The missing measure? Academic identity and the induction process

ABSTRACT

The effectiveness of academic induction is under-monitored by higher education institutions (HEIs) despite growing evidence that some academics, facing increased expectations and rising accountability within higher education (HE), perceive a lack of support from their institution. In this paper, we argue that HEIs should follow the example of other sectors to promote socialisation through adequate and supportive scaffolding of the multiple responsibilities that new academics are required to take on. We offer a dual lens into the induction of early career academics in the contemporary university. Using corpus analysis techniques, we survey recent research into induction from the fields of HE studies and of human resources (HR). The HR literature displays a greater emphasis on organisational socialisation but also on performance measures. Secondly, drawing on an empirical study of researcher experiences within a measured and funding-directed environment, we surface the challenges faced by new academics and the tensions of juggling multiple roles and identities. We find that induction programmes that encourage and educate individuals to take responsibility for their socialisation can enhance positive outcomes. Paradoxically, traditional, one-size-fits-all, induction that focuses on the ‘doing’ of academic practice leaves individuals unequally prepared for academic life. The empirical study findings echo claims in the literature that communities of practice can act to positively support newer academics. The induction challenge then is to provide personalised, professional scaffolding for scholarly development and to monitor its effectiveness, while seeking opportunities to build a more supportive academic culture.

KEYWORDS:

• early career academic
• induction
• academic identity
• corpus analytics
• measured university

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Corpus analysis often begins by identifying ‘key words’ (vocabulary that is unusually frequent compared to standard usage) and ‘collocates’ (words which occur unusually frequently together). Combining key words with their collocates provides insight into the dominant themes in a corpus (Baker & Levon, 2015).

2. The comparison corpus could be one of the widely available reference corpora (Kennedy, 1998), or a specifically created corpus (Kilgarriff, 2001).

3. The concordance tool can provide text extracts which exemplify a key theme (see, for example, Hanna, 2016). Corpus analysis software may also provide visualisation tools which help to reveal the underlying structures and idiosyncrasies of a text (see, for example, Pilcher & Richards, 2016). Although it is currently unusual for educational researchers to employ specialist corpus analysis software, useful results can still be obtained with smaller data sets by using spreadsheet or ‘manual’ text analysis, as Efe and Ozer (2015) and Mampaey et al. (2015) demonstrate.

4. An initial search of Scopus selected over 700,000 documents covering various different kinds of ‘induction’, yet many relevant to the induction of academic staff were not found by the search because they did not specifically use the word ‘induction’.

5. The final HE studies corpus held 1535 abstracts.

6. The HR corpus held 1189 abstracts.

7. Voyant reported that the HE corpus comprised 343,921 words and 21,675 unique word forms. The HR corpus comprised 448,125 words and 21,355 unique word forms, making it about a third larger than the HE corpus, but with a slightly smaller vocabulary.