Unveiling faculty conceptions of academic risk taking: a phenomenographic study

ABSTRACT

Among recent developments in the field of higher education is the emergence of New Public Management and of what has been labelled as ‘risk university’. The aim of this paper is to redress the lack of discussion over the role that risk-taking plays in academic practice by exploring what faculty understand academic risk taking to be and how they enact this understanding in their tasks. Drawing on a phenomenographic perspective and semi-structured interviews with 20 faculty members from a high-profile UK university, we find that academic risk taking is experienced in four qualitatively different ways. Our results suggest that although academics engage in relatively similar endeavours, they exhibit various approaches to these endeavours due to their different conceptions of what constitutes academic risk taking. These findings have implications for the literature on identity construction and the debate over how the greater accountability of academic activity is affectively experienced.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic risk taking
• academic work
• identity construction
• new public management
• phenomenography
• risk university

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Deirdre Anderson, Rosina Watson and participants at the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) Annual Research Conference 2015 for their constructive comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. We are also grateful to the interviewees for their valuable time and contribution to this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.