Moral barriers between work/life balance policy and practice in academia

Despite the proliferation of work/life balance policies in Australian universities, academic staff continue to report experiences of time pressure, anxiety, and over-work. This paper contributes to the research of academic time and career planning by exploring how early career academics engage with work/life balance policies, utilising a critical reading of Richard Sennett’s work on the corrosion of character in late capitalist economies. We find that policy engagement is tied into academics’ professional identities and perceptions of ‘good’ conduct. Drawing on interviews from a sample of 25 Australian early career academics, we argue that the failure of early career academics to use formal work/life balance policies is partially explained by the presence of workplace cultures that reward demonstrations of commitment to work roles. The use of work/life balance policies hence carries a moral cost, which participants report reflects on their character. This paper contributes to an understanding of how work/life balance policies are enacted at the level of department and individual, and argues that future research projects would benefit from attending to the construction of worker ideals within workplace cultures

‘I love my work but I hate my job’—Early career academic perspective on academic times in Australia

There has been significant interest of late into how academics spend their time during both their working and personal lives. Inspired by research around academic lives, this paper explores the narratives of 25 early career academics in Australian institutions across the country. Like several others, we propose that one of the fundamental aspects of time in academia is that of labour spent doing formal, instrumental and bureaucratic tasks. This impinges on the other side of academic life, the writing, research and discovery that bring subjective value to the academic. Using a Weberian framework however, we argue that there are two distinct rationalisations of these ‘times’ occurring. One is the formal, instrumentally imposed rationalisation of the university itself and the second is a more personally defined subjective rationalisation of research and writing. In terms of the latter, we argue that younger academics are not only seeing these times as important for their sense of self in the present but also for their projected vision of what they will become later in their professional career

The etiology of transmissible murine colonic hyperplasia.

The etiology of a transmissable colonic mucosal hyperplasia of mice was investigated. Hyperplasia was produced in mice inoculated with unfiltered colonic suspension from affected mice, but infectivity was lost after passage through a 0.45 mum filter. The etiologic agent was subsequently identified as a variant of Citrobacter freundii. The organism induced colonic mucosal hyperplasia when inoculated into germfree mice, and it was recovered in pure culture from the affected animals

An integrated life cycle costing database: a conceptual framework

Life cycle costing (LCC) is a management technique that has been available to the industry for some time, but despite this it continues to languish in obscurity. Some clients, most apparently from the public sector, are fostering the technique by commissioning studies based on the LCC appraisal techniques. However, the majority of building designs are still currently produced unsullied by thoughts of maintenance implications, life expectancy or energy consumption. Recent technological developments, particularly in Web, Virtual Reality (VR), and Object Oriented technologies and mathematical and computational modelling techniques will undoubtedly help in resolving some of the problems associated with life cycle costing techniques. This paper outlines a conceptual framework for an innovative system that facilitates the implementation of LCC in various design and occupancy stages. This system is being developed within an EPSRC-funded research project, undertaken through a joint collaboration between the Robert Gordon University and the University of Salford

Beyond ahistoricity and mobilities in lifestyle migration research

[Extract] Lifestyle migration is a complex phenomenon. There is no clear and precise theoretical model that is going to produce the sort of explanatory power that will help us understand all the facets of this modern-day movement. If we attempt to do so, such is the folly of macro social theory perhaps, we risk losing sight of the 'other parts' which O'Reilly (2012: 33) reminds us exist in most migration stories. As Favell (2008: 3) contests in his work on 'Eurostars', even concepts like freedom have distinct empirical flavours which different groups experience along the fractured social lines of norms, classes, statuses and other characteristics. In lifestyle migration, broad considerations of the movement usually couched as a middle-class quest for the better life, need to be mindful of the other end of the spectrum including gentrification of new areas (Moss 2006), consumer ethics and the visual appropriation of place (Van Auken 2010) and migration patterns of those low-paid 'service' workers who follow the wealthier for material and not lifestyle purposes (Nelson and Nelson 2011). Many of these faces of the movement are large enough to warrant not only their own research agendas but also their own theoretical footings

New horizons in lifestyle migration research: theorizing movement, settlement and the search for a better way of life

In 2009, Benson and O’Reilly (2009a and b) noted a burgeoning field of research investigating what they labelled lifestyle migration, the migration of ‘relatively affluent individuals, moving either part-time or full-time, permanently or temporarily, to places which, for various reasons, signify for the migrants something loosely defined as quality of life’ (2009a: 621). This is a migration phenomenon distinct from other more-documented and researched forms of migration (such as labour migration and refugee movements) that has some similarities with elite travel and migration (see, e.g., Amit 2007; Birtchnell and Caletrío 2013), and has developed into a healthy field of scholarly enquiry, generating its own corpus of literature. As Knowles and Harper succinctly define it, ‘[These] are migrations where aesthetic qualities including quality of life are prioritized over economic factors like job advancement and income’ (2009: 11). The centrality of such aesthetic qualities both to the decision to migrate and experiences of post-migration life results in explanations privileging the socio-cultural dimensions of the decision to migrate. As we demonstrate in this introduction, these explanations, developing out of the research traditions of sociology and social anthropology, are often underpinned by a strong commitment to social theory