Predeterminación del Problema

In the developing world, academics are in an unenviable position; at the bottom of a world system of unequal relationships. Their situation is further complicated by the fact that they often have mixed qualifications, resulting in a select number of qualified professors and PhD holders. This not only results in small numbers of skilled and experienced academics but it raises barriers particularly in their recruitment and retention (Portnoi, 2009:189). In a book titled “The Changing Academic Workplace:

Comparative Perspectives”, Altbach (2000:14) states that declining government funding, managerialism

and increased demands for accountability have not only become the ‘vocabulary of academic life’, but they have had adverse effects in the working conditions of academic staff in the form of increased class sizes and inadequate and/or deteriorating facilities.

Portnoi (2009:188) also adds that massification of HE had led to a crisis in the academic profession that has negatively affected the quality of teaching, research and scholarship. On top of this, academics are increasingly being asked to produce and apply knowledge aimed at solving social problems rather than for the pursuit of knowledge itself. Gardner and Wiley (2016:2) further state that academics experience several challenges within the university such as “decreased government funding, pressure to generate new income, balancing work and family life, continuous change, dealing with slow and unresponsive administrative processes and increased government reporting and scrutiny”. These challenges emanating from the disjunction between the ‘imagined’ academic life and the ‘reality’ that is experienced make academic life difficult (King & Billot, 2016:158).

Today, academics find themselves working alongside colleagues whose roles exceed their job descriptions; these so called ‘blended’ or ‘third space’ professionals are typically non-academic staff whose work crosses the traditional boundary between the academic and administrative functions of the university. This suggests that ‘pure’ academic voices are increasingly becoming diluted while non- academic staff is increasingly setting the tone for HEIs (Robinson, 2016:18). HE systems are also employing greater numbers of part-time or fixed-contract academics; this has led to casual academic labourers or ‘just-in-time knowledge workers’ and a split in academic identities (Portnoi, 2009:188-189). Further, academics are being asked to develop a range of ‘unrelated and non-complementary skills’.

They are expected to add community service and research consultancies to their working roles. Academics research is also increasingly dedicated to community partnerships and external funding agencies rather than their own professional area of learning and teaching. The end result of this is that academics often find themselves working for somebody else’s agenda (Robinson, 2016:18-19).

In order to have a full comprehension on the impact of external factors on academic identity, it is important to consider the complex changes that universities are currently undergoing. According to Lomas and Lygo-Baker (2006) these changes are brought about by the need for HEIs to respond to a range of developments in economics (such as the reduction in public spending), politics (such as the pressure to increase student places) and technological advances (such as new and faster methods of communication). For example, greater demands are now placed on HEIs to deliver more with fewer resources (Feather, 2017:706). Academics also recognise the requirement to collaborate with external partners and act entrepreneurially (Kearney & Maxwell, 2015:3).

The increasingly business-orientated direction of the HE sector is also reflected by pressure on academic staff to bring their own constructions of academic identity in line with the corporate identity distinct from a ‘collegium of academics’ (Gale, 2011: 216). For example, Portnoi (2009:189) states that in the early 1990s South African universities began to develop strategic plans and mission statements in a language that increasingly reflected the private sector. However, many academics found it difficult to assimilate the new terminologies emanating from the corporate sector as they clashed with the values enshrined in academic work and were unconducive to collegial interactions. Portnoi goes on and states that universities in South Africa are still grappling with racist and sexist undertones in their universities despite the existence of the 1998 Employment Equity Act (EEA) which sought to transform academic workplaces into inclusive workplaces which are more representative of the South African society (2009:190).

It is for this reason that Robinson (2016:17) contends that academics’ individual and collective identities are being undermined by increased workplace pressures, national educational policies as well as the forces of globalization. Ultimately, this leads to de-centered academic identities indicative of the ever increasing de-centering of the academic from the core functions of academy. To clarify this point, Robinson further states that academics’ understandings of what constitutes significant discipline relevant research are being de-centered by the existence of institutional and national competitive research evaluations. This means that academics hoping to score well in these evaluation exercises must chase ‘volume’ over ‘quality’ of publications. Additionally, it is the management of HEIs (rather than academics) who decide research concentrations as part of institution-wide research strategies (2016:18).

Such changes, whether inspired for the right moral reasons, create a significant shift at the level of an individual’s values and the underlying belief structures. Since an individual’s values underpin and explain the individual’s identity, any change in these values has an impact upon identity. For example, modularization, semesterisation and the use of accreditation of experiential learning for credit accumulation and transfer schemes are examples of relatively recent specific manifestations of managerialism in universities in England (Lomas & Lygo-Baker, 2006). Other researchers such as Morley (2003) contend that universities have been transformed into classic Fordist organisations that are involved in the large-scale production or massification of higher education as a public service.

Morley (2003) goes on to states that this application of Fordism principles to HE has led to the ‘the industrialization of higher education’. Moreover, in many HEIs, there currently exists a prevailing notion of the ‘student as a customer’, with academic staff encouraged to meet the needs of students. According to Lomas and Lygo-Baker (2006) students increasingly understand themselves as consumers, entitled to agreed standards of provision and to the full information about the quality of what is provided. Under these circumstances, renewable contracts have become the norm with junior academic staff members citing problems of job security and lack of opportunities for career progression.

Most academics have also observed increasing accountability and budgetary difficulties as well as decreasing autonomy and deterioration of working conditions closely related to new managerialism. For example, Sang, Powell, Finkel & Richards, 2015:237) state that increased focus on performance management and measurement in HE contributes to concerns about diminishing opportunities to exercise autonomy and academic freedom, declining collegiality and increasing quantification of academic output. Accordingly, the job satisfaction of academics has steadily declined, raising the concern that academics may lose their key position and leadership role within HE as well as their role in the future development of society (Lai, 2010:272-273).