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The work of academics has intensified, but the focus for most remains on teaching, research and contribution to service. Institutional imperatives and positioning within universities impact significantly on how individual academics fashion themselves to fit with expectations and demands. There is, of course, no simple version of scholarly identity and Barnett (2000) called attention to the ‘super complexity’ of academic work some time ago. ‘Scholarly’ has been deliberately used in the title of this chapter, even though ‘academic’ is also used throughout. The purpose here is to draw attention to – and avoid – the binary that Stuart Hall notes: Academic work is inherently conservative in as much as it seeks, first, to fulfill the relatively narrow and policed goals and interests of a given discipline or profession and, second, to fulfill the increasingly corporatized mission of higher education; intellectual work, in contrast is relentlessly critical, self-critical, and potentially revolutionary for it aims to critique, change, and even destroy institutions, disciplines and professions that rationalize exploitation, inequality and injustice. (reported in Olsen & Worsham, 2003, p. 13)

In this article I analyze the official portrait of U.S. President George W. Bush to exemplify my previous theoretical elaboration of an interpretive analytics of the sign based on socio-semiotics and symbolic interactionism. President Bush’s official portrait is analyzed paradigmatically and syntagmatically as a complex multimodal text. I examine this sign diachronically by reflecting on the processes of production, distribution, and especially consumption of the portrait occurring throughout his tenure and within the exo-semiotic context of the American and World society at the turn of the millennium. In particular, I focus on the socio-semiotic process of interpretation by building upon Start Hall’s coding/decoding model. Thus, I offer an overview of how hegemonic, oppositional, and negotiated codes are constituted by and in turn constitute discourses about the objects represented in this picture. In conclusion, I examine how social semiotics can be used to view semiosis as an everyday socio-political performance.

This study examines the scholarly output of accounting researchers in the periods surrounding a change in university affiliation. Our expectation that publishing activity will increase in periods around an institutional change is based on expectancy theories and informed by studies on the contract year performances of professional athletes. Using a sample of 635 accounting professors who switched universities between 2008 and 2014, the authors find evidence that accounting authors who switch universities publish more in the years around a switch compared with other years. Our research contributes to the literature on changes in university affiliation by documenting a contract year phenomenon operating within accounting academia. Practical implications for college administrators are also discussed.

This chapter explores the complexity of issues surrounding Black males and athletics in higher education. Multiple studies over the past decade and a half have depicted an oppositional relationship between athletics and academic achievement. Research suggests that media imagery, stereotyping, and other non-academic influences on African American males who participate in intercollegiate athletics tend to result in an over-identification with professional athletes, sports, and perceptions of great value associated with physical performance activities and a simultaneous under-identification with academic performance, scholarly identity, and student development. These pressures ultimately limit career options outside of athletics. In an effort to combat these issues, Beyond the Game™ (BTG) Program, a program described in this chapter that was developed in Wisconsin’s Equity and Inclusion Laboratory (Wei LAB) and implemented at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, seeks to harness curricular, co-curricular, and on-the-field leadership training to strategically develop and support post-graduation options. This comprehensive, multi-faceted program directly confronts the challenges student-athletes face when they exhaust their eligibility status but have yet to identify viable career alternatives to professional sports. This chapter explores the main tenants of the program, established with a group of Division 1 NCAA-affiliated college athletes as participants.

Moving up the career ladder has its rewards – more money, of course. However, in academia, it could also mean more time and autonomy to pursue your research interests and greater ability to influence the direction of your department and your field. However, getting a promotion takes time and effort, mixed in with a pinch of luck and willingness, while keeping your day job ticking over. Amidst all this, you also need to ensure you are across the process and criteria – slightly different at every university and different yet again in institutions overseas. This chapter will demystify the process by providing you with a useful overview across global contexts, tips, and tested techniques for making yourself promotion ready.

This chapter introduces a metaphor—the house—and applies Habermas’ philosophy to examine the environment where knowledge production takes place. The analysis shows the dominance of “the systemic paradigm,” which is characterized by increased bureaucratization and commercialization. This paradigm has severe consequences for two core features of universities: the open-ended search for deeper understanding and the principle of autonomy. The chapter advances the idea of reclaiming the political dimension of the epistemic endeavor and presents a series of initiatives which help to advance tourism scholarship by non-conforming to the steering conditions of this paradigm and instead reclaiming the personal and subjective; promoting multiple knowledges; and building alternative platforms of knowledge production, cooperation, and dissemination.

Self-regulation does not only play a pivotal role in coping with job demands and major life events, but also shapes personality development in a way that builds protective resilience, integrative abilities in holistic processing of negative and positive experiences, and autonomous functioning. Therefore, in facing setbacks and failures, intrapsychic self-regulatory mechanisms determine recovery and learning processes, in order to stabilize well-being and ensure psychological functioning. In the present chapter, the author will focus on such self-regulatory mechanisms, which influence coping processes after experiences of failure and setbacks at work. In doing so, the author draw from the Personality–System–Interaction Theory, which provides in-depth insights into different motivational and volitional processes of self-regulation. Firstly, the author elaborates on inter-individual differences in self-regulation, which can be conceptually distinguished into action and state orientation. Whereas state orientation impedes effective coping with setbacks and failures, action orientation enables building resilience and goal-focused self-regulation, especially when employees are confronted with setback experiences. Secondly, the present chapter involves findings on recovery processes and mindsets, which are relevant for the theoretical understanding about the impact of setbacks and failures on employees’ psychological functioning. Thirdly, the author discusses affect modulation as a specific form of self-regulation, which allows for reducing negative affects and increasing positive affects, in order to facilitate holistic and integrative processing of setback experiences. Finally, proceeding from insights into how employees can overcome setback experiences and learn from failure, The author will provide practical implications for human resource management, training, and leadership.

Much has been analyzed regarding the origins and the impact of rankings and metrics on policies, behaviors, and missions of universities. Surprisingly, little attention has been allocated to describing and analyzing the emergence of metrics as a new action field. This industry, fueled by the “new public management” policy perspectives that operate at the backstage of the contemporary pervasive “regime of excellence,” still remains a black box worth exploring in depth. This paper intends to fill this loophole. It first sets the stage for this new action field by stressing the differences between the policy fields of higher education in the United States and Europe, as a way to understand the specificities of the use of metrics and rankings on both continents. The second part describes the actors of the field, which productive organizations they build, what skills they combine, which products they put on the market, and their shared norms and audiences.