Alan Floyd

Turning Points: The Personal and Professional Circumstances That Lead Academics to Become Middle Managers.

In the current higher education climate, there is a growing perception that the pressures associated with being an academic middle manager outweigh the perceived rewards of the position. This article investigates the personal and professional circumstances that lead academics to become middle managers by drawing on data from life history interviews undertaken with 17 male and female department heads from a range of disciplines, in a post-1992 UK university. The data suggests that experiencing conflict between personal and professional identities, manifested through different socialization experiences over time, can lead to a ‘turning point’ and a decision that affects a person’s career trajectory. Although the results of this study cannot be generalized, the findings may help other individuals and institutions move towards a firmer understanding of the academic who becomes head of department—in relation to theory, practice and research.

Researching from within: external and internal ethical engagement

This article examines the superficial and deep ethical and moral dilemmas confronting ‘insider’ researchers, which we term external and internal ethical engagement. External ethical engagement refers to the traditional, easily identifiable ethical issues that insider researchers attend to by submitting their application for ethical approval to their institutions internal review board. Internal ethical engagement relates to the deeper level ethical and moral dilemmas that insider researchers have to deal with once ‘in the field’ linked to ongoing personal and professional relationships with participants, insider knowledge, conflicting professional and researcher roles, and anonymity. By reviewing the literature in this area and drawing on the authors’ experiences of undertaking interpretive studies at institutions where they were members of staff, we explore these concepts and examine the implications for insider researchers.

Jugglers, "Copers" and "Strugglers": Academics' Perceptions of Being a Head of Department in a Post-1992 UK University and How It Influences Their Future Careers.

This study investigates the experiences of academics who became department heads in a post-1992 UK university and explores the influence that being in the position has on their planned future academic career. Drawing on life history interviews undertaken with 17 male and female heads of department, the paper constitutes an in-depth study of their careers in the same university. The findings suggest that academics who become department heads not only need the capacity to assume a range of personal and professional identities, but need flexibility to regularly adopt and switch between them. Whether individuals can successfully balance and manage such multiple identities, or whether they experience major conflicts within or between them, greatly affects their experiences of being a head of department and seems to influence their subsequent career decisions. The paper concludes by proposing a conceptual framework and typology to interpret the career trajectories of academics that became department heads in the case university.

Exploring identities and cultures in inter-professional education and collaborative professional practice

Although the concept of multi-agency working has been pursued and adopted as the most appropriate way to improve childcare provision and health workforces in recent years, both in the UK and more globally, research suggests that participation in such work can be problematic. This article examines current developments in inter-professional education and collaborative professional practice. Drawing on desk research across the fields of Education, Health and Social Care, it applies a critical lens to re-examine inter-professional working using well-established concepts of profession, identity, culture, career, and training/work transitions. The article uses theoretical hooks to look for similarities and differences in the promotion of inter-professionality across the Education, Health and Social Care sectors, alongside those which occur within each. It looks towards a re-invigoration of knowledge creation and application through research. This is viewed as especially urgent in times of fragmentation, transformation, and arguably, disintegration, in the services its professional and academic educators and workers seek to serve.

Focusing the kaleidoscope: exploring distributed leadership in an English university

In the UK and elsewhere, the idea of ‘distributing leadership’ in universities is becoming more popular. Yet, there is surprisingly little research on this topic. This paper reports on a funded study which explored how one institution had implemented a newly conceived ‘distributed’ leadership model, specifically to investigate the impact of the model on the academics who had taken on the new leadership positions within the university. The study adopted an exploratory, sequential mixed methods design with in-depth interviews (n = 30) being undertaken first, followed by an online survey (n = 177). The findings suggest that the challenge of ‘distributed leadership’ in universities is complex on a number of levels: the plurality of the institutional mission; the diversity of possible leadership/management roles; the challenge of effective communication; and the effects of traditional academic values and identities, which may support but may also be antithetical to the strategic direction of the institution.

Supporting researching professionals: EdD students’ perceptions of their development needs

ABSTRACTA Doctorate in Education (EdD) is an established alternative to a Doctorate in Philosophy (PhD). However, frameworks in use to support doctoral study in the UK are focused mainly at PhD students and their associated needs and do not address the specific requirements of students who are often working full time and undertaking research into their professional context. To fill this gap, the purpose of this paper is to report on a Researching Practitioner Development Framework (RPDF) which has been developed to meet the specific professional development needs of EdD students. We describe the theory which underpins the overarching structure of the RPDF and report on a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with nine EdD students, which informed its content. Future research is planned to evaluate the implementation of the RPDF alongside existing EdD programme resources, and its role in supporting the professional development and research impact of EdD students.

Leadership identity in a small island developing state: the Jamaican context

While the role of leadership in improving schools is attracting more worldwide attention, there is a need for more research investigating leaders’ experiences in different national contexts. Using focus-group and semi-structured interview data, this paper explores the background, identities and experiences of a small group of Jamaican school leaders who were involved in a leadership development programme. By drawing on the concepts of culture, socialisation and identity, the paper examines how the participants’ journeys of becoming and being school leaders are influenced by national-level societal and cultural issues, experienced at a local level. The findings suggest that in becoming school leaders, the participants perceived that they had a strong sense of agency in attempting to change the social structures within the institutions they lead and in the surrounding local communities, which in turn, they hope, will have a lasting effect on the nation as a whole.