Applying Hagedorn’s Conceptual Framework to Examine Job Satisfaction among Faculty at the University of Sarajevo

Faculty around the world shares some underlying commonalities by virtue of sharing a profession, but we cannot draw informed parallels because culture, style and history of higher education, and faculty socialization play a significant role in how the faculty life is lived and experienced. We know quite a bit about faculty working in developed and developing nations, but the current snapshot lacks perspectives from academics living in transitional nations. This in-progress study will survey faculty employed at the University of Sarajevo, located in Bosnia and Hercegovina, to establish a baseline of their demographic profile and to describe their job satisfaction using Hagedorn’s conceptual framework. This study will test the applicability of Hagedorn’s framework in non-US settings and expand our understanding of the causes and outcomes related to faculty satisfaction.

Faculty Socialization and Gaining Tenure

In higher education, ethical principles should guide administrators to develop policies and procedures that are just and fair to faculty, administrators, staff, and students and, as well, consider the needs of the various stakeholders affected by them. One example of a process that should be planned and carried out in an ethical way is the tenure-track process for faculty members. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss ethical issues and challenges institutions of higher education face in the tenure process and in socializing new full-time tenure track faculty members into academe. The authors discuss the acculturation process into the academy, then focus on interpersonal interactions and relationships, including mentoring and other supportive relationships and gender and minority issues that may affect the tenure process and acculturation into the academy. They conclude with future concerns and discussion of the ethical considerations for socializing faculty members into academe.

Sponsored Research Indirect Costs: A Single-Site Case Study of Public Research University STEM Faculty Members’ Perspectives

This explanatory case study investigated the phenomenon of one institution’s public research university STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) faculty members’ perspectives on indirect cost recovery from research grant funding. The explanatory scheme incorporated organizational culture, faculty socialization, and political bargaining models in the conceptual framework. The analysis indicated that faculty socialization and organizational culture were the most dominant themes; political bargaining emerged as significantly less prominent. Public research university STEM faculty are most concerned about the survival of their research programs and the discovery facilitated by their research programs; they resort to conjecture regarding the utility of indirect cost recovery. The findings direct institutional administrators to consider less emphasis on compliance and hierarchical authority and focus on greater communication and clarity in budget processes and organizational decision-making when working with expert professionals such as science faculty; for higher education researchers, the findings indicate a need for more sophisticated models to understand organizational dependency on expert professionals.

Learner-Centered Outcomes in Subject-Centered Institutions: Metaphors for Muggle Learning

Learner-centered education faces many challenges when introduced to university centers where faculty socialization into subject-centered teaching is the dominant ethos. Three warning metaphors drawn from the literature of J K Rowling are used to illuminate challenges associated with learner-centered education. The first metaphor focuses attention on ways in which institutional structures in disciplinary education are frequently altered confronting faculty and students with organizational turbulence. The second metaphor warns that individual learners easily distracted from family and personal career goals. The final metaphor highlights ways in which learning – to be of value to students – requires personal ownership and fit.

Faculty Socialization into the Advising Role: An Examination of Information and Information Sources that Shape Role Learning

Faculty advisors at four institutions completed questionnaires designed to categorize the information they received when learning advising responsibilities. They identified role-set members who provided this information and its usefulness by type. They receive more organizational (policies and procedures) information than any other type of advising information, which they rate high in usefulness. While they receive formal appraisal information less often than any other type and rate it lowest in usefulness, faculty members receive informal appraisal messages from students. The findings warrant further investigation of the influence of students as socialization agents in the faculty advisor role-learning process.