Bruce Macfarlane
Biographic Data
| ID | 1499649 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bruce Macfarlane |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bruce |
| FAMILY NAME | Macfarlane |
| SIGNATURE | MACFARLANE B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bristol |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9399-6155 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 214 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Janus-like tensions for universities in Hong Kong
Universities in Hong Kong are Janus-like by both facing-out and facing-in. They must navigate growing socio-political tensions in balancing their local, national, regional and international obligations and ambitions. While Hong Kong has long enjoyed a reputation as an international business and education hub its accelerated integration into the Chinese mainland means that local universities need to adapt to a range of changes and pressures includ…
Co-authorship as a traded commodity
It is estimated that almost a half of all authors listed in co-authored papers do not satisfy widely adopted international guidelines with respect to legitimate co-authorship. In order to better understand the micro-politics of co-authorship, this study explores the publication patterns of early career academics (ECAs) working in selected research-intensive universities in Hong Kong, Canada and the UK. The results reveal that co-authorship is a t…
Beyond Cudos and Decay
The normative landscape of academic research is increasingly fragmented. Classical CUDOS norms and counternorms coexist across profession, market, corporation, state and community logics, yet existing scholarship rarely explains how these norms are patterned, how they interact, or how tensions between them are mediated. This conceptual article develops an institutional logics wheel of research norms: a relational, spatial heuristic grounded in in…
Decolonising and re-imagining the concept of the international academic
This conceptual paper problematises the notion of the ‘international academic’, a phrase that is strongly influenced by a post-colonial legacy. It is a term of prestige based almost entirely on an academic’s de jure race, nationality or citizenship rather than a person’s de facto international scholarly reputation. In order to decolonise the concept, it is argued that objective criteria, including citation data, and esteem markers such as keynote…
The duty to explain
This paper defines a university teacher’s ‘duty to explain’ as a way of developing student autonomy. This builds on the idea that in other professions, such as medicine or law, there is a duty of care towards the client to explain the full facts and risks to a patient or client. The university teacher has a similar duty towards the student to explain all perspectives and to problematise claims to knowledge. This approach makes it possible for the…
Crises in Global Higher Education
A typology of critique about higher education teaching
This paper develops a typology for understanding forms of critique about teaching in higher education by drawing on a thematic analysis of papers published in a specialist journal between 1996 and 2023. Based on an analysis of more than 1,000 papers, three broad conceptual categories of critique are identified, labelled as functional pragmatism, learning theory, and critical theory. Functional pragmatism is largely data-driven and concerned with …
Academic Cronyism and Publication in Journal Special Issues
While academic cronyism is an acknowledged phenomenon it is rarely the subject of research in higher education except by reference to staff recruitment and academic in-breeding. It constitutes a ‘wicked’ problem that is complex to understand and investigate since it is based on networks of individuals that are grounded on reciprocal professional benefits that are often private or at least partly hidden from view. Drawing on social network theory,…
Why choice of teaching method is essential to academic freedom
The paper sets out a conceptual argument that the choice of teaching method is part of the freedom to teach in higher education. It enters into a dialogue with the views of Stephen Finn in a paper published in Teaching in Higher Education in which he argues that academic freedom should be limited in respect to teaching methods. The concept of pedagogic self-governance is linked to the importance of choice of teaching method and illustrated by ref…
The ideology of crisis in higher education
Higher education seems to be in a perpetual state of ‘crisis’. The many hundreds of books and papers containing this specific, or other relevantly similar expressions, convey a sense of fear and angst. Yet, what are these various crises about, and which values and beliefs are seen as threatened or ‘under attack’? This paper will provide an analysis of the ‘crisis’ literature and identify four major crisis themes – massification , marketisation, r…
The Decay of Merton’s scientific norms and the new academic ethos
This article provides a conceptual reformulation of Merton’s scientific ethos widely known by the acronym CUDOS (i.e. communism, universalism, disinterestedness and organised scepticism). While Merton perceived the threat to the autonomy of science as coming from outside the walls of academe, mainly in the form of nationalism and racism, the subsequent rise of neoliberalism and global market forces means that the scientific ethos is being undermi…
Three perspectives on leadership in higher education
There is a fragmented and complex literature about higher education leadership representing a diversity of ideological perspectives about its nature and purposes. Internationally, the literature has been strongly shaped by the importation of concepts and theories from management studies and a tradition of scholarship led by university leader-researchers. Drawing on an extensive literature review—drawing on over 250 books, book chapters, reports a…
The (re)invention of tradition in higher education research
Reflection on the meaning of the word ‘tradition’, and related terms such as ‘traditional’, is conceptually complex but has been subject to limited critical scrutiny within academic discourse. The evidence of this study, drawing on the theory of tradition and a database of all 6947 papers published in Studies in Higher Education between 1976 and 2021, is that higher education researchers make extensive use of these words in a routinised and often…
The academic sabbatical as a symbol of change in higher education
The sabbatical provides an important illustration of the changing nature of academic life and is a symbol of the growing demands of performativity. Drawing on historical literature and archival sources concerning university sabbaticals at Australian and English universities, the paper demonstrates that underlying assumptions about its purposes have changed slowly, but markedly, over time. A shift has occurred from a conception of the sabbatical a…
The closed academy? Guild power and academic social class
Academic inbreeding is a deeply ingrained practice which needs to be understood by reference to the medieval guilds. Drawing on the guild concept and associated benefits of forms of capital, a distinction is drawn between ‘guild‐route’ academics who have followed a privileged, linear path into academe and their ‘non‐guild’ counterparts who tend to enter later in their career from the professions or industry, often without a PhD. The tendency to r…
A voyage around the ideological islands of higher education research
This paper explores the ideological orientations of higher education (HE) researchers in the form of a visual map, including three principal ‘islands’ – Pragmatists Peninsula, Reformists Rock and Dystopians Retreat. The development of the HE research field in general, illustrated by the last 40 years of scholarship within Higher Education Research & Development in particular, is explained in relation to this metaphorical seascape. The analysis id…
The conceit of activism in the illiberal university
The popular image of activism in the university involves students and academics campaigning for social justice and resisting the neo-liberalisation of the university. Yet activism has been subtly corporatised through the migration of corporate social responsibility from the private sector into the university, a trend that may be illustrated by reference to the growing influence of research ‘grand challenges’ (GCs). Attracting both government and …
The spirit of research
The reinvention of the university as a research-focused institution has transformed the way in which research is defined in practice. It is now widely explained in terms of a narrow set of performative expectations. This paper draws on historical literature to trace the hollowing out of research from a broad, though often sceptical, conception shaped by the liberal education tradition to one that is now expressed and evaluated almost exclusively …
Myths about students in higher education
Myths about students in higher education pervade both popular and academic literature. Such folklore thrives due to the belated development of systematic enquiry into higher education as a field of academic study, the neglect of an historical perspective, and an over-reliance on opinion-based scholarship and interview data drawn from University lecturers as a proxy for interpreting student attitudes. This paper analyses three popular myths about …
The right to teach at university
The right to teach at university is a distinctive philosophical and legal conundrum but a largely unexplored question. Drawing on Humboltdian principles, the legitimacy of the university teacher stems from their continuing engagement in research rather than possession of academic and teaching qualifications alone. This means that the right to teach needs to be understood as a privilege and implies that it is always provisional, requiring an ongoi…
The CV as a symbol of the changing nature of academic life
The effects of performativity in academic life are widely discussed and debated. Yet most analysis relies on conventional forms of empirical enquiry, notably interviews and questionnaires. The curriculum vitae (CV) is a comparatively neglected source of insight into the changing nature of academic life that offers a fresh insight. Drawing on the CVs of three generations of UK academics, this exploratory study analyses changing patterns of self-re…
The neoliberal academic
Neoliberalism is invariably presented as a governing regime of market and competition-based systems rather than as a set of migratory practices that are re-setting the ethical standards of the academy. This article seeks to explore the way in which neoliberalism is shifting the prevailing values of the academy by drawing on two illustrations: the death of disinterestedness and the obfuscation of authorship. While there was never a golden age when…
Legitimation, professionalisation and accountability in higher education studies
The core themes of research into higher education studies (HES) have previously been identified through quantitative approaches focused on publication patterns, but there is a lack of fine-grained, qualitative analysis about the development of the field. This paper provides an intergenerational analysis of the emergence of HES in the UK since the 1960s drawing on autobiographical accounts. It reveals that many who conduct HES research retain a st…
Women professors and the academic housework trap
Women constitute just over one fifth of full professors in UK higher education and whilst work has emerged in recent years on professors as leaders, there has been comparatively little research about how this under-represented cadre define and practise their role as intellectual leaders. This paper seeks to analyse how women see their role as full professors through autobiographical accounts of their intellectual and career histories via intervie…
Critiques of Student Engagement
Freedom to Learn
The freedom of students to learn at university is being eroded by a performative culture that fails to respect their rights to engage and develop as autonomous adults. Instead, students are being restricted in how they learn, when they learn and what they learn by the so-called student engagement movement. Compulsory attendance registers, class contribution grading, group project work and reflective learning exercises based on expectations of sel…
The neoliberal academic
Neoliberalism is invariably presented as a governing regime of market and competition-based systems rather than as a set of migratory practices that are re-setting the ethical standards of the academy. This article seeks to explore the way in which neoliberalism is shifting the prevailing values of the academy by drawing on two illustrations: the death of disinterestedness and the obfuscation of authorship. While there was never a golden age when…
Women professors and the academic housework trap
Women constitute just over one fifth of full professors in UK higher education and whilst work has emerged in recent years on professors as leaders, there has been comparatively little research about how this under-represented cadre define and practise their role as intellectual leaders. This paper seeks to analyse how women see their role as full professors through autobiographical accounts of their intellectual and career histories via intervie…
Defining and Rewarding Academic Citizenship
The concept of ‘academic citizenship’ reflects different interpretations of the civic purposes of the university. However, activities associated with this concept are largely under?conceptualised and poorly rewarded in academic life. Based on research with an international group of academics, this paper defines the meanings of ‘service’ and ‘academic citizenship’, and outlines the implications for academics serving five overlapping communities: s…
Professors as intellectual leaders
The literature on leadership in higher education is predominantly concerned with the role of formally designated senior managers such as heads of department and deans of faculty. By contrast, relatively little attention has focused on those performing informal and distributed forms of leadership, such as (full) university professors. This article draws on the results of an online questionnaire and interviews to explore the leadership role of prof…
The ethics of multiple authorship
The allocation of authorship credit in academic publication raises complex ethical issues but is comparatively under-researched, particularly in the social sciences. The paper analyses the results of research into attitudes to multiple authorship based on a survey questionnaire of academics working in education faculties in universities in Hong Kong. The results illustrate the way in which intellectual contribution is often overridden by consider…
Communism, Universalism and Disinterestedness
Critiques of Student Engagement
The last judgement
The literature on leadership in higher education is focused mainly on senior academic leaders with managerial roles. It largely excludes informal and distributed forms of intellectual leadership offered by full professors among others. This article explores the concept of intellectual leadership using academic obituaries. A total of 63 obituaries were collected from Times Higher Education published between 2008 and 2010. These identify the import…
The academic sabbatical as a symbol of change in higher education
The sabbatical provides an important illustration of the changing nature of academic life and is a symbol of the growing demands of performativity. Drawing on historical literature and archival sources concerning university sabbaticals at Australian and English universities, the paper demonstrates that underlying assumptions about its purposes have changed slowly, but markedly, over time. A shift has occurred from a conception of the sabbatical a…
The CV as a symbol of the changing nature of academic life
The effects of performativity in academic life are widely discussed and debated. Yet most analysis relies on conventional forms of empirical enquiry, notably interviews and questionnaires. The curriculum vitae (CV) is a comparatively neglected source of insight into the changing nature of academic life that offers a fresh insight. Drawing on the CVs of three generations of UK academics, this exploratory study analyses changing patterns of self-re…
The right to teach at university
The right to teach at university is a distinctive philosophical and legal conundrum but a largely unexplored question. Drawing on Humboltdian principles, the legitimacy of the university teacher stems from their continuing engagement in research rather than possession of academic and teaching qualifications alone. This means that the right to teach needs to be understood as a privilege and implies that it is always provisional, requiring an ongoi…
Research Ethics in Japanese Higher Education
The (re)invention of tradition in higher education research
Reflection on the meaning of the word ‘tradition’, and related terms such as ‘traditional’, is conceptually complex but has been subject to limited critical scrutiny within academic discourse. The evidence of this study, drawing on the theory of tradition and a database of all 6947 papers published in Studies in Higher Education between 1976 and 2021, is that higher education researchers make extensive use of these words in a routinised and often…
Legitimation, professionalisation and accountability in higher education studies
The core themes of research into higher education studies (HES) have previously been identified through quantitative approaches focused on publication patterns, but there is a lack of fine-grained, qualitative analysis about the development of the field. This paper provides an intergenerational analysis of the emergence of HES in the UK since the 1960s drawing on autobiographical accounts. It reveals that many who conduct HES research retain a st…
Critical and Alternative Perspectives on Student Engagement
Re-evaluating the Realist Conception of War as a Business Metaphor
Defining and Rewarding Academic Citizenship
The concept of ‘academic citizenship’ reflects different interpretations of the civic purposes of the university. However, activities associated with this concept are largely under?conceptualised and poorly rewarded in academic life. Based on research with an international group of academics, this paper defines the meanings of ‘service’ and ‘academic citizenship’, and outlines the implications for academics serving five overlapping communities: s…
Research Ethics in Japanese Higher Education
Communism, Universalism and Disinterestedness
The Morphing of Academic Practice: Unbundling and the Rise of the Para-academic
Teaching, research and service are the three conventional elements of academic practice, recognised on an international basis. However, evidence suggests that academic practice is rapidly disaggregating, or ‘unbundling’, as a result of a variety of forces including the massification of national systems, the application of technology in teaching and increasing specialisation of academic roles to support a more centralised and performative culture.…
Professors as intellectual leaders
The literature on leadership in higher education is predominantly concerned with the role of formally designated senior managers such as heads of department and deans of faculty. By contrast, relatively little attention has focused on those performing informal and distributed forms of leadership, such as (full) university professors. This article draws on the results of an online questionnaire and interviews to explore the leadership role of prof…
Academic integrity
This article provides a literature review on academic integrity, which encompasses the values, behaviour and conduct of academics in all aspects of their practice. This is a growing area of academic research as a result of the expansion of higher education on a global basis and concerns about standards of professional conduct. The article maps the main strands of research on academic integrity by reference to teaching, research and service using …
The last judgement
The literature on leadership in higher education is focused mainly on senior academic leaders with managerial roles. It largely excludes informal and distributed forms of intellectual leadership offered by full professors among others. This article explores the concept of intellectual leadership using academic obituaries. A total of 63 obituaries were collected from Times Higher Education published between 2008 and 2010. These identify the import…
Freedom to Learn
The freedom of students to learn at university is being eroded by a performative culture that fails to respect their rights to engage and develop as autonomous adults. Instead, students are being restricted in how they learn, when they learn and what they learn by the so-called student engagement movement. Compulsory attendance registers, class contribution grading, group project work and reflective learning exercises based on expectations of sel…
Critiques of Student Engagement
Critical and Alternative Perspectives on Student Engagement
The ethics of multiple authorship
The allocation of authorship credit in academic publication raises complex ethical issues but is comparatively under-researched, particularly in the social sciences. The paper analyses the results of research into attitudes to multiple authorship based on a survey questionnaire of academics working in education faculties in universities in Hong Kong. The results illustrate the way in which intellectual contribution is often overridden by consider…
The neoliberal academic
Neoliberalism is invariably presented as a governing regime of market and competition-based systems rather than as a set of migratory practices that are re-setting the ethical standards of the academy. This article seeks to explore the way in which neoliberalism is shifting the prevailing values of the academy by drawing on two illustrations: the death of disinterestedness and the obfuscation of authorship. While there was never a golden age when…
Legitimation, professionalisation and accountability in higher education studies
The core themes of research into higher education studies (HES) have previously been identified through quantitative approaches focused on publication patterns, but there is a lack of fine-grained, qualitative analysis about the development of the field. This paper provides an intergenerational analysis of the emergence of HES in the UK since the 1960s drawing on autobiographical accounts. It reveals that many who conduct HES research retain a st…
Women professors and the academic housework trap
Women constitute just over one fifth of full professors in UK higher education and whilst work has emerged in recent years on professors as leaders, there has been comparatively little research about how this under-represented cadre define and practise their role as intellectual leaders. This paper seeks to analyse how women see their role as full professors through autobiographical accounts of their intellectual and career histories via intervie…
Myths about students in higher education
Myths about students in higher education pervade both popular and academic literature. Such folklore thrives due to the belated development of systematic enquiry into higher education as a field of academic study, the neglect of an historical perspective, and an over-reliance on opinion-based scholarship and interview data drawn from University lecturers as a proxy for interpreting student attitudes. This paper analyses three popular myths about …
The right to teach at university
The right to teach at university is a distinctive philosophical and legal conundrum but a largely unexplored question. Drawing on Humboltdian principles, the legitimacy of the university teacher stems from their continuing engagement in research rather than possession of academic and teaching qualifications alone. This means that the right to teach needs to be understood as a privilege and implies that it is always provisional, requiring an ongoi…
The CV as a symbol of the changing nature of academic life
The effects of performativity in academic life are widely discussed and debated. Yet most analysis relies on conventional forms of empirical enquiry, notably interviews and questionnaires. The curriculum vitae (CV) is a comparatively neglected source of insight into the changing nature of academic life that offers a fresh insight. Drawing on the CVs of three generations of UK academics, this exploratory study analyses changing patterns of self-re…
The conceit of activism in the illiberal university
The popular image of activism in the university involves students and academics campaigning for social justice and resisting the neo-liberalisation of the university. Yet activism has been subtly corporatised through the migration of corporate social responsibility from the private sector into the university, a trend that may be illustrated by reference to the growing influence of research ‘grand challenges’ (GCs). Attracting both government and …
The spirit of research
The reinvention of the university as a research-focused institution has transformed the way in which research is defined in practice. It is now widely explained in terms of a narrow set of performative expectations. This paper draws on historical literature to trace the hollowing out of research from a broad, though often sceptical, conception shaped by the liberal education tradition to one that is now expressed and evaluated almost exclusively …
The closed academy? Guild power and academic social class
Academic inbreeding is a deeply ingrained practice which needs to be understood by reference to the medieval guilds. Drawing on the guild concept and associated benefits of forms of capital, a distinction is drawn between ‘guild‐route’ academics who have followed a privileged, linear path into academe and their ‘non‐guild’ counterparts who tend to enter later in their career from the professions or industry, often without a PhD. The tendency to r…
A voyage around the ideological islands of higher education research
This paper explores the ideological orientations of higher education (HE) researchers in the form of a visual map, including three principal ‘islands’ – Pragmatists Peninsula, Reformists Rock and Dystopians Retreat. The development of the HE research field in general, illustrated by the last 40 years of scholarship within Higher Education Research & Development in particular, is explained in relation to this metaphorical seascape. The analysis id…
The academic sabbatical as a symbol of change in higher education
The sabbatical provides an important illustration of the changing nature of academic life and is a symbol of the growing demands of performativity. Drawing on historical literature and archival sources concerning university sabbaticals at Australian and English universities, the paper demonstrates that underlying assumptions about its purposes have changed slowly, but markedly, over time. A shift has occurred from a conception of the sabbatical a…
Why choice of teaching method is essential to academic freedom
The paper sets out a conceptual argument that the choice of teaching method is part of the freedom to teach in higher education. It enters into a dialogue with the views of Stephen Finn in a paper published in Teaching in Higher Education in which he argues that academic freedom should be limited in respect to teaching methods. The concept of pedagogic self-governance is linked to the importance of choice of teaching method and illustrated by ref…
The ideology of crisis in higher education
Higher education seems to be in a perpetual state of ‘crisis’. The many hundreds of books and papers containing this specific, or other relevantly similar expressions, convey a sense of fear and angst. Yet, what are these various crises about, and which values and beliefs are seen as threatened or ‘under attack’? This paper will provide an analysis of the ‘crisis’ literature and identify four major crisis themes – massification , marketisation, r…
Sociology (29 works) · Political science (26 works) · Higher education (24 works) · Law (21 works) · Higher Education Governance and Development (17 works) · Pedagogy (17 works) · Social science (17 works) · Evaluation of Teaching Practices (13 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Higher Education Practises and Engagement (11 works)