Responsible by default: the international study tour supervisor role

ABSTRACT

In 2014, the Australian Government introduced the New Colombo Plan (NCP), whereby undergraduate students would become ‘informal ambassadors’ enhancing Australia’s ‘soft power’ within the Asia-Pacific region. Participation by students, universities, host organisations and communities expanded rapidly before Australia’s pandemic-driven closure of international borders. This hiatus has afforded a space for reflection upon the NCP, including the pivotal study tour supervisor role. Supervisors assume informal responsibilities beyond their formal roles, often in unfamiliar settings, with scarce recognition. Their assumption of responsibility is conceptualised here within a formal-informal spectrum, which underpins an evaluation of how the role might be accorded greater recognition.

KEYWORDS:

• International study tour supervisors
• workloads
• informalisation
• disaggregation
• self-responsibilisation
• recognition

Introduction

International study tours have a long history, stretching at least as far back as the sixteenth century Grand Tour that became a rite of passage for young, male, English aristocrats (Bacon [1625] 1985; Brodsky-Porges 1981; Towner 1985). This paper’s context is set by a considerably less grand but much larger, more inclusive contemporary incarnation. The Australian Liberal-National Government’s 2014 New Colombo Plan (NCP) established a scheme to support undergraduate student visits to Asia-Pacific nations. The Foreign Minister at the time, Julie Bishop, anticipated that students would act as ‘informal ambassadors’, extending Australia’s influence and prestige in the region (Bishop 2014). The NCP constituted a strategic ‘soft power’ initiative, designed to promote Australia’s interests in the region (Hong 2021), with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFaT) being assigned primary responsibility for the programme.

The original Colombo Plan, a product of the early Cold War era, included a mission to attract students and future leaders from Asia-Pacific countries to pursue a ‘Western’ higher education. Commencing in 1950 with seven Commonwealth member nations (India, Pakistan, United Kingdom, Canada, Sri Lanka [then Ceylon], New Zealand and Australia), the Colombo Plan had the unmistakeable political purpose of counteracting the threat of Communism in the region. The Colombo Plan continues to the present, although with 27 member nations and a very different, social and economic cooperation remit (Auletta 2000; Oakman 2002; Sarwal 2019). The NCP, as a solely Australian government initiative, differs considerably from the original Colombo Plan, particularly in its aspirations for Australian students to become ‘global citizens’. While the explicitly Communist threat may have long since subsided, China’s political and economic rise has been a growing concern for Australian governments, implicitly driving the NCP’s emphasis on ‘soft power’. Critical scrutiny of the NCP has questioned its ‘global citizenship’ claims while raising the charge of neo-colonialism that was often levelled at the original Colombo Plan (Heron 2019; Neilsen and Weinmann 2020; Salter and Halbert 2017; Schulz and Agnew 2020; Tran and Vu 2018; Tran et al. 2020).

Internationalisation and ‘global citizenship’ aspirations have long been integral aspects of the rapid expansion of Australia’s public universities, with the emergence of higher education as a major export industry. By 2019, before the pandemic, the total number of international students enrolled in Australian higher education institutions was 521,948, an increase of 8.7% on 2018 and equivalent to 32.4% of total student enrolments (1,609,798) (DESE 2020). Not only has there been massive growth in participation by international students, especially from Asia-Pacific nations; Australian universities have also opened overseas campuses or established joint teaching and accreditation agreements with numerous Asia-Pacific universities. The NCP, as a distinctly modest counter-balance to this overwhelmingly one-way flow of students and finance, inaugurated scholarships of up to one academic year, internships of up to six months and a mobility grants scheme for undergraduate students, usually aged 28 or younger. While overseas study tours by Australian students are neither new nor an exclusive province of the NCP, the programme massively increased their profile and importance, signalling an explicit governmental harnessing of higher education to political, economic and diplomatic goals.

Before the pandemic’s onset, participation in NCP study tours had been increasing rapidly. The initial 2014 pilot programme included 48 projects, 38 universities and approximately 1,000 students in Indonesia, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong. By 2019, the NCP’s reach had extended to include projects in forty Asia-Pacific countries, encompassing almost all disciplines within every Australian public university, while including thousands of students, academics, administrative staff, host communities and organisations (DFaT 2015, 2018, 2020b, 2021). At the time of writing (November 2021), the future of international study tours is unclear, since travel to, from and within Australia remains restricted. However, the eventual re-opening of international borders should herald a rapid return of NCP study tours. There has been no waning in the Commonwealth Government’s commitment to the programme, as indicated by increasing financial resources: from an initial A$100 million over its first five years of funding, the programme’s budget allocation rose to a projected A$51.933 million annually during 2020–2021 (DFaT 2020a, 23).

Short-term (typically 2–4 weeks) mobility scheme study tours provide the primary setting for this paper’s focus on the expectations, demands and responsibilities of the study tour supervisor role. The Department of Education, Skills and Employment (DESE, previously Education and Training – DET), in consultation with DFaT, has commissioned evaluations of the NCP’s effectiveness (e.g. ACIL 2016). Based on a series of Likert-scale (‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’) survey questions, these reports have concentrated on students’ levels of satisfaction with their learning experiences. Study tour supervisors, however, are noticeable only by their absence – a theme explored below. As the following discussion will illustrate, the role is pivotal to the effectiveness of the study tours, distinctive for its open-ended responsibilities that extend well beyond formal job descriptions and workloads. The challenging day-to-day task of reconciling these goals, which rarely coincide seamlessly, often falls by default to the study tour supervisor.

Background and method

This paper’s origins were idiosyncratic, acquiring an organic, occasionally even coincidental character, emerging from several, initially unrelated processes. These were: the author’s long-term membership, as a staff representative, of a committee developing formal workload policies; discussions with twenty of the author’s university colleagues, who had performed the international study tour supervisor role on more than one occasion; and subsequent conversations with fifteen colleagues in other departments and universities who had also performed the role. The substantial majority of supervisors (80%, with some variations according to institution and discipline) were women, while no supervisor was above the academic rank of Senior Lecturer (Level C, on an A-E, Associate Lecturer to Professor, scale). All these colleagues had extensive experience teaching in various formats, face-to-face, online and overseas, as well as a demonstrated commitment to student learning. They all saw the role as exemplifying a quantitative and qualitative extension of expectations and responsibilities beyond formal job descriptions and workload allocations, while several commented on the role’s relative invisibility in formal career planning and development.

The paper evolved through a largely unplanned convergence of events and discussions that begged some attempt at integration and comprehension, its purpose steadily emerging as the increasing informal demands of the supervisor role became undeniable. The paper’s unplanned character is intimately connected to the contentious issues, such as workloads and career development, that provide its main focal points. Supervisors’ raising of various problems they had encountered was not without risk. Indeed, some colleagues who were happy to discuss these issues in a reasonably casual manner expressed reluctance to be interviewed as part of a formal research project, which they saw as potentially increasing their employment vulnerability.

Therefore, the need to protect colleagues against any possibility of adverse consequences was a priority – which denotes both the possibilities and limitations of this kind of research, which is dependent on a high degree of mutual trust and confidentiality between researcher and participants. As the paper’s purpose is to address general themes, all information is anonymised, with no possibility of individuals being identified. For example, the small number of direct quotations are composite comments drawn from observations, variously worded, made by several supervisors. In order to focus exclusively on general issues, no issue mentioned by fewer than five colleagues is included in the paper. The author recorded the general issues in note form, with all colleagues being asked if they consented to data being reported at this higher-order, consolidated level; all agreed.

Drawing on this eclectic range of sources, then, the paper examines the distinctive dynamics of the international study tour supervisor role, situating it within a general informalisation and disaggregation of academic work in Australia’s public universities. It constitutes a series of reflections designed to give voice to concerns rarely expressed through formal organisational channels.

A note on terminology may be appropriate here, with respect to the terms that serve as analytical reference points throughout the paper, signifying macro-level processes with micro-level effects manifested in the supervisor role. The term ‘informalisation’ is usually associated with work (e.g. cash-in-hand) that is not subject to formal regulation (see, e.g. Hammer and Ness 2021). It is adopted here to capture a growing mismatch between, on one hand, formal job classifications and workloads and, on the other, the quantitative and qualitative increases in responsibilities and work, beyond formal regulatory parameters. ‘Quantitative’ increases denote the overall number of working hours and the span of those hours across the working day and week – in the case of supervisors, this can approximate to ‘24/7’ availability. ‘Qualitative’ increases refer to the supervisors’ performance of work beyond their formal skills, qualifications and experience – often due to the absence of appropriately skilled, qualified and experienced staff. ‘Disaggregation’ indicates the interrelated but distinct phenomenon whereby the limits of academic work (traditionally teaching, research and related administration) are being steadily eroded, with the blurring of demarcations between formally academic and other university work roles.

Tall tales but (probably) true

Performance of the supervisor role consistently exemplifies both informalisation and disaggregation, with associated growth in the quantitative and qualitative work performed. Even before its commencement, the role involves considerable additional work, requiring academic staff to make a successful application for NCP funding. Applications comprise such items as: applicants’ previous experience in managing study tours; projected development of students’ knowledge of the region and tour locations; contributions to partnerships between Australia, the region and host nations; and detailed budgets. Pre-tour planning includes: meetings with stakeholder organisations and securing letters confirming their approval; selecting students and contracting third-party providers, if available, to provide support services in host nations (for instance, organising trip schedules); traversing multiple layers of organisational bureaucracy; and successful completion of requisite short courses (such as First Aid).

Yet the ensuing tour events often confounded even the most meticulous preparation. When recounting their experiences, several supervisors invoked a maxim beloved of travelling (usually male) sports teams and rock bands: ‘What goes on tour stays on tour’. The supervisors’ tales included: the exploits of intoxicated students (and occasionally supervisors); ill-advised (in retrospect) sexual liaisons; altercations with host community or organisational members and occasionally police – events absent from official government or university study tour promotions (e.g. DFaT 2017). Consequently, tour experiences provided the ingredients for occasional moments of dark humour. When asked to reflect on what might happen without a supervisory presence, several supervisors responded with a further, deadpan question: ‘A large bunch of young Australians in a foreign country: what could possibly go wrong?’

To a significant degree, this question captured the exercise of responsibility that emerged as a consistent theme. Supervisors often spontaneously couched their observations in a language of responsibility, particularly the phrase, ‘ultimately responsible’ – especially with respect to expenditure of public funds. Unanticipated problems repeatedly surfaced while on tour (for example, hotel rooms becoming unexpectedly unavailable), with the supervisor inevitably addressing them. Supervisors believed that not only were they the responsible person in such situations but also that they would be held responsible for any unresolved problems by government, students, university managers, host organisations and communities.

Supervisors’ informal assumption of responsibility invariably followed an internal narrative whereby the risks of action were weighed against the possible consequences of inaction. Confusion and uncertainty over the role’s requirements and limitations, intensified in crisis or emergency situations, necessitated this self-questioning. Supervisors across different disciplines, locations and institutions cited an array of other factors that compounded these pressures: protracted fatigue and lack of sleep, due primarily to their ‘24/7’ availability; feelings of isolation and helplessness, in the absence of immediate support; and the need to maintain at least the appearance of being in control, especially in students’ eyes. The frequently uttered lament, ‘this isn’t what I signed up for’, encapsulated the consequences of role confusion and uncertainty. Yet supervisors uniformly enunciated their commitment to students’ learning and welfare, seeing their performance of the role as personally and professionally rewarding – albeit with few tangible career benefits.

The informal assumption of – or, alternatively, withdrawal from – responsibility was predicated on the possibilities conjured up by a sequence of questions, such as: ‘When should students be expected to take responsibility for their own actions?’. The exercise of responsibility was driven by the possible consequences of both action and inaction: ‘What should I do?’ and ‘What should I not do?’. Ranging from last-minute cancellations of events to natural disasters, these situations incited the persistently nagging question, ‘What might happen if I don’t assume responsibility?’. Therefore, each subject emerged as internally conflicted, a site within which the consequences of macro-level informalisation and disaggregation played out.

The performance of a role with extensive informal responsibilities requires the individual supervisor to negotiate the consequent personal, professional and potentially legal risks. Each action or non-action (a decision to not intervene – or ‘non-decision’ in the literature on power – e.g. Denord, Palme, and Réau 2020; Lukes 2021), becomes complex, conflicted and even contradictory, often containing different motivations and rationalisations. Analysis of this assumption of responsibility, therefore, requires imagining alternative scenarios that did not eventuate – and assessing their potential consequences. Picture, for example, a situation occasionally encountered by supervisors. Following an end-of-tour dinner, a student (add gender/sexuality/alcohol) knocks on a supervisor’s (add gender/sexuality/alcohol) hotel door at 11.30 pm, wishing to discuss an unspecified personal issue. Now multiply this ‘What would you do?’ scenario several times, to indicate the extent of the dilemmas a supervisor might face. As several supervisors ruefully observed, ‘They don’t pay me enough for this … No pay is enough’.

Therefore, the role demands the repeated navigation of confronting situations (some disciplines – for example, nursing or medicine – more than others), often involving deeply held political and cultural differences within foreign settings. Supervisors, in many cases lacking significant language skills or knowledge of their host country’s history, culture, politics and economy, were often embarking on their own, sometimes rapid learning trajectories. They encountered unfamiliar situations that could diverge dramatically from those envisaged in their initial planning and preparation. ‘Learning by doing’, a phrase mentioned by several supervisors, typified the role’s unanticipated demands, revealed only through its performance. The supervisor was required by default to redefine the role’s parameters while performing it: a sequence of pragmatic, ad hoc responses to immediately pressing exigencies.

Supervisors’ accounts of their experiences repeatedly revealed an informal, often gendered assumption of responsibility, a process of moral regulation that included professional and personal ethics, necessarily extending beyond compliance with formal bureaucratic requirements (Shamir 2008; Warren 2017). Student learning on international study tours exhibited a closely related ‘learning by doing’ character, whereby students, like supervisors, were often required to manage confronting situations. Managing the tensions between students’ increasing assumption of responsibility and the maintenance of a safe environment emerged as a negotiated process, essential to both student learning experiences and the effective performance of the supervisor role.

Self-responsibilisation, autonomy and coercion

The supervisor role’s often nebulous demands regularly stretch well beyond a formal full-time workload and the duties described in formal job classifications. The mismatch between formal allocations and actual work, both quantitatively and qualitatively, may be illustrated by comparing the role’s responsibilities to a lecturer’s formal job classification in university enterprise (collective) bargaining agreements (NTEU 2021). Duties in formal classifications are mainly confined to more ‘traditional’ academic work such as on-campus (or, during pandemic lockdowns, online) delivery of lectures and tutorials. The inelegant but reasonably descriptive term ‘self-responsibilisation’ is adopted here, to interpret the convergence of macro-level informalisation and disaggregation upon the contested site of the ‘neoliberal’ subject (e.g. Oksala 2015), the point at which the supervisor is required – by default – to assume informal responsibility.

This conceptualisation draws upon the two main traditions of analysis of neoliberalism: heterodox political economy and cultural studies (Feldman 2019; Iszó 2019). Both traditions, despite their deep differences, generally concur on their interpretation of neoliberalism as the active construction of a ‘free economy’ – for example, state intervention to restrict unionism and collective bargaining, enforcing a ‘free’ labour market, as distinct from laissez-faire non-intervention. With respect to the work of academic staff in Australia’s public universities, this construction may be identified in the intensified regulation and surveillance of academic work, especially through more or less stringent performance management processes.

The intersection of multiple processes in the performance of the supervisor role demands examination of how supervisors, as subjects, respond to macro-level changes by assuming informal responsibility, while articulating in diverse ways their own personal and professional values. There is an array of literature on the neoliberal ‘responsibilisation of the self’, inspired largely by Foucault, particularly his discussions of neoliberal governmentality (Foucault 2008; see Done and Murphy 2018; Peters 2016; Trnka and Trundle 2014). Supervisors’ self-responsibilisation, though, cannot be readily classified as the actions of a neoliberal subject; their frequent assertion of substantive educational values sits uneasily with the operation of universities as profit centres or conduits for foreign policy. Although supervisors assume personal responsibility for decisions, a noted aspect of neoliberal governmentality (e.g. Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011), they also consistently assert commitment to clearly non-neoliberal rationalities (such as personal and professional ethics): a self-responsibilisation that, at various times and to varying degrees, may be autonomous or coerced.

Clarification of the distinction between autonomous and coerced self-responsibilisation may be appropriate at this juncture. The informal exercise of responsibility has always been integral to academic work – and is arguably one of its more treasured aspects, when that self-responsibilisation is an autonomous exercise of professional skills, abilities and experience. To provide an example that may be familiar to many readers: a lecturer may give informal advice to a PhD candidate (whom she doesn’t supervise) following a seminar presentation on strategies for publishing from a thesis. This would be an act of autonomous self-responsibilisation requiring discretionary space and time – both of which are in diminishing supply for many academic staff. In contrast, the coerced self-responsibilisation enacted by the study tour supervisor requires work to be performed outside any formal working hours, within compressed time periods, often beyond their professional skills, abilities and experience. Coerced self-responsibilisation could often crystallise into a single rhetorical question, ‘If I don’t do it, who will?’. While the term ‘coerced’ may seem excessively dramatic, it may also convey the sense of being left with no option but to exercise responsibility.

Several supervisors were acutely aware of this autonomous/coerced distinction and of the coercion implicit in being left with no option, in situations that were substantially attributable to macro-level organisational process. Yet they were also asserting their own autonomous self-responsibilisation in many cases (for example, mentoring students), articulating their own personal and professional ethics (such as commitments to public education and global citizenship, variously understood). Hence supervisors would express their intermingled accommodation, resistance and resignation – albeit with a sense of foreboding, aware that the academic career they had originally ‘signed up for’ may be rapidly receding.

Informal work and formal recognition

Compounding these problems is the role’s undeniable ‘out of sight, out of mind’ quality. Its performance occurs in culturally and geographically distant locations, in numerous time zones. This invisibility, reported by many supervisors, was often accompanied by managers’ purposeful non-intervention – or ‘turning a blind eye’ to the consequences of intensified performance and accountability demands placed on academic staff. The extensive informal work performed by supervisors in the role can often receive limited recognition in performance management, career development and workload allocations. These are conducted according to formal guidelines and criteria, with an emphasis on quantifiable outcomes and measurement. Limited formal recognition effectively entrenches and perpetuates organisational invisibility, rendering the role less attractive to potential future supervisors.

Academic staff who had performed the supervisor role for a significant period frequently mentioned the cumulative difficulties of finding successors. Potential successors, having become aware of the role’s increasing informal demands and lack of formal rewards, became reluctant to step forward, with the consequence that supervisors found themselves bound to the role. Its performance consequently acquired a web-like character: as its complexities and challenges became widely known, so its occupants became increasingly inextricable from it, identified as the ‘go to’ persons for international study tours. Therefore, the supervisor role epitomises a deepening bifurcation between formal roles and informal work, as the role becomes increasingly inseparable from those performing and reconfiguring it.

In this regard, the role may be located towards the informal end of a conceptual spectrum from formal to informal – with the position steadily shifting towards greater informalisation, within a context of diminishing support fuelled by restructurings and redundancies. The formal pole of this conceptual spectrum would represent an exact correspondence between a formal job classification and the substantive work performed within that job. At the informal pole, any correspondence between the formal job classification and substantive work would be dissolved. The informalisation of academic work is consequently inseparable from a systemic decline in academic support staff numbers over recent decades (Croucher and Woelert 2021), with academic staff self-responsibilising to occupy the vacuum.

In its present form, then, the role presents a deepening conundrum. Its performance mainly by less senior staff, predominantly women, reduces the likelihood of more senior staff, particularly men, volunteering to perform it, while its lack of formal recognition renders it less attractive as an avenue for career development. The performance of the role overwhelmingly by less senior staff perpetuates a vicious cycle, whereby its increasing informal demands and lack of recognition act as a disincentive for more senior staff to perform the role. While applying for NCP funding is technically voluntary, several colleagues reported that it was seen as an expectation by their managers, within the ‘black box’ of annual performance reviews that could range in tenor from developmental and collaborative to witheringly judgmental, even confrontational. Demonstrating the highly situational character of autonomy and coercion, colleagues reported experiences from the collegial to the intensely micro-managerial, although with applications for mobility grants generally viewed in a positive light. This denotes a further point of separation from more senior staff, who were more commonly expected (again, voluntarily in a formal sense) to apply for major research grants, both financially more substantial and viewed organisationally as far more prestigious. Hence a teaching-research demarcation between less and more senior staff became perpetuated, with more senior staff disinclined to apply for NCP funding.

Consequently, those in more senior management roles are unlikely to be familiar with the role’s demands, undermining recognition in career planning and development: the intrinsic rewards accruing from the role are rarely accompanied by appropriate extrinsic recognition. The role’s relative lack of recognition may also become an increasingly self-perpetuating prophecy, as those most committed to intrinsic educational goals (for example, pastoral care) are attracted towards it and prepared to perform increasing volumes of informal work. In contrast, a role that offers few, if any, discernible extrinsic rewards (such as pay and promotion) may be less appealing to those with a stronger means-end commitment to personal career advancement. Therefore, inequities associated with the role’s occupancy may become increasingly entrenched and insoluble.

Yet this need not be seen as an irreversible process to which supervisors must submit. To varying degrees, students, host communities and organisations may also be committed to a substantive educational moral economy that contradicts a neoliberal means-end epistemology of competitive, gain-maximising individuals (e.g. Hayek 1980). This moral economy was demonstrated by instances of staff and students from different disciplines and universities sharing resources and information with local host organisations and communities, outside official channels. Reciprocal relationships therefore developed, whereby hosts would provide informal support (for example, with establishing local networks). Shared commitments to substantive educational goals may provide a common ground uniting numerous parties, in both home and host countries, demonstrating scope for ‘micro-resistances’ (Ball 2016; Ball and Olmedo 2013; Thomas and Davies 2005). They may also represent potential resources for resisting further managerial, financial and political encroachments and reasserting the purposes of public education cross-nationally – a possibility pursued later in this paper.

A poignant postscript to this section may help to underline the supervisor’s location at the convergence point of macro-level processes of informalisation and disaggregation, where lack of both visibility and formal recognition intensify employment vulnerability. When international study tours resume, several supervisors who contributed to this paper will no longer be employed, having departed via redundancy or early retirement. University managements have found in the pandemic a convenient source of legitimation for increasingly normalised restructurings and redundancies, justified through declines in fee-paying international student numbers since early 2020. Adopting their own ‘no alternative’ refrains of questionable sincerity (see, e.g. Ross 2021), they have achieved significant generational change, with an accompanying loss of organisational knowledge, educational expertise and workplace experience.

Pragmatic considerations, reconstructive possibilities

Certain practical recommendations follow, almost spontaneously, from these observations. Rather than interpreting the supervisor role as an ad hoc variant from a norm of classroom teaching (face-to-face or online), its distinctive requirements demand a role-specific classification. The unavoidable blurring of the professional and the personal in supervisor-student relationships (for example, personal counselling) graphically illustrates the role’s complexities and challenges. Supervisors act in a direct mentoring capacity that is more immediate, constant and wide-ranging than would be typical of many teaching and learning situations. Not only does the role’s effective performance require ‘soft’ skills and personal attributes that have historically gone unrecognised, often assumed as innate gender characteristics (Hong 2016). It also demands qualitatively role-specific skills and abilities that extend well beyond current academic job classifications – such as negotiating, on behalf of students, with local communities and organisations.

The study tour supervisor role will always demand a considerable element of self-responsibilisation – for example, responding to medical emergencies or weather events. The challenge, though, is to ensure that self-responsibilisation is as far as possible autonomous and within the supervisor’s professional expertise – that is, related to student learning and development. Students were keenly aware of the value of supervisory contributions, being especially appreciative of supervisors’ ‘24/7’ availability to advise on personal issues (e.g. WSU 2020) – underscoring the need for this extensive informal work to be accorded greater formal recognition. While the role’s uncertainties cannot be eliminated, greater role clarity and strategic purpose, rather than ad hoc responses by supervisors in confronting situations, might reduce their potentially adverse consequences. Greater formal recognition with role-specific training and education (for example, language and culture), matching its formal classification more closely to its substantive demands, might permit supervisors to devote their concentrated attention to the purposes of student learning.

At a pragmatic level, strategies such as Realistic Job Previews and Expectation Lowering Procedures (Harvey, Buckley, and Novicevic 2007) might offer some promise for reducing the inconsistencies between initial expectations and subsequent experiences – that is, between the job ‘signed up for’ and the substantive work. Also, a more systematic approach to career development and succession planning might attract more potential successors, particularly if those in management positions have had some prior experience performing the role – or, at least, are familiar with its responsibilities and contributions.

Yet a troubling paradox presents itself here: closer matching of the role’s formal requirements, actual work and career development may attract more means-end actors; however, this should not come at the cost of losing those colleagues with a demonstrated commitment to substantive learning outcomes. In this respect, the first-hand knowledge possessed by students who have participated in study tours may constitute a potentially valuable contribution to job redesign, recruitment and selection processes. Further, the inclusion of host universities, government and non-government organisations, and local communities may help in generating a shared commitment to future study tours and continuing relationships, based on the moral economy mentioned previously. Dedicated professional support within host countries might eliminate the difficulties posed by widely differing time zones, while reducing reliance on third-party providers, whose reliability was occasionally questioned by supervisors. Greater participation by supervisors with connections to host countries might further minimise linguistic and cultural concerns.

Reducing the role’s informal qualitative and quantitative demands would require considerable investment in appropriately qualified staff at both home and host locations, to perform many of the activities currently performed informally by supervisors – which would assume an initial demarcation of ‘academic’ from ‘academic support’ roles, addressing current informalisation and disaggregation. These demands not only generate additional work and stress but also deflect from supervisors’ core commitment to student learning, while compounding the risks, hazards and confusions that often accompany study tours. Admittedly such change is improbable in the current climate, in which university managements routinely prioritise core teaching and learning activities as cost-cutting areas – as indicated by the massive proliferation of casual (or sessional) teaching positions in recent decades – until the pandemic, which brought a dramatic, highly contested cessation of many casual appointments (Littleton and Stanford 2021).

Exploration of the international study tour supervisor role also affords potentially valuable insights into the complex inter-relationships between academic work and student learning outcomes. Learning is always, to varying degrees, a shared experience. On international study tours, this shared dimension assumes complex forms, extending to far more participants (such as local communities) than would be typical of classroom or online settings. Eventful and often challenging, international study tours require both supervisors and students to exercise responsibility and personal judgment, with supervisors managing students’ emerging self-responsibilisation – a crucial learning outcome. Therefore, the quality of student learning is inseparable in its practical immediacy from the configuration and performance of the supervisor role.

Conclusion

From students’ ‘informal ambassador’ contributions to the involvement of local communities and organisations, NCP study tours are characterised by informal work. This paper has illustrated how the pivotal international study tour supervisor role exemplifies an informal quantitative and qualitative extension of academic work beyond formal job classifications, amid a situation of repeated restructurings that have intensified under pandemic. The role constitutes a point at which macro-level processes of informalisation and disaggregation converge, requiring the individual supervisor to self-responsibilise beyond their formal roles. Academic staff in the role are frequently required to respond to unexpected situations in overseas settings, with limited support from their home universities. Yet the role’s significant, often unforeseeable challenges should not be allowed to obscure its intrinsic value and rewards; realisation of its potential requires extensive revision of not only the role itself but of prevailing university business models that deem such roles of marginal value. Without a reversal of decades-long informalisation and disaggregation, there are limits to the extent to which this specific role can attain greater coherence, employment security and an enhanced long-term contribution to student learning.

Discussion of the international study tour supervisor role inevitably raises the larger issue of unpaid, formally unrecognised work in higher education, the subject of numerous reports and surveys internationally (e.g. UCU 2016). Future research might seek to capture dimensions of power and inequality that were not examined in this paper – for example, differences between disciplines or the experiences of colleagues originally from host nations, who were surprisingly under-represented among tour supervisors. Such research might draw upon the relevant literature on workplace voice and silence (e.g. Astvik, Welander, and Hellgren 2021), to explore strategies to address the increasing informalisation and disaggregation of academic work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).