(Un)professionalisation or (Re)professionalisation of the Academic in the Brave New World?

Abstract

Currently, the digital dimension permeates the daily activity of many professions, with all that this entails, in terms of advantages, disadvantages and challenges. The academic world is not immune to these new technological, political and social conditions and new instigations and situations emerge, which need to be studied. This article seeks to answer the following research question: Is the academic profession undergoing a process of increasing proletarianisation, which is influenced by the new universities' mission (in a broad way), in the sense of unprofessionalisation, or are there new conditions for academics' re-professionalisation experienced as a challenge? A meta-analysis of publications that focus directly on this topic was conducted through a conceptual analysis of the most recent literature addressing this topic. It is concluded that, in general, and notwithstanding institutional, local, regional, national and international specificities, there is some degree of academic's unprofessionalisation resulting from an increase in the functions ascribed to him/her by the political dimension that, in a context of increasing instability and control of his/her activity through the quantity and intensity of the functions to be conducted, may call into question academic autonomy, a basic foundation of the University. However, and concurrently, there is a new context which could, under certain conditions, foster the enormous challenge of re-professionalisation. As an implication of this work, there is a need to rethink this situation, which, if continued and deepened, will threaten the academic profession in some of its central dimensions, which may jeopardise the future sustainable development of our societies.

Sociology: Tension between Science and Militant Activism?

“…To view sociology as a science that has the ability to generate and disseminate useful knowledge 2 Begin to read literatures more broadly across a much larger intellectual landscape and to gather more knowledge outside of narrow specialties 3 Teach knowledge about how the social universe operates rather than how it should operate but, at the same time, address the empirical and theoretical question of whether there are alternatives to present conditions 4 Be tolerant within departments of those who do research and teach in areas not related to inequalities, and moreover, learn something of what they know 5 Save activism to one's personal life 6 Encourage students at the graduate level to think about alternatives to tenure-track employment 7 Develop this applied track by encouraging students and fellow faculty members to have an engineering mentality whereby empirical finding and abstract theories are made accessible to all who desire knowledge about human behavior, interaction, and social organization 8 Encourage ASA and other professional associations to develop a social engineering-by another name-as something that sociologists can do and encourage some form of certification that anyone who is part of this engineering "fraternity" is appropriately knowledgeable Source: Turner (2019) The relationship between sociological involvement and knowledge transfer is critical (Sá, Ferreira, & Serpa, 2019;Ghimire, 2017), and the authors' perspective does not indicate a withdrawal of Sociology from the public sphere, but rather a clearer separation in this sense applied to the social sciences and specifically to Sociology. Spalter-Roth, Best, and White (2018)…”

Trust in Higher Education Management and Organizational Culture

“…The changes brought about by COVID-19 (Ferreira & Serpa, 2021) have been, and still are, remarkable in most people's lives, and also in the context of education (Sá & Serpa, 2020a) and higher education (Sá & Serpa, 2020b, 2020c, 2020dAyman, Kaya, & Kuruç, 2020;Rasiah, Kaur, & Guptan, 2020;Croucher & Lacy, 2020), in addition to the challenges for academics, including their (un)professionalization or (re)professionalization (Ferreira & Serpa, 2018a;José Sá, Ferreira, & Serpa, 2019). This change occurs in a context of social re-legitimation of higher education (Roos, 2019;Adhikariparajuli, Hassan, & Siboni, 2021;Prieto-Jiménez, López-Catalán, López-Catalán, & Domínguez-Fernández, 2021), characterised by increasing complexity.…”