Higher education (HE) has a long association with many professions and industries yet the demand for professional-facing HE provision has never been greater with public services, such as nursing and policing, now requiring mandatory HE qualifications (Bekhradnia and Beech, 2018) in parallel with a rapid growth in degree apprenticeships (Universities UK, 2019). Consequently, there has been an expanding need for experience-rich professionals to transition into full-time academic roles. These practitioner academics (PAs) are not in themselves a homogenous group as they span a range of professions that may not have been traditionally associated with HE. This thesis adopts an ethnographic, narrative, interpretivist approach to capture the experiences of sixteen full-time neophyte and established PAs from multiple UK based higher education institutions (HEIs) from a diversity of professional backgrounds. Through conversational-expository methods – blog posts and comments, semi-structured interviews, and conversations on the model of the BBC’s Listening Project (BBC, 2017) – the narrative accounts draw upon ‘thinking tools’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1989:50), predominantly of field, habitus, and symbolic capital, as a framework of inquiry. This thesis adds to the theoretical understanding of, and practical approaches to, the limited body of research on the experiences of this diverse workforce in crossing disciplines and boundaries and entering an academic role. Findings revealed that PAs experience a distinctive transition of field, habitus, and symbolic capital. Yet it emerged that this unique experience of change is often overlooked by HEIs in their induction support. This thesis makes the argument that recognition of the rich diversity of backgrounds to an academic role is required to frame effective induction support and makes recommendations for implementation. Furthermore, this research demonstrates this sample of PAs’ previous involvement of working predominantly in public service or industry bringing a familiarity of working within a neo-liberal ideology operationalised through new public managerialism. PAs are uniquely situated to benefit HEIs as a resource to harmonise discourses and practices through determined government reform, such as the Higher Education and Research Act (Great Britain, 2017), blending state and market involvement in the sector.
Permanent link to this resource: https://doi.org/10.24384/wbfh-cv92
Kitchener, Mary
Supervisors: Dalrymple, Roger; Summerscales, Ian
School of EducationFaculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2020
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