Managerial Universities and a Gendered Functional Differentiation of Academic Work: A Case of a Dutch University

• In Event: 161 - Section on Organizations, Occupation and Work Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 09. The Organization of Education

Abstract

European universities have changed in the past two decades towards more managed ‘corporate’ organizations (Krücken and Meier, 2006). Among other things they have modified their organizational structures, which entails also the differentiation of academic work (Leisyte & Dee 2012). Universities in several countries have started to introduce performance monitoring and differentiated career paths for academics (Shuster and Finkelstein, 2006).
The purpose of this paper is to understand the functional differentiation of academic roles for female academics in a managerial university and the implications of this change for their career opportunities. We argue that the increasing academic work role differentiation may lead to the emergence of gender inequalities (Grummell et al. 2009; Van den Brink 2010).
We do so by concentrating on the Dutch case study university. The study uses survey and interview data. The survey was carried out among female academics of the university (n=512, response rate 25%) in 2012. Further, 10 in-depth interviews were carried out with female academics. Using the model of cumulative impact on female academic career progression (Barret and Barrett 2011) we show that female academics at mid-career level in the case study university are the most disadvantaged by the division of work in the managerial university. We thus argue that functional differentiation between teaching and research is likely to introduce a constraint for career progression for female academics and thus support the gendered functional differentiation of academic work (Barry et al. 2012).

Authors

• Liudvika Leisyte, Technical University Dortmund

• Bengü Hosch-Dayican, Technical University of Dortmund