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Project leader
Paul Blackmore with Camille B. Kandiko
Steering group
Bruce MacFarlane, University of Portsmouth
Jose Chambers, University of Winchester
Project's administratrative home
King’s College London
Introduction
The UK government has invested heavily in the modernisation of job roles and reward and recognition. Through the Rewarding and Developing Staff initiative (HEFCE, 2000) £800million has been invested in institutions, part of which has been used to introduce performance-related pay in universities, to provide a tool that can be used to encourage changed working practices. Yet there is evidence that this investment has not been fully effective in the academy (Guest and Clinton, 2007). It is clear that unless academic motivation is better understood, the efforts of leaders and managers will often be frustrated, leading to waste of scarce resources and an unengaged staff.
There is of course a very large literature on motivation in general and within work in particular, but relatively little draws on and illuminates life in higher education. A Leadership Foundation-funded small development project completed by the applicants has explored leadership issues in developing interdisciplinary research and teaching, by interviewing senior leaders in the UK and Australia. There have been many project outputs (see Appendix).
One of the most important areas identified in the project was that of academic motivation. Leaders described the challenges they had faced in encouraging groups of colleagues to be innovative and to change their working practices. The project highlighted the central importance of a local culture in determining how likely an innovation was to succeed. Leaders and managers could not make progress if a change was not “the way we do things here.” We have started to use the term “prestige economy” (Bascom, 1948; English, 2005; Herskovits, 1948) to describe the collection of beliefs and values and ways of working that characterise and express what a particular group of people prizes highly.
We would now like to build on our achievement so far by examining motivation in a range of academic settings and with a range of staff, from junior staff to senior managers and academics as well as administrators, in order to produce practical tools that are of wide benefit.
We are not claiming that academic work is entirely unique but we do believe that an academic environment introduces particular features, one of which is the influence of the discipline or professional group. Since most academic staff are reported to feel more of an affiliation to their discipline than to their institution (Jenkins, 1996), there are complex motivations for academics. We do not believe academics’ behaviour can be explained without looking at these various features of academic organisation and motivation.
This work will build on an investment that has already been made by the Leadership Foundation in a major new area of work that has already delivered a substantial return in terms of outputs and that has huge potential. We suggest that the Leadership Foundation should claim it as a real advance in understanding that they have sponsored and should invest in further.
Aims
The project will develop greater understanding of academic motivation, benefitting those in leadership positions and in development roles in higher education.
Objectives
The project will:
Description of the proposed methodology including how the project will be tested in practice
We propose to examine six settings, a range of academic departments and research centres representing Humanities, Social Sciences and Sciences and cross-disciplinary activities, reflecting both academic and professional orientations. In our selection of participants we will work with staff at a range of levels of experience and grade. Within a small development project we cannot expect to achieve a full representation of the range of HE settings but we are not intending to do that: we want to illustrate the range of situations and the different ways in which staff may be motivated.
The exploration will be sensitive to institutional context, since there is clearly an interaction between institutional and departmental levels.
We will use four sources of information:
Taken together these will offer a concise way of “taking the pulse” of the department, triangulating findings through a range of sources of information. We will then make the method available to others.
Proposed outcomes
Proposed outputs
A short and accessible report that will introduce the key issues and be supported by brief case studies, to be published either under the LF imprint or through King’s Learning Institute
A design for an analytical activity, with all supporting documentation, that can be used by developers and others to work with an academic group in exploring and highlighting the nature of their prestige economy
Conference presentations (see below)
In-house seminar
Dissemination
Intended benefits to project partners and the wider higher education community
The idea of a prestige economy has now been presented on at least ten occasions, at conferences, seminars and within accredited teaching programmes (see Appendix). It has been met each time with a very high level of interest. We have strong positive feedback that this is an idea that helps explain academic behaviour and provides a useful tool for those working in the academy, whether as academic leaders or in a development capacity.
The project is highly relevant to a great deal of the LF’s research agenda. It is a key aspect of any leadership role in higher education that requires engagement with academic communities and has the potential to have a considerable impact on the effectiveness of leadership development. There are obvious benefits for the whole sector, for this proposal goes to the heart of one of the most long-running and widely felt concerns among development communities of all kinds in universities - the problem of “engagement” (Elvidge, 2004, 2006). Persuading academic staff, individually and in groups, to make use of the development support that is available to them is a continuing issue. Some suggest that this comes about because developers may not properly understand the cultures with which they work, and may seek to impose their own (McWilliam, 2002). Helping development communities to find their way into academic groupings would be immensely helpful and could lead to the more effective use of development resources.
We believe that many audiences would benefit from the outcomes and outputs of our work:
Milestones
Month Activity
1-3
Literature review
Identification of suitable cases
Initial website established
4-7
In-depth study through interviews, focus groups and documentary and statistical analysis
8-10
Analysis
Report and materials preparation
11-12
Conference workshop presentations (dependent on conference dates)
Website fully populated
Report and material completed and delivered
References
Barnett, R. 2000. Realizing the university in an age of supercomplexity. Buckingham: Society for Research into Higher Education and Open University Press.
Bascom, W.R. 1948. Ponapean prestige economy. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 4(2): 211-221.
Elvidge, L. 2004. Exploring academic development in higher education: Issues of engagement. Cambridge: Jill Rogers Associates Ltd.
Elvidge, L. (ed) 2006. Exploring good leadership and management practice in higher education: Issues of engagement. Cambridge: Jill Rogers Associates Ltd.
English, J.F. 2005. The economy of prestige. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Guest, D. and Clinton, M. 2007. Human resource management and university performance. London: Leadership Foundation for Higher Education.
HEFCE. 2000. Rewarding and developing staff in higher education. Bristol: Higher Education Funding Council for England.
Herskovits, M.J. 1948. Man and his works: The science of cultural anthropology. A.A.Knopf.
Hoe, S.L. 2006. The boundary spanner’s role in organizational learning: Unleashing untapped potential. Development and Learning in Organizations 20(5): 9-11.
Jenkins, A. 1996. Discipline-based educational development. The International Journal for Academic Development, 1(1): 50-62.
McWilliam, E. 2002. Against professional development. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 34(3): 289-300.
Whitchurch, C. 2007. Professional managers in higher education: Preparing for complex futures. London: Leadership Foundation for Higher Education.
Appendix: Recent publications / presentations disseminating work on disciplines and motivation
Herding cats for a living: understanding academic motivation, Staff Development Conference, Cardiff.
Managing changing practice. Keynote, Dublin Centre for Academic Development symposium on academic professional values: Being an academic in a 21st century HEI.
Leadership in context. Keynote, Keele University Leading Academic Groups Programme.
Academic motivation: the role of a prestige economy, with Dr Camille Kandiko, SRHE Conference.
Interdisciplinarity within an academic career, with Dr Camille Kandiko, Beyond teaching and research: inclusive understandings of academic practice, 3rd international CETL conference, University of Oxford.
Four sessions on leadership and management within Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice programme, KLI, King’s College London.
Leading learning among disciplines: the challenges of inter-professional and interdisciplinary work. Masterclass for College of Social Studies, University of Birmingham.
Blackmore, P. and Kandiko, C. (under review) A prestige economy: Motivation in academic life, Journal of Further and Higher Education.
Kandiko, C. B. & Blackmore, P. (2008). Institutionalising interdisciplinary work in Australia and the UK. Journal of Institutional Research, 14(1), 87-95.
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