The paper applies Hoyle's notion of "extended" professionality to modern higher education working. It begins with some of the policy contexts and theoretical perspectives around the structural and professional change experienced by academic staff: changes that have been documented in systematic studies of university life from the 1970s onwards.…

Employing the interdisciplinary field of health inequalities as a case study, this paper draws on interviews to explore subjective accounts of academic identities. It finds widespread acceptance that academia is a market place in which research-active careers require academics to function as entrepreneurs marketing ideas to funders. Beyond this,…

This paper argues that it is reasonable to expect the professoriate, including full professors, to balance traditional academic values with external demands for accountability. Today's universities are characterised by increasing diversity, wider access to higher education, decreasing funding and greater oversight through quality assurance:…

Driven by the growing presence of market forces within higher education worldwide, universities are changing the way they engage with students. This article explores how a university's internal culture relates to engagement with students and their views. It builds on wider research into student engagement and organisational cultures. The…

This article focuses on the theory and practice of teamwork in "top management teams" in UK higher education institutions. It is informed by some of the key findings from a recent two-year research project sponsored by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education that investigated the different ways in which UK higher education institutions…

The leadership roles of pro-vice-chancellors (PVCs) in the United Kingdom and elsewhere have evolved markedly over the last three decades while universities have been encouraged to shift towards more executive styles of leadership and decision-making. The change does not only reflect changing institutional needs, however, but an accommodation of…

This paper reports aspects of an international study of leadership of teaching in 19 departments with outstanding teaching records in 11 research-intensive universities. Leadership was found to take different forms in different discipline areas, in different organisational cultures, and in response to major problems affecting the department. While…

This paper addresses the relationships between leadership theory, practice and development, drawing on both the higher education and wider leadership literature. It explores why challenges and problems exist within the contested field of leadership theory and why gaps remain between theory and practice after more than a century of research--and…

This paper adds to earlier reviews by the author of the changing roles and identities of contemporary professional staff in UK higher education, and builds on a categorisation of professional staff identities as having "bounded", "cross-boundary" and "unbounded" characteristics. Drawing on a study of 54 professional managers in the United Kingdom,…

UK higher education is undergoing a period of significant change that generates a series of tensions and difficulties for universities and university leaders. This paper explores these tensions through analysis of findings from a study comprising 152 semi-structured face-to-face interviews in 12 UK universities. Building on from theories of…