This book explores the perceptions of academic staff and representatives of institutional leadership about the changes in academic careers and academic work experienced in recent years. It emphasizes standardisation and differentiation of academic career paths, impacts of new forms of quality management on academic work, changes in recruitment, employment and working conditions, and academics' perceptions of their professional contexts. The book demonstrates a growing diversity within the academic profession and new professional roles inhabiting a space which is neither located in the core business of teaching and research nor at the top level management and leadership. The new higher education professionals tend to be important change agents within the higher education institutions not only fulfilling service and bridging functions but also streamlining academic work to make a contribution to the reputation and competitiveness of the institution as a whole. Based on interviews with academic staff, this book explores the situation in eight European countries: Austria, Croatia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Romania, and Switzerland.

Which inequalities characterise today higher education' systems, which one do they produce and which one do they fight? This book answers this three sides question by developing a comprehensive approach to depict and frame inequalities in and by higher education. By doing so, it provides researchers and policies makers with a tool to think and fight inequalities. Drawing on a multilevel and international perspective, this book analyses the inequalities issue at three levels (Access to higher education, Success in higher education and Access to academic careers as an illustration of inequalities in access to the marketplace) by using complementary disciplines and approaches. Besides national histories of higher education and their path dependencies, societal specificities and their understanding of what diversity means and how it can be measured, international pressures to admit common norms, inequalities are today thought in an always more multidimensional, qualitative way. Relying on cases studies, this book takes the reader through the contemporary complexity of higher education inequalities to finally provide him with a conceptual scheme of reading the dimensions weighting on inequalities and think the potential tools to address them.