Peter James Bentley, Hamish Coates, Ian R. Dobson, Leo Goedegebuure, and V. Lynn Meek (eds): Job satisfaction around the academic world

Abstract

This book, on academic job satisfaction across 11 higher education systems, makes a valuable addition to Springer’s Changing Academy book series, which itself is proving to be highly informative in explaining the changing nature of the academic profession. The contributors to the book use data from the Changing Academic Profession (CAP) survey of 2007 (Teichler et al. 2013) to examine the impact on academic job satisfaction of a wide range of variables. The higher education systems addressed include those of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, Portugal, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Each system has a chapter written on it by appropriate national experts. In addition, there are two general chapters, one an introduction and the other a conclusion, written by the editors. Though discussed explicitly in only a few of the chapters, Hagedorn’s (2000) perspective on academic job satisfaction provides the conceptual framework for the book. Hagedorn proposed that both mediators and triggers affect academic job satisfaction. Mediators include motivators and hygienes (intrinsic and extrinsic rewards associated with one’s work), together with demographic characteristics and environmental conditions; and triggers are significant events, such as receiving a promotion, moving institution or starting a family, that affect an individual’s reference point. This perspective contributes valuably to the book by allowing for the identification of a range of potentially salient variables. The book reports some interesting findings. It records, for example, that a majority (62 %) of academics across the systems investigated were satisfied with their jobs. Indeed, only 15 % of them agreed that ‘if I had it to do over again, I would not become an academic’. This finding is interesting because it occurs against a background of rapid and sometimes turbulent change in many of the higher education systems addressed. The CAP survey itself was motivated by a concern about the impact of change on the academic profession. In the concluding chapter, the editors comment that academics are known to