary studies. So, as a student I lived through some of the most wide-ranging changes ever affecting students in the New Zealand higher education system, but with little sense of agency over those massively significant structural shifts.
Then, I became an academic staff member at the turn of the century, and was confronted by a system that was changing the way that academic staff experienced higher education. In my first year as a university lecturer, academics – at my university at least – were striking against what they perceived to be poor working conditions and an unresponsive management. Outside the university, but directly affecting the working lives of academics, the Tertiary Education Commission was being established, Centres for Research Excellence were introduced, Colleges of Education were being merged with universities, and at least one polytechnic became a university. The PBRF was in development and represented a new shift in how research is funded and also how academics viewed their time. Ako Aotearoa (the National Centre for Tertiary Teaching Excellence), a grassroots-led but eventually government-funded commitment to ensuring the quality of the student learning experience, was also just around the corner. Once again, I was starting out a time of immense change, not all of it bad, of course.
These moments engendered a fascination with the student and academic experience that saw me make higher education my area of research focus, and prepared me to be in an ideal position to research the experiences of early career academics in New Zealand universities and contribute to this series of books on the changing academic profession worldwide. As a young, female academic starting out in a time of upheaval, I encountered many moments of challenge, questioning, and limited agency. This book is not about that – many others have written more eloquent, autobiographical accounts (see, for example, Misiaszek 2014) – but these experiences have greatly influenced my perspective on and desire to support the socialisation process for new academics. I hope that this book will give voice to some of the concerns, challenges, and prospects facing early career academics and will make a contribution not just to the research on what we know of the academic profession in New Zealand, but also to our practice around supporting our new colleagues. I am hopeful that, despite its focus on the New Zealand context, international readers will also benefit from reading about the experiences of people starting out in academia in the twenty-first century.
Notes
- 1.
There is even a website dedicated to identifying maps without New Zealand: http://worldmapswithout.nz/
- 2.
The most notable of these are the IBF (International Boxing Federation), the WBA (World Boxing Association), the WBC (World Boxing Council), and the WBO (World Boxing Organisation).
- 3.
These terror attacks occurred at Garissa University College in Kenya, where 148 people lost their lives in April 2015, and at Bacha Khan University in Pakistan in January 2016 that left 21 dead.
- 4.
- 5.
Readers can find out more about the overall CAP project in Teichler et al. (2013). The most recent iteration of the CAP questionnaire was conducted in 18 countries in 2007 and has been reported on in Springer’s series of books on the changing academic profession, of which this volume now forms a part. New Zealand was not one of the countries included in the CAP survey in 2007, but will be included (along with at least nine other new countries) from 2017.
- 6.
At my own university, for example, this title is Head of School.
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Appendix: Research Methods
Appendix: Research Methods
Early Career Questionnaire
As mentioned in the chapter itself, the questionnaire for early career academics was based on the CAP survey from 2007 and included many of the same questions, as well as some adaptations and additions for the New Zealand context. I piloted the questionnaire with 47 early career academics, whom I also interviewed, at all eight New Zealand universities in 2011. As a result of this pilot, and issues that were raised during the interviews, I added questions to the demographic section on early career academics’ living situations, and to the institutional policies, support, and services section, in particular. The questionnaire was then sent to all early career academics (those within the first 7 years of their first permanent academic appointment) at all eight New Zealand universities in early- to mid-2012.
Identifying the Research Population
My reference group comprised one local contact at each university (usually working in the university’s teaching and learning centre or equivalent), who helped me to liaise with Human Resources (HR) staff at each university to identify the early career academic population at each university. As explained in the chapter, I defined ‘early career’ as academics within the first 7 years of their first permanent academic appointment. For ease of sampling, because such a population had already been identified by each university for Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF) reporting purposes, I asked each university’s HR contact for the email addresses of academic staff in the first 7 years of their academic career. In most cases, this meant they had been appointed at their current university since the beginning of 2005 (or just before the 2006 PBRF round). Some of those appointees had transferred from academic positions at other institutions and were quite senior and thus not considered ‘early career’, so my HR and reference group contacts had to do some culling before sending through their lists.
Early Career Responses
The eventual list numbered 1216 potential participants. I then sent all early career academics at all eight universities a personalised email inviting them to answer the questionnaire online (using the Qualtrics survey software) and to let me know if they did not fit the criteria. Several replied, telling me they had been in academia for longer than 7 years (but at their institution for fewer years, which is why they would have appeared on the original list). Once I removed those outside the criteria, my population was 1151. I received 538 responses, giving a very respectable response rate of 47%. Table 1.1 outlines the responses by university and overall.
Academic Manager Questionnaire
I also sent a much shorter questionnaire, with several of the same questions from the Institutional Policies, Services, and Resources section of the early career questionnaire, to a variety of academic managers and senior people who support early career academics at all eight New Zealand universities. An email request to participate was forwarded by contacts at each New Zealand university to Heads of Department, Deans, Associate Deans, Pro/Assistant/Deputy Vice-Chancellors, and anyone involved in managing or directly supporting early career academics. This questionnaire included the following sections:
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Institutional policies, support, and services for new academics
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Professional and career development
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Job information
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Advice for new academics.
I hoped to receive eight to ten responses from each of the larger universities, and perhaps five or six from smaller universities, as I thought this would give a sense of the perspectives of some academic managers and enable me (or someone else) to identify issues to follow up on in later research. I was very pleased to receive 104 replies, with a good spread of responses from all eight universities. Table 1.2 shows the responses to the Academic Manager Questionnaire received from each university. As invitations to complete this survey were not sent individually, I do not know the population size for each university, so no overall response rate is listed for the Academic Manager Questionnaire. However, as Table 1.2 shows, a good spread of responses was received from across all eight universities, corresponding well with the response rates for the early career questionnaire from each university (see the fourth column).
Academic managers in a variety of different positions replied to the questionnaire, from a Deputy Vice-Chancellor to several Deans, Associate Deans, and Directors. The majority of responses came from Heads of Department or equivalent.Footnote 6 As noted earlier, Heads of Department are usually the people with direct line management responsibility for early career academics and the managers upon whom the early career academics rely most for support and information at the outset of their academic career or upon arrival at a new university. Table 1.3 provides more detailed information on the respondents to the academic manager survey.
The results for the Academic Manager Questionnaire are found predominantly in Chap. 8, whereas the Early Career Questionnaire provides the data in Chaps. 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, and also contributes to Chap. 8.
Focus Groups
Following the collection of the questionnaire data, I conducted focus groups at four universities, with a sample of early career academics from different disciplines, and one focus group with managers at my own institution. Respondents were asked at the end of the questionnaire if they were interested in receiving a copy of the findings, and I used this list to email people to ask if they would be interested in participating in a focus group at their university. The focus groups considered the results of the national questionnaire and probed further the experiences of early career academics, and the support and resources needed for successful socialisation into the academic career in New Zealand. Seventeen early career academics and nine managers were involved in the focus groups (Table 1.4).
Data Analysis
Statistical Analyses
Questionnaire response comparisons in Chaps. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 were conducted using correlations, t-tests, Chi-Squares, ANOVAs, and regression analyses. All statistical analyses excluded cases pairwise, which ensured each analysis only used the data that was available for that analysis. Preliminary analyses were conducted on all the variables to assess their relative distribution in order to inform the subsequent analyses. Subscale items were grouped together based on conducting Primary Component Analyses and then assessing the reliability of the scales (only alpha scores above 0.7 were accepted). Chapter 5 on academic satisfaction includes more detail on the analyses undertaken for that particular modelling exercise.
Questionnaire and Focus Group Comments
I allowed space after three sections in the questionnaire (institutional policies and support, working relationships, and work-life balance) and at the end of the questionnaire for respondents to make open-ended comments. More than 160 respondents made comments. The thematic analysis of these comments involved my first reading through all the comments, identifying codes for analysis, then ordering those codes into a series of key themes, and attributing each comment to a theme (some comments fit more than one theme). Two colleagues then also went through the comments and assigned them to the key themes. More than 90% of the time comments were coded into the same themes by both me and the other researchers. I conducted a similar process for my analysis of the focus group transcripts.
I include comments from the questionnaire and the focus groups throughout the book to support the statistical findings and the suggestions I make for supporting early career academics. These comments are not intended to be representative of all respondents; rather, they shed further light on the findings and go some way to explaining how some early career academics feel about their circumstances. They also give voice to the participants, as do the poems at the end of each chapter. Comments are indented, and respondents’ academic level, discipline, sex, and age group are provided.
Limitations
It is important to acknowledge that this research represents only a snapshot in time. It does not investigate how views of individuals might have changed or be changing, nor does it look into how recent changes in circumstances (employing institution, type of contract, family situation, etc.) might affect the perceptions of early career academics. It will thus be important to investigate the perceptions of New Zealand early career academics longitudinally and also include voices of academics from all levels, for comparison and context, hence the New Zealand involvement in the next phase of the CAP project.
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Sutherland, K.A. (2018). Introduction. In: Early Career Academics in New Zealand: Challenges and Prospects in Comparative Perspective. The Changing Academy – The Changing Academic Profession in International Comparative Perspective, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61830-2_1
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