Conference Agenda

Research Aims and Questions

The academic profession is a crucial area of research in higher education, encompassing topics such as academic identities and roles and career trajectories. In recent years, the challenges faced by academics—driven by a performativity-oriented academic environment—have also garnered increasing attention within the field. Since the Carnegie Foundation’s academic profession survey was introduced in the early 1990s, researchers have explored many aspects of academics' experiences and perceptions, adopting more international and comparative perspectives that consider institutional and disciplinary contexts. International scholars have also conducted follow-up comparative surveys, such as the Changing Academic Profession (CAP) surveys in 2007-2008 and the Academic Profession in the Knowledge Society (APIKS) in 2017-2018 (Aarrevaara et al., 2021). Despite the growing interest and scholarly efforts related to the academic profession, there remains a limited understanding of how this research area has developed historically and geographically. Identifying the evolution of research in terms of topics and methodologies, as well as exploring leading scholarly works in the field, is essential for advancing future studies of the academic profession. Thus, this study proposes three research questions:

1) How has the volume and methodologies of academic profession research evolved globally between 1980 and 2025?

2) How are authorship structures and collaboration patterns distributed across countries, and how have these patterns changed over time?

3) What are the implications of these patterns for the geographical representation and research leadership in academic profession studies?

Data Sources and Review Design

The analysis is based on a systematic review of English-language academic profession research published between 1980 and 2025. Two primary data sources are used: the Scopus database and the Changing Academy – The Changing Academic Profession in International Comparative Perspective book series. The initial search yielded 1,048 records, including journal articles and academic book chapters. A stepwise screening process was applied following a title–abstract–full-text sequence. For edited volumes, where chapter titles may reflect organizational roles of the book rather than research focus, inclusion decisions were guided by content relevance rather than titles alone. After removing duplicates and irrelevant records, the final analytical sample includes 833 publications. Each publication was coded for publication type, year, country affiliation of the first author, authorship structure, and collaboration mode, enabling a multi-dimensional analysis of the field’s development.

Preliminary results

First, the field exhibits a prolonged period of low and relatively stable output prior to the mid-2000s. The publication activity reached a peak around 2015, driven by a substantial increase in book chapters, largely attributable to the publication of edited volumes associated with the CAP project. Journal articles also grew steadily during that period but at a more moderate pace. The post-2018 period was characterized by moderate annual fluctuations, with journal articles becoming an increasingly prominent and consistent component of the literature relative to book chapters.

Second, methodologically, academic profession research was characterized by a strong dual orientation: qualitative and quantitative studies each accounted for roughly half of the overall literature. When disaggregated by publication type, journal articles showed a modest qualitative predominance, whereas book chapters leaned more heavily toward quantitative approaches, indicating the significance of cross-cultural quantitative surveys conducted by the CAP project.

Third, cross-national variation was evident when research capacity and the publication volume were analyzed together. For example, some countries exhibited broad participation by many authors (e.g. the United States and the United Kingdom), whereas others relied on repeated contributions from a smaller core of scholars (e.g. Finland).

Fourth, collaboration patterns also reflect nationally embedded research structures rather than global convergence. Particularly, among book chapters, international collaborations account for a substantial share of publications, most notably in Australia and Finland. At the same time, single-authored chapters dominate in countries such as Japan and the United Kingdom.

Contributions and Implications

This study makes three main contributions. First, it deepens the understanding of the development of academic profession research as an area of study in global higher education, clarifying how publication dynamics have evolved across various regions and countries over four decades. Second, by foregrounding authorship and collaboration as analytical dimensions, it offers a structural perspective on research capacity and knowledge leadership in the area of academic profession studies. Third, the findings establish a research foundation for future analyses in this particular field.

Scientific knowledge production is expected to solve complex societal challenges such as climate change, population growth and social inequality. These tasks require cooperation across disciplines, institutions, countries and continents. Russia's war against Ukraine and geopolitical tensions between countries and continents, such as the strategic and technical competition between US and China, has in many European countries led to security measures and legislation for research cooperation between countries that partly contribute to the exclusion of researchers from countries such as Iran and China. Within the framework of such developments, scientific knowledge production is characterized by demanding and contradictory expectations - which can have great significance for the role and status of the academic profession (Vabø & Schmidt 2025, Fjærstad & Gåsemyr 2024).

University employees who combine research and teaching are considered a distinct academic profession, despite the group representing disciplines with very different knowledge content (Teichler, Aritmoto and Cummings 2013). The academic profession is characterized by a shared set of values, particularly the freedom to determine the content of their research and teaching. However, we have limited research-based knowledge about how the securitization of universities, with changes in political and administrative principles for governance and management of the sector impacts the role and status of the academic profession.

This paper analyzes a unique set of interview data with academic staff representing disciplines in Norwegian universities, such as maritime technology and climate research, to understand how they experience and manage new security routines within their fields of research. Topics addressed are the need of the academic profession for developing new modes of collaboration with institutional leadership and security authorities, implications for research and teaching content, recruitment practices, international collaboration, and work environment. How is responsibility addressed in knowledge relationships, and what ethical and security-related challenges apply generally and specifically to the discipline, such as security clearance and export control? How do changes in regulations and guidelines impact one’s practice as an academic?

Analysis of data is inspired by an historical institutional perspective, emphasizing how distinctive dimensions of the institutional context, including the profession's identity, influence how securitization is understood and implemented in practice. The interview data is also contextualized with necessary relevant written sources, policy documents, regulations, and public debates as well as register data on R&D staff- and publication patterns. The study is part of the project R-INSECURE: Responsible Internationalization, Inclusion, and National Security in Norwegian Research Organizations in a Changing Geopolitical Landscape, funded by The Norwegian Research Council.

The maintenance of a strong connection between teaching and research has long been a professed principle of academia, enshrined as inseparable in international agreements like the Magna Charta Universitatum (1988), and reconfirmed in its later update (2020). Yet despite their supposed inseparability, studies continue to provide evidence of their separation (Geschwind & Broström, 2015; Hattie & Marsh, 1996; Macheridis et al., 2024; Weenink et al., 2024). Partly, this divergence between principle and practice is due to competing perceptions of what, exactly, is linked or separated in the teaching-research nexus. There are substantial differences in how the relationship is conceptualised (Visser‐Wijnveen et al., 2010) as well as in how it is operationalised and measured (Cao et al., 2023; Paulsson & Macheridis, 2023). As Verburgh et al. (2007) argue, research findings in this field are highly contingent upon the methodological lens through which the phenomenon is examined.

This study contributes to the ongoing discussion of the linkage or separation of teaching and research by seeking to avoid the problem of definition, leaving the conceptualisation and operationalisation open to interpretation. The vehicle for this attempt is survey data from the international Academic Profession in the Knowledge-Based Society (APIKS) project (Aarrevaara et al., 2021). Among other things, this data includes items asking respondents for 1) the typical number of hours per week spent in teaching and research activities, 2) their balance of interests between teaching and research, and 3) their view on whether teaching and research are compatible endeavours.

Drawing on both descriptive and inferential statistical analyses, the study explores how academics evaluate the compatibility between teaching and research. Specifically, it investigates whether positive or negative perceptions of this compatibility are systematically associated with individuals’ professional interests or with the practical distribution of their workload. The study specifically utilises a single-country subset of the survey data for this comparison, to enable contextualisation of the results to the structural conditions set by the higher education system. This subset is provided by Sweden, in light of its Higher Education Act, which demands “close links between research, and courses and study programmes” (Swedish Council for Higher Education, 2025), thereby placing regulatory emphasis on the teaching-research nexus.

The results of the study provide insights into how perspectives on teaching and research vary in relation to conditions of both principle, in the form of interest, and practice, in the form of workload. In doing so, it contributes to the scholarly discussion by anchoring evaluations of the teaching-research nexus in individual experiences aggregated into collective patterns.