Managed Professionals

Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor

By Gary Rhoades

Subjects: Higher Education
Series: SUNY series, Frontiers in Education
Paperback : 9780791437162, 351 pages, April 1998
Hardcover : 9780791437155, 351 pages, April 1998

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments

1. Academics as an Organizationally Managed, Stratified Professional Work Force

2. Restructuring Professional Rewards: The Structure, Stratification, and Centrality of Faculty Salaries

3. Retrenchment and Reorganization: Managing Academic Work(ers) for Productivity

4. Reorganizing the Faculty Work Force for Flexibility: Part-Time Professional Labor

5. The Production Politics of Teaching and Technology: Deskilling, Enskilling, and Managerial Extension

6. Managerial Domain and Academic Employees: Outside Employment, Intellectual Property, and Faculty's Own Time

7. Unionized Faculty: Managing the Restructuring of Professionals and Production Work in Colleges and Universities

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Focuses on the ongoing negotiations of professional autonomy and managerial discretion and provides insight into the broad restructuring of faculty, with conclusions that extend beyond unionized faculty to all of academe.

Description

Managed Professionals is a source book on the negotiated terms of faculty work and a sociological analysis of the restructuring of faculty as a professional workforce. Based on a sample of forty-five percent of the more than 470 negotiated faculty agreements nationwide (which cover over 242,000 faculty), the book offers extensive examples and analysis of contractual provisions on: salary structures; retrenchment; use and working conditions of part-time faculty; use of educational technology (in distance education); outside employment; and intellectual property rights.

Focused on the ongoing negotiation of professional autonomy and managerial discretion, the book offers insights into the broad restructuring of faculty, with conclusions that extend beyond unionized faculty to all of academe. Faculty are managed professionals, and are increasingly so. Managers have much flexibility, and as they seek to reorganize colleges and universities, the exercise of their flexibility serves to heighten the divisions within the academic profession and to reconfigure the professional workforce on campus.

Gary Rhoades is Professor of Higher Education at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona.

Reviews

"This book delineates the tensions between faculty and academic management more fully and deeply than any other study of which I am aware. It is particularly acute in depicting faculty stratification, the erosion of professional autonomy and the limits of collective bargaining. What I most appreciate in this book is its exploration of the tension inherent in the status of faculty as 'managed professionals'—I do not know of another book that explores this central characteristic of faculty work. I found the topic, the review of pertinent theories and the examples quite interesting. The theme is central to understanding the academic profession. " — Ernie Benjamin, Director of Research, American Association of University Professors

"Timing for this book could not be better. The current debates surrounding tenure, the 'collapse' or 'decay' of the academy (variously presented) are topics of great concern to those inside higher education and to those individuals outside who are responsible for policy and governance. This book is both important on its own merit and in its contribution to the larger fields of academic governance, labor, law, and public policy. " — Ken Kempner, University of Oregon