Globalisation, combined with an increasingly mobile workforce, means that human resource
management cannot rely solely on “one size fits all” solutions, whether at institutional or sub-
institutional levels. Resolving “hard” issues, such as recruitment and retention, often requires the
design of flexible and individual solutions in the field. For instance, it has been suggested that support
for networking, an understanding of institutional cultures, and a linking of internal and external
considerations “must be addressed by ‘management’ in a much wider sense than can be exercised by
top leadership alone” (Duke, 2003, p. 54). While to some extent this has always been the case,
mechanisms for facilitating this are now being recognised formally and brought into the public
domain.
For instance, one institution in the United Kingdom has responded to revised pay and grading
structures by introducing a career pathway scheme to replace traditional hierarchical academic and
research ladders. A new scheme envisages career strands for those following a traditional balance
(research and teaching); a teaching-oriented balance; a research-oriented balance; and an enterprise-
focused profile; within a framework of three career tracks for Education, Research and Enterprise.
Thus, on the teaching pathways, individuals might progress from teaching assistant to teaching fellow,
senior fellow and director of education. The roles are differentiated by “competencies for role holders
or standards of output” (Strike, 2005, p. 6). This more complex map of pathways provides transfer
points, so that individuals can shift across strands and progress as their interests adjust over time and
their careers develop. Other institutions are also considering broadly similar versions of this
framework of multiple strands within the academic “family” of roles.
Challenges emerging from such arrangements are to define clear criteria for these strands, whilst
enabling some crossover points, and also to achieve acceptance of these criteria by unions and, more
generally, by the staff affected. Strike concludes:
“Europe can see England as an island where career adaptation is taking its own curious and
perhaps temporary evolutionary path, or seek to more closely observe and evaluate the
results. Like all evolutionary changes, not all of the resulting variations will survive and be
successful and so reproduce elsewhere. The traditional academic ladder and titles may
survive and resist novelty, especially if England is in a unique context with particular
nationally specific stimuli.” (Strike, 2005, p. 7)
However, the literature suggests that not all of the stimuli are specific to the United Kingdom,
and that there are wider pressures for adjustment and accommodation. The loosening of employment
categories in the context of the national re-design of pay and grading structures may, therefore,
accelerate new forms of role, and contribute to emergent aspects of academic identity, whereby:
“the capacity to develop business/earn one’s own salary/manage ‘client’ relationships, once
missing from academics, is now part of the skills repertoire of our next generation of
academics.” (Dunkin, 2005, p. 8)
Conclusion
A picture emerges, therefore, of a diverse and mobile workforce, for whom the content of roles is
changing, sometimes by default, and sometimes via policy interventions by governments or
institutions, such as the modification of terms and conditions. At the same time, crossovers are
occurring between academic and management fields of activity, creating mixed roles between the two,
including professionals who assist in the contextualisation of institutional activity in complex
knowledge environments. This is a situation that is beginning to be documented (see for instance, in
relation to academic staff, Middlehurst, 2004; to teaching and learning professionals, Gornall, 1999;
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