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Since the late 1980s, research on post-industrialized economies shows that the boundary between work and family is increasingly becoming blurred. The continuing evolution of e-technology allows work for some to be done anywhere, anytime. This article examines the degree to which e-technology has transferred work into the home lives of academics and how this has affected their work/life balance. Drawing on a study in an Australian university of academics with young children, we utilise the terms 'work extensification' and 'work intensification' to explore whether these new technologies are a blessing or a curse in their work lives. At the same time we describe the deteriorating working conditions for Australian academics whose work has intensified and extended into their private lives with longer working hours in a speeded up environment. Our findings revealed the use of metaphors such as invasion and intrusion of e-technologies into academics' homes and their need to establish boundaries to separate work and family life. Most felt that having e-technologies at home was of benefit to their work but they came at a cost to their family life--delivering a blessing and a curse. Keywords Academics * E-technology * Work/life balance * Universities, Introduction Since the late 1980s, research on post-industrialized economies shows that globalization with its accompanying technologies is changing where we work and the speed of our work, and it is [...]

Byline: Jeroen Huisman (1), Jan Currie (2) Keywords: academics; accountability; higher education policy; university management Abstract: This article discusses the impact ofaccountability on higher education policies inEurope and the United States. We describe howthe accountability movement relates to otherpolicy trends in higher education, providingempirical data on how accountability wasimplemented and how academics and managers infour universities perceived these policies. Weclose the article with a reflection on theobserved shift from professional to politicalaccountability that uses `soft' mechanisms thatseem to offer little change in the quality ofeducation in these countries. Author Affiliation: (1) Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500, AE Enschede, The Netherlands (2) School of Education, Murdoch University, South Street, Murdoch, Western Australia, 6150, Australia Article History: Registration Date: 19/11/2004

This paper explores Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis in relation to student and teacher becomings and the way these are actualised within the neoliberal and heterosexually striated spaces of the secondary school assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari considered a narrow approach to education problematic and called for creativity as a site of ‘resistance’. Drama is one subject rich with potentiality for students to strengthen their creativity and ‘speak back’ against the neoliberal project. What our research revealed is how the drama classroom is an open, dynamic space where students can embody different identities at a critical time in their adolescent development. What is delimiting about this potentiality is the proclivity of teachers and students, as desiring machines, to conform to the dominant neoliberal culture of competitive performativity. The paper proposes that schizoanalysis offers new insights for mapping complex desire-flows and embodied identities through and against the dominant performative and heterosexist culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the intersection between the senior secondary drama classroom, creativity and neoliberalism. Informed by a research project involving fifteen West Australian drama teachers and thirteen students, it considers the drama classroom as one site where tensions between the performative needs of neoliberal education and the more humanistic desires that drama teachers embody are enacted. This paper suggests that drama education can be a powerfully transformative vehicle for creative and innovative thinking because of its spatially unique classroom environment and embodied nature. However, collisions between rhetoric and reality, social good and economic return, can mean that young people are denied opportunities for choice and the capability development that drama education brings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In China, the central government has released a series of key policy initiatives over the last twenty years to foster decentralisation of control over higher education, giving prominence to discourses of increased autonomy for both universities and academics. This article reports findings of an empirical study of changing autonomy in Chinese higher education and it focuses on the effects of these key policy developments in two case study universities. This research was part of a larger study of new power relationships emerging from changing policies on accountability and autonomy in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore, located within a broader context of the impact of globalisation on higher education. The focus on the three regions was selected to begin to redress a Western hegemony in such research. The larger study is premised on the principle that globalisation is characterised by ongoing tensions between global commonalities and context-specific differences, and that it is important not to gloss over the complex and often contradictory national and local mediations of “global” policy trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on changing accountability policies/practices in higher education as China rapidly ‘opens up’ to the global knowledge economy. It reports empirical findings from two case study universities, using respondents’ voices, and then raises issues for critical reflection. Increasingly prescriptive and punitive neo-liberal accountabilities have come to prevail in Chinese higher education, although ‘new’ accountability mechanisms have not simply replaced the ‘old’ but, arguably, they have coalesced into a potentially unstable hybrid of accountability relationships. We argue the need to dislodge the hegemony of neo-liberal accountabilities, and to continually—and critically—navigate ‘local’ needs within ‘global’ contexts, as policies evolve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]