This panel brings together editors and coordinators of three recent volumes produced or “in progress” within the Academic Profession in the Knowledge-based Society (APIKS) network and published in Springer’s “The Changing Academy” book series: Governance, Management and the Academic Profession; Performativity, Performance Measures and the Academic Profession; and From Early Careers to Senior Roles: The Complexities of Academic Work and Careers Across the Globe. All of these volumes involve original comparative analyses drawing on a unique international dataset: responses to a common questionnaire administered to academics in more than twenty countries. than a book launch, the session is designed as an integrative discussion that mobilises the trilogy as a shared reference point to synthesise cross-cutting insights on how academic work is organised, evaluated, and experienced across higher education systems and world regions.

The panel builds a single narrative thread that connects two of the conference tracks: governance and management (Track 2) and academic profession and professional development (Track 4). We propose to read the trilogy in the following sequence: governance → performance measures → careers. This order highlights how evolving governance arrangements and managerial dynamics shape the context of academic work; how new forms of performativity and performance measurement translate institutional and system-level expectations into concrete indicators, targets, and accountability practices; and how these pressures and incentives are then reflected in academic careers, from early-career stages to senior roles under different labour-market and disciplinary conditions. While the panel will note common themes and tensions, they will also discuss some of the significant variations in these broad shifts by national system, including differences in the implications for academic work and careers.

To anchor the discussion, the panel will explicitly engage with selected guiding questions from both tracks, including: how institutional autonomy can be upheld alongside growing demands for accountability and “value for money”; what leadership and governance challenges are emerging for higher education institutions; how intermediary agencies influence governance and academic work - particularly by early career researchers in relation to hiring, workload, evaluation, and progression; what transformations of the academic profession are visible locally and globally; and how the changing nature of academic work affects the research–teaching nexus, faculty well-being, work pressure, diversity, autonomy, and professional development opportunities.

The discussion will adopt a multi-level lens—system/government, institutions, and academics as actors—to connect structural changes with lived professional realities. Short, complementary interventions by panelists will be followed by a moderated dialogue to surface convergences and tensions across contexts, and an extended Q&A to bring participants’ experiences into the conversation. The intended outcome is a coherent, comparative understanding of how governing and measuring academic work reshapes career trajectories and professional development across contemporary higher education.