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This study was conducted to fill gaps in the literature based on institution type, career level, and gender identity.

Faculty often struggle with achieving work-life balance. This struggle is exacerbated for faculty parents. Most academic parent research has been conducted on early-career women and at research-intensive universities. Although these groups are important, it is also important to understand experiences of academic parents at different career levels and types of institutions. The authors conducted a qualitative thematic analysis from focus groups with faculty from a mid-sized master's level university about work-life balance expectations and experiences in their roles as academics and parents. These four groups included early-career mothers (n = 5), early-career fathers (n = 4), mid-career mothers (n = 4), and mid-career fathers (n = 7).

Faculty expressed having a high workload based on an intersection of high work expectations, unclear work expectations, and lack of equity. Consequences of the high workload included lower work-life balance, dissatisfaction at not doing more, the loss of flexibility as an advantage, and lower organizational commitment.

Although results are limited in generalizability, it is useful to examine one institution, with all participants sharing the same culture and policies, in-depth. The authors discuss recommendations for educational administrators for assisting academic parents and suggest institutions work to examine informal expectations and formal policies at their institutions. Working together, faculty and staff can help enhance alignment of expectations and perceptions of work-life balance, hopefully leading to happier, more satisfied employees.

Scholarly studies on mentoring have mostly focused on traditional mentor–mentee relationships, with little or no emphasis on how institutionalized mentoring activities that include different pedagogical approaches could be used to enhance the professional development of academics. To address this knowledge gap, this article examines how an institutionalized multilevel mentoring program could be used to enhance the professional development of early-career academics and academics in designated groups in a South African university.

The data for the study were gathered from 18 mentees and 2 program administrators using semi-structured interviews. The data gathered were assessed by way of thematic analysis that involved a detailed process of identifying, analyzing, organizing, describing and reporting the themes that were developed from the data set.

The findings revealed that when mentees participate in different mentoring and professional development activities that are structured based on different pedagogies, they can engage in higher-order thinking processes and develop multidisciplinary experiences within an expanded professional learning community. Enabled by the situated learning setting, mentees can negotiate the meaning of their professional practice within a professional community and comprehend the nuanced pedagogical approaches including scaffolding learning used by mentors to shape their career trajectory and guide them to secure promotions.

The current study contributes to the scholarly discourse on situated learning by showing that mentoring could be planned and implemented as a pedagogical endeavor with diverse learning activities and structured as a form of professional development program within a professional community.

The increasing push towards centralisation and bureaucratisation in higher education, further exacerbated by the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, calls for a better understanding of the nature of collegiality in contemporary universities. We address this issue by looking into the necessary conditions and barriers to sustaining a collegiate environment. The empirical focus is on academics, academic leaders and professional support staff at Anonymous Business School (ABS), a department in a large civic UK university. We interviewed 32 participants across the school, ranging from early-career academics to experienced professors and members of department leadership teams. The findings suggest multiple emerging perspectives on collegiality, with features of horizontal collegiality perceived as key to successful academic responses to the crisis. The findings also indicate how sustaining a collegiate environment within the department requires both choice and effort from leadership and from staff, particularly when decision-making is primarily located at the centre of the university. The choice and effort made across different collegiate pockets contribute to the department becoming an ‘island of collegiality’ within the increasingly centralised and bureaucratised university hierarchy. In this sense, the actions of the department leadership to establish supporting mechanisms, and the actions of the staff to, in turn, embrace and build interpersonal relationships and professional identities, are key to sustaining a collegiate environment.

Although an increasing number of PhD holders will continue their careers outside academia, we know little about their further career prospects. To develop a better understanding of how this group constructs and justifies a successful career outside academia, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 47 PhD graduates from different disciplines (humanities, social and beta sciences) who have obtained elaborate experience working outside academia.

Drawing on a multi-career perspective, we explored the motivations of the PhD holders when making such career transitions. The findings from the interviews demonstrated how PhD holders’ main motivations were associated with their perceived organizational, community and cognitive careers. Our data analysis revealed that these motivations related to PhD holders and can be grouped along four key tensions:

• distanced from real life (academia) versus appreciating the practical impact of their research (currently);

• competition and performance orientation (academia) versus enjoying their current multidisciplinary collaboration towards a common goal (current);

• Individualism and loneliness were typically experienced in academia versus autonomy and intellectual stimulation in their current work; and

• lack of stable career perspectives in academia versus current options for competence-based development and personal growth.

distanced from real life (academia) versus appreciating the practical impact of their research (currently);

competition and performance orientation (academia) versus enjoying their current multidisciplinary collaboration towards a common goal (current);

Individualism and loneliness were typically experienced in academia versus autonomy and intellectual stimulation in their current work; and

lack of stable career perspectives in academia versus current options for competence-based development and personal growth.

Thus, while discontinuation of an academic career may easily hold a pejorative connotation, the analysis of the PhD holders’ motivations revealed important and rewarding opportunities in pursuing a career in other sectors. Overall, from our study, we can conclude that while a major gap may exist between careers in academia and ‘the corporate world’, shifting careers between these worlds is not as ‘unthinkable’ as commonly believed.

The authors passively apply a researcher profile pitch (RPP) template tool in accounting and across a range of Business School disciplines.

The authors document a diversity of worked examples of the RPP. Using an auto-ethnographic research design, each showcased researcher reflects on the exercise, highlighting nuanced perspectives drawn from their experience. Collectively, these examples and associated independent narratives allow the authors to identify common themes that provide informative insights to potential users.

First, the RPP tool is helpful for accounting scholars to portray their essential research stream. Moreover, the tool proved universally meaningful and applicable irrespective of research discipline or research experience. Second, it offers a distinct advantage over existing popular research profile platforms, because it demands a focused “less”, that delivers a meaningful “more”. Further, the conciseness of the RPP design makes it readily amenable to iteration and dynamism. Third, the authors have identified specific situations of added value, e.g. initiating research collaborations and academic job market preparation.

The RPP tool can provide the basis for developing a scalable interactive researcher exchange platform.

The authors argue that the RPP tool potentially adds meaningful incremental value relative to existing popular platforms for gaining researcher visibility. This additional value derives from the systematic RPP format, combined with the benefit of easy familiarity and strong emphasis on succinctness. Additionally, the authors argue that the RPP adds a depth of nuanced novel information often not contained in other platforms, e.g. around the dimensions of “data” and “tools”. Further, the RPP gives the researcher a “personality”, most notably through the dimensions of “contribution” and “other considerations”.

Why and when people working in organisations hide their knowledge has received considerable academic attention. However, little attention has been paid to knowledge hiding in academia itself, even though universities are known as places where knowledge is shared. This study aims to consider the dilemma faced by academics when undertaking research work: should they share or hide what they are doing?

Using empirical evidence drawn from 20 academics in a number of UK Business Schools, the authors carried out in-depth interviews to investigate the effects of strategic knowledge hiding (SKH) on research knowledge work. The authors argue that SKH can drive competitive individuals to establish research superiority.

The findings revealed that most respondents have, for strategic reasons, hidden their tacit and/or explicit knowledge from others during ongoing research processes, but have, at the same time, purposefully sought for knowledge from targeted colleagues.

The findings extend the previous literature by revealing not only the distinctive individual antecedents of SKH but also its positive outcomes. The findings illustrate a pioneering contribution of a systematic model of SKH among university business school academics.

The purpose of this essay is to explore the opportunities and challenges that early-career researchers (ECRs) face when they seek to contribute to academic knowledge production through research activities “other than” those directly focused on making progress with their own, to-be-published, research papers in a context associated with the “publish or perish” (PoP) mentality.

Drawing broadly on the notion of technologies of humility (Jasanoff, 2003), this reflective essay develops upon the experiences of the authors in organizing and participating in a series of nine workshops undertaken between June 2013 and April 2021, as well as the arduous process of writing this paper itself. Retrospective accounts, workshop materials, email exchanges and surveys of workshop participants provide the key data sources for the analysis presented in the paper.

The paper shows how the organization of the workshops is intertwined with the building of a small community of ECRs and exploration of how to address the perceived limitations of a “gap-spotting” approach to developing research ideas and questions. The analysis foregrounds how the workshops provide a seemingly valuable research experience that is not without contradictions. Workshop participation reveals tensions between engagement in activities “other than” working on papers for publication and institutionalized pressures to produce publication outputs, between the (weak) perceived status of ECRs in the field and the aspiration to make a scholarly contribution, and between the desire to develop a personally satisfying intellectual journey and the pressure to respond to requirements that allow access to a wider community of scholars.

Our analysis contributes to debates about the ways in which seemingly valuable outputs are produced in academia despite a pervasive “publish or perish” mentality. The analysis also shows how reflexive writing can help to better understand the opportunities and challenges of pursuing activities that might be considered “unproductive” because they are not directly related to to-be-published papers.

Talent management in higher education institutes is an underexplored topic. Only a small portion of talent management publications is focussed on describing talent management in higher education institutes. In this chapter, we give an overview of the most important topics in the talent management literature in general and link it to what is known about these issues in higher education. It discusses the definition of talent and talent management, the talent management process and the multilevel outcomes of talent management, the fairness and justice issues related to talent management and the importance of embedding the analysis of talent management in its broader organizational and institutional context. In the final part of this introduction chapter, we will explain how the talent management topics are discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book.

This final chapter of this book highlights and critically discusses some specific issues concerning talent management in the context of higher education raised in the chapters of this book. It recapitulates the transition higher education is going through. This transition started decades ago but was boosted by the movements of Open Science and Recognition and Rewards. It leads to a reorientation on the conceptualization of academic performance and subsequently also on the meaning of talent and talent management in academia. It points to a shift from an exclusive and performance orientation on talent, to an inclusive, developmental approach to talent management or a hybrid form. Yet, Thunnissen and Boselie state that there is a talent crisis in academia, and this crisis urges the need for more innovative ways of developing and implementing talent management practices. This chapter ends with some recommendations for further talent management research and practice.

This chapter analyses the other aspect of an oppressor/oppressed relationship by looking at what happens to the oppressed, in this case, the academics and staff not in leadership roles. This chapter looks at why the tactics leaders employ work, and why people do not retaliate, and what systems have been put in place to prevent the people from having any consequential power. This chapter thus looks at how the power of the majority in the academy has been slowly eroded by managerial promises of empowerment, self-governance or having an opinion on the institution's direction when in reality, they have no opinion, and the only decisions they can make are inconsequential. This is why time and time again, we see universities restructure, remove non-profitable courses and increase targets to unrealistic levels to maintain power over the majority.