The academic profession used to be classified as a key profession in society (Perkin, 2018(Perkin, [1969); its specific status within society led authors such as Guy Neave to identify it as an 'Academic Estate' (Neave, 2015). In the old higher education systems of Western Europe, most academics were either considered public servants or their employment was closely aligned with public administration. In Anglo-Saxon systems, they typically enjoyed tenured status. Their protected status from dismissal assured the academic autonomy and freedom essential to develop academic work.Along the same lines, Kogan, Moses, and El-Khawas (1994) prefer the expression 'academic community' to 'academic profession' to highlight that although relevant differences were evidenced within the group, they all share a unique set of common values and norms related to knowledge production and dissemination.Nevertheless, in the last three or four decades the dominant perspective of academics being an elite profession has been questioned. The current situations of casualization, precarity, division between the haves and the have nots, long hours, surveillance, austerity, erosion of pay, exacerbated competition, work overload, and harmful power relations are the manifestation of these transformations (OECD, 2021).These trends are transforming the 'Academic Estate' into academics as 'managed professionals' (Rhoades, 1998), who are managed as any other workers in traditional industrial working relations (Musselin, 2013), questioning their long-established autonomy and freedom (Aarrevaara, 2010;Carvalho & Diogo, 2018a).There is a sense that the globalization of the academic labour market, and the digital transition, accelerated by Covid-19, has exacerbated these developments. However, there is actually a scarcity of knowledge about how academics are managed at system and institutional level and the impact that has on individuals. There is also a need to better understand how academics' characteristics, such as gender, age, and position in the academic career, influence or are influenced by the way academics are managed.There are a lot of sweeping statements and generalizations, regarding how neoliberalism, managerialism, and new public management have influenced the way academics are managed, but these can and are contested; they do not develop in the same way in different systems and institutions. Individuals, institutions, and countries make choices, negotiate change under different contexts, and the results are not the same everywhere. Nonetheless, most analyses on academics' management are Eurocentric or take a global perspective, without considering the differences between higher education systems.