Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor

Gary Rhoades is Professor of Higher Education at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona.

Managed Professionals is a source book on the negotiated terms of faculty work and a sociological analysis of the restructuring of faculty as a professional workforce. Based on a sample of forty-five percent of the more than 470 negotiated faculty agreements nationwide (which cover over 242,000 faculty), the book offers extensive examples and analysis of contractual provisions on: salary structures; retrenchment; use and working conditions of part-time faculty; use of educational technology (in distance education); outside employment; and intellectual property rights. Focused on the ongoing negotiation of professional autonomy and managerial discretion, the book offers insights into the broad restructuring of faculty, with conclusions that extend beyond unionized faculty to all of academe. Faculty are managed professionals, and are increasingly so. Managers have much flexibility, and as they seek to reorganize colleges and universities, the exercise of their flexibility serves to heighten the divisions within the academic profession and to reconfigure the professional workforce on campus.