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Existing research on how professionals manage after-hours connectivity to work has been dominated by studies on the strategies/practices individuals develop. In these studies, mobile technology is perceived as a tool or an enabler that supports otherwise human-centric connectivity decisions. This view sees technology as separate or external to the organisation, missing out on its nuanced role in shaping connectivity decisions. Our study aims to bring technology back into the sociomaterially imbricated context of connectivity and to unpack its parameters.

Drawing on data collected from documents and semi-structured interviews, we adopt the framework of “sociomaterial imbrications” (Leonardi, 2011) to understand the social and material parameters that influence connectivity management practices at two different academic institutions in Saudi Arabia.

The study identifies a set of social and material parameters (organisational, individual, technological and situational) that imbricate to shape, collectively and not individually, professionals’ connectivity management practices. Connectivity decisions to change practice (such as decisions of where, when or why to connect) or technology (how to connect) are not as distinct as they appear but originate from, and are founded on, imbricated sociomaterial parameters. Our study further suggests that connectivity decisions are shaped by individuals’ perceptions of sociomaterial imbrications, but decisions are not solely idiosyncratic. The context within which connectivity decisions are taken influences the type of decisions made.

Connectivity management emerged from sociomaterial imbrications within a context constitutive of four interacting parameters: organisational, technological, situational and individual. Decisions around the “how” and the “what” of connectivity – i.e. the practice of connectivity and its underpinning technology – originate from how people perceive sociomaterial imbrications as enabling or constraining within a context. Individual perceptions account for changes in practice and in technology, but the context they find themselves in is also important. For instance, we show that professionals may perceive a certain technology as affording, but eventually they may use another technology for communications due to social norms.

Recent research has captured the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in widening gender inequalities, by highlighting that academic women have been disproportionately affected. During the COVID-19 pandemic, women assumed most of the care labour at home, whilst working at normal patterns, leaving them unable to perform as normal. This is very concerning because of the short and long-term detrimental consequences this will have on women’s well-being and their academic careers. This article aims to stimulate a change in the current understandings of academic work by pointing towards alternative – and more inclusive – ways of working in academia.

The two authors engage with autoethnography and draw on their own personal experience of becoming breastfeeding academic mothers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

To understand the positioning of contemporary academic mothers, this study draws on insights from both cultural studies and organisation studies on the emergence of discursive formations about gender, that is “postfeminist sensibility”. Guided by autoethnographic accounts of academic motherhood, this study reveals that today academia creates an individualised, neutral (disembodied), output-focused and control-oriented understanding of academic work.

This paper adds to the conversation of academic motherhood and the impact of the pandemic on working mothers. The study theoretically contributes with the lens of “motherhood” in grasping what academic work can become. It shows the power of motherhood in opening up an alternative way of conceptualising academic work, centred on embodied care and appreciative of the non-linearity and messiness of life.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the information behaviour of early career academics (ECAs) within humanities and social sciences (HSS) disciplines who are starting their first continuing academic position. The proposed grounded theory of Systemic Managerial Constraints (SMC) is introduced as a way to understand the influence of neoliberal universities on the information behaviour of ECAs.

This qualitative research used constructivist grounded theory methodology. Participants were 20 Australian and Canadian ECAs from HSS. Their information practices and information behaviour were examined for a period of five to seven months using two interviews and multiple “check-ins”. Data were analysed through two rounds of coding, where codes were iteratively compared and contrasted.

SMC emerged from the analysis and is proposed as a grounded theory to help better understand the context of higher education and its influence on ECAs’ information behaviour. SMC presents university managerialism, resulting from neoliberalism, as pervasive and constraining both the work ECAs do and how they perform that work. SMC helps to explain ECAs’ uncertainty and precarity in higher education and changing information needs as a result of altered work role, which, in turn, leads ECAs to seek and share information with their colleagues and use information to wield their personal agency to respond to SMC.

The findings from this paper provide a lens through which to view universities as information environments and the influence these environments can have on ECAs’ information practices and information behaviour.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how women academics from the Arab Middle East enact their careers with reference to double-bounded contexts: academia as an institution encoding organizational career scripts and gender as another institution encoding specific gender roles. It is hoped that this cross-cultural perspective would broaden the understanding of careers beyond the economically advanced industrialized countries and better inform the current debate on the boundaryless career model.

The study is qualitative and exploratory in nature. It draws on one-to-one interviews with 23 female academics in early, mid and late careers, working in research universities in the Arab Middle East region.

The choice of academia as a profession is mainly driven by the subjective perception of an academic career as a calling, the lack of attractiveness of other career options in the region, and the appeal of the flexibility of academic work. Furthermore, the findings highlight both organizational (lack of mentoring and university support) and cultural factors (Islam, patriarchy, and family centrality) that shape/bind women's careers choices and patterns allowing thus for a better understanding of local constraints to the boundaryless career view in the Arab Middle East context.

The paper contributes to the boundaryless career theory development by addressing one of its major shortcomings, namely the lack of attention to context. It provides fresh insights from the Arab Middle East to the ongoing debate whether careers are boundaryless and subject to individual agency or whether careers are shaped by wider institutional factors and support existing calls in the literature to conceptualize careers at the intersection of several influencing factors.

The literature on business expatriates has been increasing rapidly, but research on expatriate academics has remained scant, despite the apparent increasing globalisation of the academic world. Therefore, more research is needed on the latter group of expatriates. This paper aims to fill some of the gaps.

A questionnaire was directed electronically towards expatriate academics occupying regular positions in science faculty departments in universities in northern Europe.

Results showed that job clarity was the dominating job factor with strong relationships with all of the five investigated work outcome variables, work adjustment, work performance, work effectiveness, job satisfaction, and time to proficiency. Job conflict and job freedom had an association with some of the work outcome variables but not with all of them. Neither workload nor job novelty had a relationship with any of the work outcome variables of the expatriate academics.

The paper shows that the findings are only partly consistent with previous research results concerning business expatriates, suggesting that the work situation for expatriate academics could have both similarities and discrepancies as compared to that of business expatriates.

This paper aims to examine the everyday practices of academic work in social science to understand better academics’ learning. It also asks how academic work is enacted in relation to the discipline, department and university, taking temporality as its starting point.

The study sought to trace academic activities in practice. Within three universities, 14 academics were work-shadowed; social, material, technological, pedagogic and symbolic actors were observed and where possible connections and interactions were traced (including beyond the institution). This paper reports on a subset of the study: the academic practices of four early-career academics in one discipline are analysed.

Email emerges as a core academic practice and an important pedagogic actor for early career academics in relation to the department and university. Much academic work is “work about the work”, both in and outside official work time. Other pedagogic actors include conferences, networks and external Web identities. Disciplinary work happens outside official work time for the most part and requires time to be available. Disciplinary learning is therefore only afforded to some, resulting in structural disadvantage.

By tracing non-human and human actors, it has emerged that the department and university, rather than the discipline, are most important in composing everyday work practices. A sociomaterial approach enables researchers to better understand the “black box” of everyday academic practice. Such an approach holds the promise of better support for academics in negotiating the demands of discipline, department and university without overwork and systemic exploitation.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the impact of the marketisation of the English HE sector on academic staff and the nature of their professional work is felt to the same degree in different English universities. The study was conducted between November 2015 and April 2017.

Using the interpretivist paradigm, a qualitative, inductive approach is adopted. In total, 12 semi-structured interviews of 60-90 min each were conducted with academics of six English university types (ancient, old and new civics, plate-glass, technological and post-1992). Participants who were identified by non-probability sampling included professors, principal, senior and lecturers and associate lecturers.

Six key themes emerged regarding the impact on academic staff and their work: efficiency and quantity over effectiveness; autocratic, managerialist ideology over academic democracy and debate; instrumentalism over intellectualism; de-professionalisation and fragmentation of the academy; increased incidence of performativity, bullying and workplace aggression; and work intensification. The ancient university is least impacted by marketisation in terms of academic staff and the nature of their work. Next are the old and new civic universities, followed by technological, plate-glass universities. The most impact is felt by academics (and the nature of their work) in the post-1992 universities.

There is a relatively small number of interviews in this study; therefore, it is difficult to categorically correlate an academic biography with their opinion in the context of their university type. More male than female participants were interviewed. International staff were not interviewed, and this could bring a varying perspective to the narrative found in this study. A mixed approach in further research would aid this objective. Some of the questioning in the pilot study was not as focused as any further primary research would have to be.

A further area of study, which could have practical implications, add originality and value would be to investigate how good practice in “employee engagement” in the university context might pave the way forward. This has the potential to benefit academic staff directly and the institution, a win–win solution for all stakeholders.

This study aims to answer the following question: Why might home-based work duties be perceived by female academics as extreme?

We employed a qualitative research method through semi-structured interviews with 33 female academics from three public universities selected from amongst 26 public institutions of higher education in Egypt. Thematic analysis was subsequently used to determine the main ideas in the transcripts.

We find that the sudden implementation of home-based work makes the academic duties of female academics extreme. Moreover, the following four factors help explain the extremity/intensity of the home-based work of female academics: mental and physical fatigue resulting from WFH, the inability to adequately meet family commitments when working from home (WFH), poor resources for home-based work and reduced ability to focus on the obstacles facing them in their academic career.

This paper contributes by filling a gap in human resources management and higher education in which empirical studies on female academics WFH and extreme academic duties have been limited so far.

This chapter was inspired by and tells of a conference experience. Most “ordinary” academics like me go to a varying number of conferences annually and regularly share stories of these experiences with our colleagues. The conference stories are about a central set of practices in academic work, at least for active researchers. However, it is difficult to find studies of conference practices (for exceptions, see Radford, 2000), and, in particular, their broader meanings to both organizers and participants.

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)