Description
Peer-reviewed oral presentation.Abstract of the paper: This paper’s contextual focus is the education workplace and workforce(s), but the findings presented will resonate with and have wider implications for other sectoral contexts.
The issue being investigated is what has been referred to as ‘pressured professionalism’ (Noordegraaf, 2007; Evans, 2018), whereby individuals feel overwhelmed by the scale, width or intensity of their work situations, and, as a result, feel anxious, stressed, and unfulfilled because they are pulled in too many directions.
The project – now completed - whose findings are discussed comprised four related studies of university professors’ perspectives on their work as senior academics expected to provide leadership, and of non-professorial academics’ perceptions of and perspectives on the professors with whom they work(ed) or encountered in their disciplinary communities. In total, data were gathered from more than 2000 questionnaire respondents and almost 100 interviewees. Research participants reported feeling pressured to perform, with many feeling that they fall short of what they should be achieving. One questionnaire respondent, for example, complained that ‘professors have to be all-singing, all-dancing’, another, that professors ‘have to be all things to all people’. An interviewee said ‘we can only really deliver mediocre stuff because we simply don’t have the capacity to deliver at the levels expected’.
To draw out the wider implications of workplace dissatisfaction or lack of fulfilment through ‘pressured professionalism’, Evans’s (2018) ‘proximity theory’ will be presented. Explaining the bases of individuals’ attitudes to their work and working lives, this theory posits that there is a direct correlation between job-related attitudes and perceived proximity of one’s current perceived job situation to one’s current perceived ideal job situation. The closer one considers oneself currently to be in relation to what one currently considers to be one’s ‘ideal job’, the more positive will be one’s job-related attitudes. Proximity theory encompasses what Evans (2018) calls the ‘compromising-uncompromising’ work context continuum, whereby one’s work context is located somewhere on a ‘compromising’- ‘uncompromising’ continuum. Compromising work contexts are those in which the individual must compromise on her/his values, ideals and aspirations; uncompromising work contexts, on the other hand, are more closely aligned with the individual’s values, ideals and aspirations – which, as a result, are less likely to be compromised. The more uncompromising their work context, the more positive are people’s job-related attitudes – and vice versa. Pursuit of proximity to one’s ‘ideal’ work situation involves, inter alia, pursuit of an uncompromising work context.
The paper discusses institutional policy – specifically, one of greater specialisation for academics, allowing them to narrow their foci in order to play to their strengths, with a view to feeling less ‘stretched’ and being more able to achieve more, by having fewer priorities to attend to. The author also presents the notion of what she calls ‘employee-centrism’, as a workplace cultural shift, increasingly prevalent in the post-COVID workplace, that is discernible in organisation studies research, and which, applied to education contexts, may prevent tragedies such as the suicide of headteacher Ruth Perry, who feared an imminent downgrading from her school’s OFSTED inspection.
| Period | 8 Sept 2025 → 10 Sept 2025 |
|---|---|
| Held at | British Sociological Association, United Kingdom |
| Degree of Recognition | International |