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This chapter looks at the discursive dimension of the working environment in research and higher education organizations; more specifically at neoliberal managerial discourse and at how it participates in shaping the way researchers, teachers and support staff perceive themselves and their experiences. It is based on a multiple case study and combines an intersectional and a socio-clinical approach. The empirical data is constituted by in-depth interviews with women conducted in Ireland and Chile, and includes some observations made in France. A thematic analysis of individual narratives of self-ascribed experiences of being bullied enables to look behind the veil drawn by managerial discourse, thus providing insights into power vectors and power domains contributing to workplace violence. It also shows that workplace bullying may reinforce identification to undervalued social categories. This contribution argues that neoliberal managerial discourse, by encouraging social representations of “neutral” individuals at work, or else celebrating their “diversity,” conceals power relations rooting on different social categories. This process influences one’s perception of one’s experience and its verbalization. At the same time, feeling assigned to one or more of undervalued social category can raise the perception of being bullied or discriminated against. While research has shown that only a minority of incidents of bullying and discrimination are reported within organizations, this contribution suggests that acknowledging the multiplicity and superposition of categories and their influence in shaping power relations could help secure a more collective and caring approach, and thus foster a safer work culture and atmosphere in research organizations.

This chapter examines various definitions and perceptions of Research Management and Administration (RMA) from individuals both from within and outside the profession to gain a wider understanding of this field. These definitions and perceptions are expected to trigger reflections on where the boundaries of the profession are more likely to be.

To do so, the authors utilise a mixed method that begins with a discussion of different definitions of RMA. Next, we move from conceptualisation to action and engage the reader by presenting empirical insights from an analysis of specific training programmes within RMA, shedding light on the profession’s distinctive features from an insider’s perspective. Lastly, we delve into the case study of the project foRMAtion, a training program that introduces RMAs as the ‘Professionals at the Interface of Science.’ This case study allows us to explore how individuals outside the RMA profession, such as teachers and students participating in its training courses, perceive and understand RMA.

The chapter concludes the section on cross-innovation and convergence processes between audiovisual media industries and the education sector. It addresses, first, that these processes are not driven by any specific technology, but by two broad and interdependent processes – individualisation that makes people in insecure careers search for personalised learning opportunities and the experience economy that produces expectations for learning experiences to be pleasurable and fun, that is, gamified. The chapter demonstrates the emergence of EdTech as a new dialogic subsector operating between the publicly operating education sector and the private media and information and communication technology industries. It demonstrates the inherent institutional diversity in and around this subsector and discusses the nature of the dialogues constituting it. It, lastly, addresses the risks deriving from global platformisation to the education sector and demonstrates how Estonia’s government-run platforms, effectively cross-innovation systems linking teachers, learners and content providers in dynamic ways, could present feasible alternatives to the global platforms.

Work-life flexibility policies (e.g., flextime, telework, part-time, right-to-disconnect, and leaves) are increasingly important to employers as productivity and well-being strategies. However, policies have not lived up to their potential. In this chapter, the authors argue for increased research attention to implementation and work-life intersectionality considerations influencing effectiveness. Drawing on a typology that conceptualizes flexibility policies as offering employees control across five dimensions of the work role boundary (temporal, spatial, size, permeability, and continuity), the authors develop a model identifying the multilevel moderators and mechanisms of boundary control shaping relationships between using flexibility and work and home performance. Next, the authors review this model with an intersectional lens. The authors direct scholars’ attention to growing workforce diversity and increased variation in flexibility policy experiences, particularly for individuals with higher work-life intersectionality, which is defined as having multiple intersecting identities (e.g., gender, caregiving, and race), that are stigmatized, and link to having less access to and/or benefits from societal resources to support managing the work-life interface in a social context. Such an intersectional focus would address the important need to shift work-life and flexibility research from variable to person-centered approaches. The authors identify six research considerations on work-life intersectionality in order to illuminate how traditionally assumed work-life relationships need to be revisited to address growing variation in: access, needs, and preferences for work-life flexibility; work and nonwork experiences; and benefits from using flexibility policies. The authors hope that this chapter will spur a conversation on how the work-life interface and flexibility policy processes and outcomes may increasingly differ for individuals with higher work-life intersectionality compared to those with lower work-life intersectionality in the context of organizational and social systems that may perpetuate growing work-life and job inequality.

This paper focuses on governance in higher education in China. It sees that governance as distinctive on the world scale and the potential source of distinctiveness in other domains of higher education. By taking an historical approach, reviewing relevant literature and drawing on empirical research on governance at one leading research university, the paper discusses system organisation, government–university relations and the role of the Communist Party (CCP), centralisation and devolution, institutional leadership, interior governance, academic freedom and responsibility, and the relevance of collegial norms. It concludes that the party-state and Chinese higher education will need to find a Way in governance that leads into a fuller space for plural knowledges, ideas and approaches. This would advance both indigenous and global knowledge, so helping global society to also find its Way.

This chapter is focussed on the macro context of higher education and describes the historical developments in higher education and how these developments affect academic jobs and academic work. When we sketch the development of higher education with a few broad strokes of the pen, we see (1) a development from a small-scale elite institution to broad training (and research) institutes; (2) a struggle over control of higher education; and (3) a movement in which higher education is professionalized and increasingly assigned a societal task, with a series of consequences for education, research and impact. These developments contribute to a field of tension in which old traditions of academic behaviour must be reconciled with demands that are placed on higher education by society. This makes talent management, both on an individual and collective level, no easy task.

This chapter is based on the findings of the empirical material gathered in Finland and Sweden through interviews with education and audiovisual (AV) media actors and policymakers in 2017–2018. The aim of the chapter is to discuss the innovation systems of the education sector and Finland and Sweden in general, compare the sectoral innovation models of the two sectors, and conclude with discussing the resulting challenges for policymakers. Our results show that a new EdTech sector employing the competences of the education, information and communication technology, and AV media sectors has begun to emerge and actors in the both countries have eagerly taken actions to boost its development as a business and export field. We discuss the reasons and consequences of this development.

In this chapter, we discuss talent development in the context of higher education. After discussing the advantages and disadvantages of inclusive and exclusive approaches to talent development, we present empirical data that detail how the participants of a focus group study perceive talent development in higher education. Our data show the importance of a contextualized reading of talent development as the competitive context in academia hinders an inclusive focus on talent development. This context results in a performance-centred, instead of a development-centred approach to talent management, where outperforming others in narrowly defined areas (e.g. publication record) is the main goal. We show that in such a context the development of competitive talent is rewarded, and the development of communal talent is not. The focus on performance instead of (inclusive) development becomes more pronounced when employees move through their career and is believed to have several negative consequences. Mostly women perceived that such a non-inclusive approach to talent development hinders the development and deployment of their talents and obstructs their career progression.

Discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in South Africa has shifted from overt hate crimes to covert microaggressions. Microaggression is a term used in psychology to describe casual discrimination against socially marginalised groups, and they occur in three forms: microassaults, microinsults and microinvalidations. Microassaults include verbal and non-verbal discriminatory behaviours. Microinsults include actions or statements which demean a person's identity, and microinvalidations negate the thoughts, feelings or lived experiences of a certain people. Microaggressions have detrimental impacts on lives of people experiencing them and on their interpersonal relationships. The chapter presents a focus on microaggression theory together with microaggression experiences of South African Indian LGBTQ+ people, who have been under-researched. Reference is made to interview extracts from research studies focusing on South African Indian LGBTQ+ people and from e-zine articles focusing on the experiences of South African Indian LGBTQ+ people.