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This paper aims to further the understanding about the relationship between work–life conflict and possible barriers to career progression due to the perception of anticipated work–life conflict, considering the unbounded nature of academic work through features such as its intensity, flexibility and perception of organizational support.

The model was tested using survey data from academics in a public university in the south of Spain. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to test the hypotheses.

The results reveal that current work–life conflict, job intensity and perception of support have a direct effect on the anticipation of work–life conflict in the event of progression in academic careers. The flexibility that academics enjoy is not sufficient to prevent the expected conflict. Academics' age is relevant, but gender or having childcare responsibilities have no significant effect of the anticipation of conflict.

This study addresses the gap in the literature on anticipated work–life conflict, expanding the focus to nonfamily commitments in unbounded jobs such as academic posts. The authors are not aware of any other study that focuses on the anticipation of work–life conflict in the case of career advancement among current employees with professional experience or accurate knowledge of what job they will be doing instead of students. Work–life balance should not be restricted to women with caring responsibilities, as conflict is no longer only related to gender roles.

This paper not only explores existing work–life conflict but also empirically analyzes anticipated work–life conflict in unbounded careers such as academia. It represents a significant contribution in an underresearched field and may lead to future research in other settings.

This paper aims to explore and compare academics’ experiences of managing work-life balance (WLB) in the British and Chinese contexts. The authors have three specific purposes. Firstly, to investigate whether there are marked gender differences in either context, given female and male academics’ work is considered fully comparable. Secondly, to examine contextual factors contributing to gender differences that influence and shape decisions in WLB and career paths. Thirdly, to explore the gendered consequences and implications.

A cross-national and multilevel analytical approach to WLB was chosen to unpick and explore gender land contextual differences and their influence on individual academics’ coping strategies. To reflect the exploratory nature of uncovering individual experience and perceptions, the authors used in-depth, semi-structured interviews. In total, 37 academics participated in the study, comprised of 18 participants from 6 universities in the UK and 19 participants from 6 universities in China.

This study reveals gendered differences in both the British and Chinese contexts in three main aspects, namely, sourcing support; managing emotions; and making choices, but more distinct differences in the latter context. Most significantly, it highlights that individual academics’ capacity in cultivating and using coping strategies was shaped simultaneously by multi-layered factors at the country level, the HE institutional level and the individual academics’ level.

Very few cross-cultural WLB studies explore gender differences. This cross-national comparative study is of particular value in making the “invisible visible” in terms of the gendered nature of choices and decisions within the context of WLB. The study has significant implications for female academics exercising individual scope in carving out a career, and for academic managers and institutions, in terms of support, structure and policy.

The purpose of this paper is to assess student web searching competency. The paper aims to determine varying levels of university student competency in web searches and to investigate and compare their competency levels of searching academic and daily‐life tasks.

The study adopted a quantitative research method of giving study participants a controllable experiment, a task‐based online test (TBOT), to evaluate web searching competency based on student searching performance. Participants included 141 undergraduate and graduate students from Wuhan University, China. Their searching competency level was assessed by testing their searching effectiveness and searching efficiency.

Student average web searching competency level was found to be comparatively low overall, within preliminary stages of development. A lot of students are unable to search the web with efficiency. Competency levels for searching academic tasks were higher than those of daily‐life tasks, especially when the degree of difficulty increased. These two levels, however, have a significant positive correlationship. In information literacy education it is therefore vital to teach students comprehensive web searching competency that includes knowledge and techniques for both academic and daily‐life search tasks.

Using the TBOT to assess student web searching competency is novel in the field of library and information science. By conducting this pilot experiment, librarians and teachers will be able to design and promote an improved information literacy education according to students' specific web searching competency status, instead of assumed goal levels.

Currently a number of countries around the world grapple with the alleged issues of “brain drain” and “brain gain”. These twin areas are especially felt in smaller nations such as Australia. They are particularly the subject of analysis with respect to the academic profession, which seeks to recruit the next generation of academics in an increasingly global and competitive world. Academic migration itself is not a new issue being as old as the profession itself. What perhaps is novel is that in a mass system of higher education with a great diversity of institutional types migration and migration decisions are even less one-dimensional than perhaps they once, if ever, were. If ever academic migrants were motivated only by academic decisions in making their migration choices does this also apply to those who work in newer and less traditional universities. This study using life history methods examines academic migrants and their migration choices with reference to two new Australian universities. The data is related to the wider literature on recent migration studies and academic migration. Questions are posed and conclusions drawn for academic recruitment by universities facing the challenges posed by imminent large-scale retirement of academic staff.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the significance of the work‐to‐retirement transition for academic staff from a life course perspective and the manner in which individuals have managed the transition.

In total, 32 semi‐structured interviews were conducted with academic staff from ten Universities in England. The data are analysed using matrix analysis.

Marked differences in the experience of the work‐to‐retirement transition were found and five groups are identified which characterise the significance of retirement. Clean Breakers view retirement as a welcome release from work. Opportunists and Continuing Scholars use retirement to re‐negotiate the employment relationship. The Reluctant consider retirement as a loss of a valued source of identity and the Avoiders are undecided about retirement plans.

The focus of the study is at the individual level. A more complete understanding of retirement decisions would encompass organisational approaches to retirement issues.

There are practical implications for academics approaching retirement. Not all academics wish to continue to engage in academic work in retirement. For those who do, opportunities are predominantly available to staff with stronger social and professional capital. Continued engagement necessitates personal adaptability and tolerance to ambiguity. Staff who are planning their careers might build such factors into retirement planning.

Organisations need to rethink their responsibilities in managing retirement processes as they face an increasing variety of retirement expectations in the workforce. Given the unfolding de‐institutionalisation of retirement, both individuals and organisations need to re‐negotiate their respective roles.

The paper characterises the diversity of modes of experiencing retirement by academic staff, highlighting differences between the groups.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the issues arising for women and men in senior management in New Zealand and Australian universities where life course and career trajectories intersect, and analyses how the stereotypical masculinist culture of universities can create additional problems for women.

The data presented here comes from 47 interviews undertaken with women (27) and men (20) senior managers – a total of 26 interviews from New Zealand universities and 21 from Australian universities. “Senior Management” was defined in this study as those academic managers with university wide responsibilities, who were currently in senior management positions.

Life-course issues for women aspiring to senior management roles in universities are framed around hegemonic constructions of masculinity; notions of academic careers subsuming personal life in professional roles; and structural constraints making rational choice impossible for many women. Furthermore, the excessive hours worked in such roles equate with the definition of extreme jobs. The paper concludes that the way in which women and men in senior HE endeavour to balance work and family life differs but creates issues for them both.

The structure and operation of Australian and New Zealand universities make gender diversity and management difficult to operationalise, given the competing imperatives of work and other life course trajectories. It is crucial to reframe life course and career intersections are conceptualised to ensure that diversity can be maximised.

This paper focuses on women and men in senior management positions in New Zealand and Australian universities, but the findings can be generalised to other countries with HE systems based on the British University model. In discussing how institutional culture affects the intersection of career and life course trajectories, this paper highlights the detrimental outcomes for individuals and the resultant lack of diversity in the sector.

With the rise in the number of women faculty since the 1970s, the traditional academic model of an exclusive devotion to work has been increasingly contested. Broad changes have occurred in academic culture and policies to make many universities more family-friendly. Recent research on graduate students points to a shift in attitudes about work/family management as well. Graduate students, both male and female, seem to balk at expectations for a sole devotion to an academic career to the exclusion of family life. We examine how faculty members carry out acts of resistance to this traditional model.

This article presents research from two separate but related qualitative studies for a combined sample of 74 faculty members with children.

Women and men faculty make professional and personal choices and engage in behaviors that, in essence, are acts of resistance against the dominant but perhaps “old” culture of academe.

Resistance to the ideal worker norm in academia has been largely overlooked in studies about faculty parents (particularly fathers) and work/family balance. We demonstrate how faculty members act as agents of social change in academia.

This account aims to introduce contrasting perspectives on teaching and learning methods, and to detail the growth of new forms and vocabularies of access to learning. As we move towards the new millennium, the development of national, yet diversified, credit frameworks and systems will provide an essential underpinning for the organisational culture that will be needed to sustain the wellbeing and growth of the educational system. These new systems are already being incorporated into the practice of ‘virtual’ education. Lifelong learning has widespread support across the social and political spectrum and its importance can hardly be over‐stated as we seek to maintain competitiveness in a changing world. Increasing knowledge and understanding to serve both the needs of the economy and of individuals to play a major role in democratic life has become an agenda of necessity as well as desire. An open society requires open systems of knowledge. A prognosis for the future is submitted where the significance of part‐time modular and open flexible learning is evaluated in terms of a curriculum rooted in useful knowledge and competences, acquired at different sites of learning, including the workplace. It is argued that modular structures, using the potential offered by credit accumulation and transfer to different institutions with different missions, can transcend and transform the learning opportunities for students in a mass system of higher education which is rapidly becoming part of a global market economy and society. Continuous lifelong learning involving its key features of open access, recognition of learning wherever it takes place and the growth of new learning networks and partnerships, is at the conceptual heart of the development of the virtual university.

The consequences of institutional change for faculty is an under-researched aspect of the higher education (HE) sector in Ireland. The purpose of this paper is to report on the changing demands of academic life in Ireland.

A case study of the School of Business at the largest university in Ireland, University College Dublin, set out to determine the extent to which HE change is impacting on faculty. The research, involving 28 interviews with faculty and manager-academics, covered the five-year period since the appointment of a new President in 2004.

The research provides evidence of an increasing focus on more explicit research output requirements; the growth of routine administration and teaching and learning compliance requirements; and the greater intensification of work and working hours.

While the university was at the forefront in implementing large-scale institutional change in Ireland, further research is needed to explore the issues raised in this paper in the context of other schools and the remaining six Irish universities.

Few empirical research studies have been conducted in Ireland on how institutional change is impacting on the working lives of faculty. This paper serves to shine a light, for the first time, on the perspectives of faculty regarding the changing demands of academic life in Ireland.

The authors, seven women–writers–performers–artists–academics, have been working collectively for a year, storying, de-storying and re-storying the experience of our lives. The authors write to “taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect” (Nin, 1976), to uncover and learn ourselves through writing (Richardson, 1997), to take the “risky” steps of talking to each other about our inner lives (Palmer, 1998). Cognisant of the limitations and masculinities of traditional academic discourses, in form and content, and heavily confined by neoliberal expectations to count and be counted, we write and express the stories of lives the authors did not choose or imagine – lives we are given and live through. Our expression inhabits aesthetic, contemplative and sensory ways of knowing and employs poetry, image, song and story to create a polyvocal account of women’s lives, voices, struggles and learning. The authors share here part of our collective memoir and its development. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper is designed as a collective memoir.

The authors write and express the stories of lives we did not choose or imagine – lives we are given and live through. The expression inhabits aesthetic, contemplative and sensory ways of knowing and employs poetry, image, song and story to create a polyvocal account of women’s lives, voices, struggles and learning. The authors share here part of our collective memoir and its development.

The research focuses on autoethnography and lived experience.

Auto-ethnography/lived experience offers rich insights into the personal and political actions and actors within higher education.