Search results

The subject of this paper is the phenomenon of social media aesthetics, which can be perceived as a tool for promoting and building the image of libraries, especially in terms of merchandising. The aim of this paper is to analyse the potential of the dark academia social media trend in the promotion of academic libraries.

The article is based on a review of the social networking sites YouTube and Instagram and an analysis of network resources using the Brand24 tool.

Resources that are described by Internet users as “dark academia” are popular in social media. Dark academia as an aesthetic concept creates potential for the promotion of academic libraries, especially those that are more traditional in terms of their architecture, décor or how they offer their services.

The paper concerns a phenomenon which, although popular socially, has not yet been scientifically analysed in the literature on the subject. Since the topic is new and there is no scientific literature on it, the author had to base the paper on less standard sources of information (e.g. analysis of the content of social media). The article is a review, an introduction, as well as an invitation to further discussion. The author's aim is not to comprehensively cover this topic but only to draw attention to an interesting and rarely discussed issue that has great potential for practical activities.

The topic has great potential for the practical improvement of the promotional activities of libraries, especially older, more traditional libraries, to create a strong and positive image on the basis of characteristics often perceived as weaknesses.

Social media services are powerful social impact tools. Showing the potential role of social media aesthetics for cultural institutions could serve to make the public more aware of the role of the proper use of social media for promotion and image building.

The use of social media aesthetics is very rarely discussed in the subject literature.

The purpose of this study comprises the following three: (1) to ascertain the purpose of university module evaluation questionnaires (MEQs) and its reliability; (2) to evaluate University X's MEQ; and (3) to offer how Universities may be able to support their teaching staff with scholarship activities using the MEQ project.

University MEQ purposes and its reliability were investigated using literature reviews. The University X's MEQ seven statements were evaluated by three university academic staff. The study was conducted at a British university in South East of England. The duration of this interdisciplinary project was for two months which was a university interdisciplinary project between 14/07/20 and 13/10/20.

The purpose for MEQs includes (1) students’ satisfaction; (2) accountability for university authority and (3) teaching feedback and academic promotions for teaching staff. The evaluation of University X's MEQ indicated that MEQ questions were unclear which do not serve reliable student evaluation results. This topic may be of interest to University MEQ designers, lecturers, University Student Experience team, University Executive Board, University administrators and University HR senior management teams.

The following three points are considered original to this study: (1) MEQ purposes are summarised by students, university authority and teaching staff; (2) the evaluation of a British University MEQ; (3) provides suggestions on how lecturers' scholarship activities can be supported by the university-wide initiative and umbrella network. These are practical knowledge for the faculty and administrators of higher education institutions which may be of use.

The major purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of openness to change on research publication in higher education institutions (HEI) in Tanzania.

With a sample of 247 academics, a cross-sectional survey design was used and questionnaires were the primary data collection tool. The collected data were tested using mean and standard deviations, and the causal–effect relationship between the independent and dependent variables was tested using simple linear regression.

The findings of this study revealed that openness to change positively and significantly influence research publication in higher education (β = 0.598 and p < 0.001).

The study recommends that HEI should consider openness to change value as one among criteria for hiring academics as well as developing good programs that will help academics develop the academics' self-awareness with regard to what takes for one to be a productive researcher.

This is the first study to examine the influence of openness to change as a personal value on academics’ research publication in Tanzanian HEI. In this instance, the study contributes to the existing literature on the influence of academics' personal values in terms of openness to change on research publication.

Gender competence as part of engineering education can better prepare men and women to work on sustainable solutions that benefit entire societies. This chapter describes the framework and lessons learned of a community of practice (CoP) for gender equality facilitated by the Mediterranean Engineering Schools Network. Faculty and students from Mediterranean European, North African and Middle Eastern countries came together in this CoP, which was supported by the TARGET project, to develop a practical plan using a reflexive approach. The transfer of knowledge between generations is achieved by using participatory learning processes, facilitating mindful awareness, widening experiences, deepening understandings and building a gender-sensitive mindset. Students embarked on the journey to become change agents. The process led to the consolidation of gender equality knowledge, competence building and the development of change agents for gender equality. This CoP can inspire other institutions to undertake a participatory path towards gender equality – at local, regional, or global level.

This paper presents a co-authorship study of authors who published in Digital Humanities journals and examines the apparent influence of gender, or more specifically, the quantitatively detectable influence of gender in the networks they form.

This study applied co-authorship network analysis. Data has been collected from three canonical Digital Humanities journals over 52 years (1966–2017) and analysed.

The results are presented as visualised networks and suggest that female scholars in Digital Humanities play more central roles and act as the main bridges of collaborative networks even though overall female authors are fewer in number than male authors in the network.

This is the first co-authorship network study in Digital Humanities to examine the role that gender appears to play in these co-authorship networks using statistical analysis and visualisation.

Little research is devoted to how salary allocation processes interfere with gender inequality in talent development in universities. Administrative data from a university indicated a substantial salary gap between men and women academics, which partially could be explained by the unequal distribution of men and women in the academic job levels after acquiring a PhD, from lecturer to full professor, with men being overrepresented in the higher job levels, as well as in the more senior positions within each job level. We demonstrated how a lack of transparency, consistency and accountability can disqualify apparent fair, merit-based salary decisions and result in biased gender differences in job and salary levels. This chapter reflects on how salary decisions matter for the recognition of talent and should be an integral part of talent management.

Despite the general recommendation of using a combination of multiple criteria for research assessment and faculty promotion decisions, the raise of quantitative indicators is generating an emerging trend in Business Schools to use single journal impact factors (IFs) as key (unique) drivers for those relevant school decisions. This paper aims to investigate the effects of using single Web of Science (WoS)-based journal impact metrics when assessing research from two related disciplines: Business and Economics, and its potential impact for the strategic sustainability of a Business School.

This study collected impact indicators data for Business and Economics journals from the Clarivate Web of Science database. We concentrated on the IF indicators, the Eigenfactor and the article influence score (AIS). This study examined the correlations between these indicators and then ranked disciplines and journals using these different impact metrics.

Consistent with previous findings, this study finds positive correlations among these metrics. Then this study ranks the disciplines and journals using each impact metric, finding relevant and substantial differences, depending on the metric used. It is found that using AIS instead of the IF raises the relative ranking of Economics, while Business remains basically with the same rank.

This study contributes to the research assessment literature by adding substantial evidence that given the sensitivity of journal rankings to particular indicators, the selection of a single impact metric for assessing research and hiring/promotion and tenure decisions is risky and too simplistic. This research shows that biases may be larger when assessment involves researchers from related disciplines – like Business and Economics – but with different research foundations and traditions.

Consistent with the literature, given the sensibility of journal rankings to particular indicators, the selection of a single impact metric for assessing research, assigning research funds and hiring/promotion and tenure decisions is risky and simplistic. However, this research shows that risks and biases may be larger when assessment involves researchers from related disciplines – like Business and Economics – but with different research foundations and trajectories. The use of multiple criteria is advised for such purposes.

This is an applied work using real data from WoS that addresses a practical case of comparing the use of different journal IFs to rank-related disciplines like Business and Economics, with important implications for faculty tenure and promotion committees and for research funds granting institutions and decision-makers.

In academia, assessment is often narrow in its focus on research productivity, its application of a limited number of standardised metrics and its summative approach aimed at selection. This approach, corresponding to an exclusive, subject-oriented concept of talent management, can be thought of as at odds with a broader view of the role of academic institutions as accelerating and improving science and scholarship and its societal impact. In recent years, open science practices as well as research integrity issues have increased awareness of the need for a more inclusive approach to assessment and talent management in academia, broadening assessment to reward the full spectrum of academic activities and, within that spectrum, deepening assessment by critically reflecting on the processes and indicators involved (both qualitative and quantitative). In terms of talent management, this would mean a move from research-focused assessment to assessment including all academic activities (including education, professional performance and leadership), a shift from focus on the individual to a focus on collaboration in teams (recognising contributions of both academic and support staff), increased attention for formative assessment and greater agency for those being evaluated, as well as around the data, tools and platforms used in assessment. Together, this represents a more inclusive, subject-oriented approach to talent management. Implementation of such changes requires involvement from university management, human resource management and academic and support staff at all career levels, and universities would benefit from participation in mutual learning initiatives currently taking shape in various regions of the world.

In the present discourse of university politics, collegiality has come to be viewed as a slow force – seemingly inefficient and conservative compared to popular management models. Concerns have thus been raised regarding the future prospects of such a form of governance in a society marked by haste and acceleration. One way to bring perspectives on this contentious issue is to perceive it in the light of the long history of the university. In this article, I derive insights about the shifting state of collegial governance through a survey of an intense period of reforms in Sweden c. 1850–1920 when higher education was allegedly engaged in a process of modernization and professionalization. Drawing on recent work in historical theory and science and technology studies (STS), I revisit contests and debates on collegiality in connection to a number of governmental commissions. Focusing on the co-existence – and collisions – of multiple temporalities reveals that overcoming potential problems associated with heterogeneous rhythms required an active work of synchronization by universities in order to make them appear timely, as higher education expanded along with the mounting ambitions of national politics, focused on centralization, efficiency, and rationalization. The analysis is structured around three focal issues for which collegial ideals and practices, including their temporal characteristics, were particularly questioned: (a) the composition of the university board, (b) the employment status of professors, and (c) hiring or promotion practices. Pointing at more structural challenges, this study highlights how collegiality requires a constant maintenance paired with an awareness of its longer and complex history.

The authors examine how performance measurement systems (PMSs) and academic agency influence the meaning of research quality in practice. The worries are that the notion of research quality is becoming too simplistically and narrowly determined by research quality's measurable proxies and that academics, especially manager-academics, do not sufficiently realise this risk. Whilst prior literature has covered the effects of performance measurement in the university sector broadly and how PMSs are mobilised locally, there is only little understanding of whether and how PMSs affect the meaning of research quality in practice.

The study is designed as a comparative case study of two university faculties in Finland. The role of conceptual analysis plays a notable role in the study, too.

The authors find that manager-academics of the two examined faculties have rather similar conceptual understandings of research quality. However, there were differences in the degree of slippage between the “espoused-meaning” of research quality and “meaning-in-practice” of research quality. The authors traced these differences to how the local PMS and manager-academics’ agency relate to one another within the context of increasing global and national performance pressures. The authors developed a tentative framework for the various “styles of agency”. This suggests how the relationship between the local PMS and manager-academics’ exerted agency shapes the “degrees of freedom” of the meaning of research quality in practice.

Given that research quality lies at the heart of academic work, the authors' paper indicates that exploring the three matters – performance measurement, the agency of manager-academics and the meaning of research quality in practice – in combination is crucial for the sustainability of the academe. The authors contribute to the literature by detailing the way in which local PMS and manager-academics' agency have material impacts on what research quality means in practice. The authors conclude by highlighting the pressing need for manager-academics to exercise the agency in efforts to safeguard a broad and pluralistic understanding of research quality in practice.