The changing nature of academic work: implications for professional continuing education

Abstract

Changes in academic work and the implications of these changes for academics continuing professional education are analysed so as to reveal patterns of change which are of more general relevance. I will pay particular attention to the influence of changing technologies — in the narrow sense of changing machinery (computers) and the broader sense of organisational structures (entrepreneurial, neo‐Fordist, neo‐bureaucratic organisations, etc.). To illustrate how things could be otherwise, I will look at the implications for academic staff development of the increasing distance between the contemporary idea of the professional academic, and the idea of the intellectual.