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Despite decades of managerial university reforms, collegiality emerges as an idea that unites academics, and that both symbolises and legitimises the collective aspirations of the academy. Typically, collegiality is positioned as an unquestionably "good thing"—an unproblematic academic ideal or an academic structure—obscuring the contingency of social arrangements in universities. This paper investigates the plurality of collegial practices that unfold "on the ground" in the context of university reforms and the diversification of the academic workforce over recent decades. The paper presents a qualitative and exploratory study of collegial practices in seven contemporary Australian and New Zealand/Aotearoa universities, employing a social cartographic analysis. Eleven types of logics underpinning collegial practices are identified and described in detail, by drawing on examples of collegial practices offered by fifteen research participants. A reconfigured picture of academic relations is presented, revealing the range of collegial practices that tend to be subsumed under a generic notion of collegiality. The effects of different types of collegial practices are examined, contesting exclusionary collegial relations and highlighting practices that have the potential to produce a more inclusive and socially just academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on the implementation of research-informed teaching has focused on influencing the individual practices of academics. However, social practice theory has criticised individualist approaches, arguing that attention must be paid to the context of practice, which in the academic context requires a focus on how academics articulate agency in their teaching practices in relation to specific contextual opportunities and constraints. This small-scale qualitative study in a UK university explores how academics across eight disciplines reshaped their understandings and practices of research-informed teaching in the context of a change in institutional mission from teaching and professional practice to incorporate expectations around research, drawing on developments in social practice theory when applied to academic workgroups. Understandings of identity and agency developed in postcolonial literary theory are used to further explore the academic work involved in creating new narratives for research-informed teaching in the context of changing, and often contradictory discourses of research, teaching and practice. This has implications for approaches to implementing research-informed teaching, which should recognise the work of academics in developing new narratives for research-informed teaching in the context of unique configurations of the nexus between research, teaching and practice in different disciplines. Social practice theory provides a lens for considering the contextual elements impacting on academic approaches to research-informed teaching, while approaches to narrative borrowed from postcolonial literary theory foreground the agency of academics in working across contradictions that surfaced with changes to the nexus between research, teaching and practice, to create emergent practices of research-informed teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in the careers of expatriate academics has rapidly grown in recent years. The specified organizational and cultural norms to which a host-university expects expatriate academics to conform, however, have been left largely unexplored. A conjoined question, too, is whether or not the university is successfully managing for diversity. The present research therefore examines input from six senior managers at a leading Korean university, finding that it has its own expectations for expatriate academics although these expectations are not formally codified. The case university does not expect outstanding research from them because of acknowledged limitations in the research environment. Managers are satisfied with the teaching of expatriate academics with caveats, but their participation in service activities is a perceived challenge. This, language deficiency, and absences over paid term breaks diminish ‘we-ness’ and positive perceptions of expatriate faculty. Change, however, may come in time. For now, some colleges and departments may be defending the status quo rather than pursuing true ‘Leadership Practices for Diversity,’ but there are nonetheless positive developments in some academic units; expatriate academics are making their way up the ranks, and university level initiatives suggest that more change could be around the corner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]