Second-Career Academics and the Influence of ‘Professionalism’ in Higher Education: A Phenomenographic Study in STEM

Abstract

This article examines the phenomenon whereby ‘professionalism’ is used as a concept in higher education (HE), specifically regarding HE’s relationships with professions in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). We examine the implications for human development arising from the influence of professionalism in HE, presenting the qualitative interpretations of second-career academics, a term we use to describe university teaching staff recruited for their prior industrial experience in STEM professions. Using a phenomenographic approach, we examine the conception of second-career academics and how professionalism influences educational policy and practice in HE. We present four successively inclusive conceptions of experiences, with professionalism expressed as making normative judgements of students’ interactions and behaviours, negotiating those interactions and behaviours with students, critiquing the professional applicability of curricula and activities, and changing those curricula and activities to suit the needs of STEM professions. These conceptions expose challenges related to policy and practice and the roles undertaken by second-career academics, including their enculturation of students into the normative expectations of STEM professions, their influence on the apparent correspondence between HE and work in STEM, and their marketing of STEM professions inside HE.

1. Introduction

1.1. Professionalism in Higher Education

This article contributes to the scholarship on ‘professionalism’ in higher education (HE). In particular, it describes how a particular group of stakeholders—often known as second-career academics, recruited for their professional experience—conceive of professionalism in their academic practice.

The importance of professionalism in HE, as we consider at length below, has been emphasised by a range of influential stakeholders internationally, notwithstanding the variety of meanings attached to the term. For example, pan-European policy actors, prompted by the political fragmentation associated with ‘serious budget cuts in all European countries … unemployment, growing nationalism and extremism, new tensions between the East and the West’, have emphasised professionalism, and professionalisation, as among the core notions they hope might reinvigorate the integrative Bologna Process [1] (p. 3), an intergovernmental endeavour launched in 1999 to reform HE across Europe and internationally through increasing recognition, exchange and collaboration. The concept of professionalism, moreover, has been extensively pursued by policymakers across states. Camilleri et al. [2] (p. 20), for example, compare state-level policies, illustrating the apparent consensus that professional HE comprises ‘alternating phases of work and study, employability, cooperation with employers, practice-relevant knowledge and applied research’. In many regards, HE has distinct policy drivers from those more directly work-related sectors that recruit educators directly from working professions, such as further education, vocational education and training, workplace learning, and skills training [3]. In the United Kingdom, where our article’s study is situated, professionalism has been increasingly emphasised in HE policy since the influential Dearing Report [4] made formal recommendations to professionalise teaching staff.

Yet, as elaborated below, critical voices have found increasing expression in the literature about the consequences of implementing professionalisation and the particular implications for managing, governing, and organising HE. It has been suggested that professionalism contributes to the growth of goal-oriented approaches to tertiary education, approaches, which serve to promote programmatic teaching and learning, paradoxically ‘undermining the professionalism of university teachers’ reducing them to administering ‘the flow of students in a knowledge factory’ [5] (p. 193). There seems to be a pressing need to understand how university staff experience and conceive of professionalism, with this article seeking to contribute to that emerging understanding, examining professionalism in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). We note that HE strategists are not unilaterally focused on managerialist outcomes—an example of a more ethical orientation being phronesis, the quality of practical wisdom acquired during a transition to professional identity, recognised by Malik et al. [6]. Yet professionalism within HE in STEM is frequently related to the regulation of credentials, with scholarly contributions, which include Seyfried et al.’s [7] examination of professional normativity, in institutional approaches to quality, Macheridis’s [8] study of governance in assessment, contrasting the influences of individual professionalism and institutional authoritarianism, and Aili and Nilsson’s [9] critique of professionalism in subjectivising—as discrete from socialising—learners into their future work settings.

In this article, we set out to describe what professionalism means to a particular set of HE stakeholders, rather than what policymakers or scholars suggest it ought to mean. The people we engage with fall into a category we call second-career academics, by which we mean those ‘reinventing themselves as an academic, after a substantial first career in the professional world’ [10] (p. 3). We focus on them because they are typically recruited into HE based on professional (rather than scholarly) credentials and because they are expected, within institutions, to serve as a vehicle for integrating ‘professionalism’ into the educational experiences of students (ibid.). It is claimed that second-career academics contribute to HE in several ways, by providing practice-informed educational experiences, building bridges between vocational practice and education, and identifying opportunities for research and social interaction [11]. Second-career academics are sometimes described using the terms boundary spanners and pracademics, definitions, which we set aside here since they presume a dichotomy between practice and academia, which will be unhelpful. Our stance—interpretive, non-dualist, and rejecting assumptions of practice dichotomies—is derived from foundational principles of phenomenography, which emphasise second-order accounts of the variety of experiences, thereby elevating people’s experiences of phenomena above the phenomena themselves [12].

In empirical terms, the article draws on the conceptions of second-career academics recruited into university teaching and learning roles on the basis of prior, substantial, industrial experience in STEM fields. It is important to emphasise from the outset, however, that the article is not primarily directed towards an audience of STEM educators. Instead, our core motivation is to understand how the concept of professionalism serves to mediate relations between HE and wider society, particularly in terms of human development. The reason for studying the experiences of second-career academics in STEM is because it is those disciplines, in particular, which have been noted for recruiting academic staff from industry since the 1970s, considered as serving as the advance guard of a trend toward academic capitalism [13]. We examine the conceptions of second-career academics in STEM fields because people in these roles have direct experience of how professionalism imbricates educational practice in settings where it has become well established and where professionalism is taken very seriously.

1.2. Current Scholarship

We consider four strands of the scholarly literature on professionalism in HE as pertinent to our work in this article. These strands are concerned, in turn, with professionalism’s manifestation as an institutional phenomenon, the attendant recruitment of second-career academics, what the term is taken to mean (especially across European HE), and its positioning as part of the ‘offer’ to students.

Debates about the institutional manifestations of professionalism, meanwhile, have emphasised and critiqued issues of policy and performance metrics. European HE institutions, perhaps due to their increasing incorporation into neoliberal regimes, have undertaken disparate initiatives in pursuit of associated performance indicators (see [2] for a discussion of state-sponsored metrics), including endeavours to facilitate collaborative approaches in knowledge transfer [14,15]. Once again, this situation has been sharply contested. University managers, in particular, are accused of prioritising business gains above society’s needs, with education merely ‘pertinent to the needs of employers’ [16] (p. 111), serving to erode society’s ability to meet unexpected challenges. Professionalism’s excessive influence on HE, it is suggested, fails society on numerous counts, including by politicising teaching and learning, focussing on compliance with professional accreditation, and resourcing programmes solely to suit markets [17]. The formalising of boundaries between professions and HE—or sometimes ‘industry’ and HE—is therefore seen as unhelpful. Professionalism seemingly implicates HE institutions in social phenomena. They might be hoped to counter the hegemonic, cultural reproduction of work and learning, the control of status by those in positions of power, and mechanisms for sheltering the activities of certain groups from societal inquiry [18].

One particular way in which professionalism is manifest in HE is via the employment of second-career academics, which is the focus of this article. Perhaps surprisingly, the literature that focusses specifically on this phenomenon does not routinely reflect the variety of debates in the wider literature. The scholarship certainly does emphasise that increasing numbers of ‘professionals’ are moving into academic careers, where they contribute, it is suggested, to marketable workplace orientations within HE, which appeal to students [10]. It is also acknowledged that these second-career academics’ particular spheres of competence can present challenges, both for themselves and for their departmental managers, with diverse conceptions of pedagogical, administrative, pastoral, and other activities that are conducted in academic work, beyond solely research, which tends to focus much current scholarship. On the one hand, second-career academics offer managers rich practitioner experiences, which can be directly deployed to attract and engage students. On the other hand, second-career academics are likely to lack expertise in identifying, funding and publishing curiosity-driven research [19]. These are important points, yet they are typically related to individual training or development, rather than to wider debates of professionalism. Furthermore, while the considerations for recruiting, supporting, retaining, and developing second-career academics seem well-understood—as practical challenges for university managers—it remains unexamined how such practitioners conceive their own work, and the implications for wider debates about professionalism in HE.

With regard to what professionalism is taken to mean, the literature emphasises that a particular narrative has been dominant across many European contexts for some time, one in which professionalism is concerned with the regulation of credentials. In this narrative, professionalism means placing controls on those cultural, technical and ethical credentials that regulate a given group of workers within society; those workers, including many within STEM fields, are thus taken as constituting a ‘profession’ based around various regulated curricula (summarised for several European states by Camilleri et al. [2]). Such work intersects with longstanding discourses about professionalism in academic sociology [20,21], which position the issue as concerning either the specialisation of certain work, beyond the capability of those lacking formal preparation, or the regulation of high-risk work, requiring trust for specific workers to conduct. These ‘profession-oriented’ notions of professionalism have provided an impetus for change and social control in HE, through the ‘development and maintenance of work identities, career decisions and senses of self’ [22] (p. 34). They have also driven exploitative behaviours, which many university teachers ‘would prefer our students did not develop’ [23] (p. 1224). Professionalism thus tends to be framed in HE as the pursuit of characteristics deemed to be attractive to specific fields in the world of work, rather than for broader, less instrumentalist forms of human development, such as engaged global citizenship [22].

Another strand of literature emphasises that professionalism has increasingly come to have purchase in HE as part of the ‘offer’ to students; with institutions positioning particular programmes as ‘professional’ on the basis of claims about graduate employability, vocational applicability, and economic stability [10]. A range of recent studies have examined how university managers might thereby exploit the business gains of professionalism, including marketizing ‘demand-led education’ and the regulation of professional identity [24], emphasising professional visibility and accountability [25], and fostering professional networking as part of the enculturation of students [26]. The vision of HE attendant upon such claims is, of course, highly controversial, since alternate values such as critique, reflexivity, and global citizenship, are seen as being imperilled. Such uses of professionalism have been critiqued even from within the neoliberal tradition, since an emphasis on professions can be taken as diverting attention towards the needs of the state and away from an institution’s markets. Other critiques, with different ideological underpinnings, appeal for resistance to professionalism on the grounds of institutions becoming ‘increasingly tied to the needs of capitalism’ [27] (p. 5).

1.3. The Article’s Contribution

The present article responds, then, to a dearth of research on the perceptions and experiences of second-career academics who have undergone career transitions from being industry professionals to pursuing academic careers. The lacuna in scholarship, it is worth noting, has previously been recognised. Wilson et al. [23] (p. 10), for example, acknowledge that ‘the movement of industry professionals to academia … is clearly an under-researched area’ whilst LaRocco and Bruns [28] (p. 626) note the shortfall of researching experiences of ‘professionals who chose higher education as a second career’. The project we report on involved interviews with second-career academics in STEM in HE institutions in the United Kingdom who, as we outline above, are implicated in debates about professionalism. Our aim is to establish and interpret their conceptions and experiences about the influence of professionalism in HE. We do so by addressing the following research question:

What are the qualitatively different ways that a group of second-career academics, in STEM fields, conceive of professionalism in their institutional practice in HE?

The study we describe below identifies four discrete conceptions of professionalism, derived from a phenomenographic analysis of interviews with second-career academics. These four conceptions position professionalism in HE as a locus of academics’ normative judgements of students’ interactions and behaviours, academics’ negotiations of interactions and behaviours with students, academics critiquing the purpose and applicability of curricula and activities, and academics changing curricula and activities. We position these four conceptions along axes of importance and meaningfulness to the participants, analysing the categories and the variations between them, to underpin our core argument that second-career academics have influential yet contradictory roles in enacting the influence of professionalism in HE. Those roles include the professional enculturation of students, acting to narrow the correspondence of HE and work settings, and the marketing of professions. We believe these to be original contributions, to the literature researching second-career academics and their conceptions of professionalism in HE.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Methodology

To study the experiences of second-career academics, we use the approach of phenomenography, not to be confused with phenomenology (the two are occasionally, and mistakenly, conflated; see Tight’s [29] work for disambiguation). Phenomenography was developed within research of HE, to investigate the different ways in which people experience their encounters with shared phenomena. It is a qualitative, interpretivist, and relatively recent form of research that has emerged since the 1980s. Typically, researchers using phenomenography are motivated by an interest in the qualitative implications of work and learning, with such work understood as characterised by an emphasis on socially negotiated meaning, context-sensitive awareness, and variations in experiences [30]. The core knowledge outcome of phenomenographic research is an outcome space, which shows how a particular group experiences encounters with some phenomenon, and that emphasises variations between those experiences, thereby seeking to enhance our understanding of the social world [31].

Many canonical examples of phenomenography involve examining students’ approaches to learning, yet in recent years, the approach has been increasingly used to research diverse social issues. Many—like those in this article—sit explicitly within the society-education nexus. In these studies, as in ours, phenomenography proceeds from a position known as non-dualism—wherein knowledge is believed to be constituted in the group’s experiences of interactive contact with the world. In phenomenography, the relationships between people and phenomena are seen as intertwined rather than either having primacy or causality. Phenomenographers also assume that there is a limited number of ways in which a group of people perceive, understand, and experience their shared encounters with phenomena. Mapping the contours of those experiences forms the focus of studies, rather than focusing studies on phenomena themselves.

Importantly, the categories of description in a phenomenographic outcome space are not understood as equitably distributed between individuals; instead, the space represents the conceptions of experiences across the group. Conceptions (their ways of experiencing the world) and variations (their discernments of different conceptions as being discrete from each other) are usually established through individual interviews with a small number of participants (from ten to twenty) understood as constituting a unitary group. A phenomenographic outcome space commonly shows three to six conceptions, arranged in an increasingly complex and inclusive hierarchy, with the first the least complex and inclusive, and the last the most complex and inclusive. The final outcome space is arranged with the findings applying across—not within—the unitary group. Marton [31] describes a series of outcome spaces, calling upon examples of earlier studies to describe how conceptions represent a group’s own ways of conceiving a particular object of work and learning. The outcome space represents a series of hierarchically related conceptions, which are “logically related to each other in a hierarchically organised outcome space, relative to the specific object of learning and to the specific group” (p. 117). In his example of students conceiving of price fluctuations for pirated visual media, as a function of supply and demand, the outcome space comprised the following categories of description (p. 104):

A.

Attributes of the commodity (e.g., the quality of pirated media);

B.

Changes in demand (e.g., people wanting to buy pirated media);

B₂.

Changes in supply (e.g., the availability of pirated media);

C.

Changes in demand and supply (e.g., availability and willing buyers);

D.

Relative change in demand and supply (e.g., fewer available media than willing buyers).

The example serves to illustrate a number of points about an outcome space that the phenomenographic approach discerns participants’ own conceptions (A to D emerge from data, not from researchers’ preordained opinions), conceptions are logically ordered and hierarchical (each successive conception from A to D comprises the previous conceptions), each conception reveals something distinctive (A to D are each marked by variation of experiences), the outcome space is parsimonious (A to D mark variations of the group’s experiences in the most efficient way revealed by data), and conceptions are arranged in non-dualistic and second-order ways (A to D are positioned as interesting in and of themselves, and are not judged by researchers for correctness). This approach is therefore distinct from an emphasis on each category separately, or on how individuals conceive the overall phenomenon differently.

2.2. Research Design

In phenomenography, designs for data collection are typically based around phenomenographic interviews: one-on-one, semi-structured, and open-ended interactions to establish a ‘structure of awareness’ [12] (p. 171). In these highly dialogic interviews participants’ expressions are taken at face value, and understood as contributing to a collective ‘pool of meanings’ [31] (p. 154). The design is specifically constituted to establish the shared awareness revealed in each individual’s descriptions.

During the work of data analysis, the boundaries between the data of different participants are discarded, with categories of description identified across the group. An iterative process of reinterpretation produces an outcome space, whose construction aims to meet three important criteria: the illustration of something distinctive about how phenomena are understood, a logical and structural relatedness between conceptions, and parsimony (meaning faithful illustration, which is communicated as concisely as practicable). The completed outcome space (one of many possible such spaces) reveals how the group conceives of meaning and structure in their shared experiences. Meaning relates to referential aspects of ‘what’ is experienced, while structure refers to ‘how’ it is experienced [12] (p. 86). Neither meaning nor structure are privileged; they are dialectically intertwined.

To examine the experiences of second-career academics in STEM fields, we approached 14 potential participants, all of whom worked at sites where we had previously conducted research. We subsequently purposively sampled ten of those who responded, seeking to balance variation with critical cases. This purposive sampling technique is common to phenomenography, as a way of limiting selection bias and artificial distinction, positioned as an alternative to the pursuit of saturation through sample size that characterises many other research approaches. Collectively, these ten participants were working in five discrete professional fields—all related to STEM—at three different universities in the United Kingdom. More specifically, our sampled group comprised:

• two control technologists who teach (University A and University C);
• two applied mathematics lecturers (University A and University C);
• two physical science lecturers (University A and University B);
• two computer science lecturers (University B and University C); and
• two electrical engineering lecturers (University A and University C).

We used a videoconferencing platform to conduct individual interviews, digitally recording audio and video of conversations on secure cloud accounts. Commensurate with the non-dualistic and second-order principles of our phenomenographic approach, the interviewing researcher prompted participants and then pursued their experiential accounts and perceptions through open-ended enquiries, rather than tracing scripted interview questions. Opening discussions enquired about what participants conceived of professionalism, what activities they undertook in the name of professionalism, and experiences of the influence of professionalism. Academics were initially asked by the researcher to consider a particular experience where the notion of professionalism had influenced their work and learning activity, which formed the basis of subsequent discussions to discern the variations of these experiences, how they came to understand relationships between those experiences, and how experiences were qualitatively meaningful to them. Follow-up enquiries and conversational requests for elaboration were used to identify detailed interpretations, perceptions, and ways of engaging with professionalism in their academic lives.

Following each interview, we transcribed and pseudonymised data whilst safely disposing of the original recordings. We commenced our analysis with the amassed transcripts, which involved attempting to discretise the group’s conceptions, to consider the variations and to structure the categories of description, including different ways of seeing professionalism, “logically related to each other, which can be rewritten in terms of a limited number of necessary aspects” [31], which is the foundation of phenomenography. This involves iteratively analysing interview data, scrutinising the amassed transcripts for points of divergence, convergence, structural relationships, conceptions, and distinguishing features. The result is a consistent set of categories of description. This process of developing categories of description is critiqued most notably by phenomenographers themselves, who seek to continually develop such analytical techniques [12]. To substantiate trustworthiness, we incorporated methodological recommendations from established phenomenographers: bracketing our intentions [31], being parsimonious with variation and commonality [32], presenting illustrative quotes of emergent data [12], and exposing social conditions [29]. We also sought to assure validity and reliability through engaging in discussions with a colleague, who, while not involved in this project, was familiar with phenomenographic techniques. This engagement was not to request agreement or concurrence, but to seek her assurance that our outcome space could have plausibly originated from the data. Our outcome space forms the basis of the next section of the article.

3. Results

3.1. Structuring Phenomenographic Findings

Following phenomenographic convention, in this section we first present an outcome space, showing four conceptions of how the group of second-career academics in STEM fields conceive of professionalism influencing HE’s policy and practice. These categories were derived from our analysis of emergent data in the interviews, as explained in Section 2.2. The first conception is the least complex and inclusive, while the fourth conception is the most complex and inclusive. Our conceptions are hierarchically arranged in the outcome space, by which we mean that the first category does not include experiences of any other category, whilst the fourth includes experiences of all three prior categories. Yet those categories are not developmentally arranged in this outcome space; in other words, participants can and do assume any conception, at any one time, to suit their social and cultural conditions. Following an initial overview below, we elaborate on the structural and referential distinctions, each category exemplified with quotes describing experiences of relationships between participants and phenomena. We then exemplify, through interview data, the variation and relevance of experiences, with contextual implications, presenting the qualitatively different ways that participants themselves conceive of the influence of professionalism in HE.

3.2. Outcome Space

Four qualitatively different conceptions, derived from our analysis of the interviews, describe the ways in which this unitary group perceives and experiences professionalism as influencing policy and practice in HE:

Category 1.

Academics making judgements of students’ interactions and behaviours;

Category 2.

Academics negotiating with students their interactions and behaviours;

Category 3.

Academics critiquing the purpose and applicability of curricula and activities;

Category 4.

Academics contributing to changing curricula and activities.

3.3. Structural and Referential Aspects

The outcome space is represented in Figure 1, which highlights both the structural or ‘how’ aspects of experiences and the referential or ‘what’ aspects of experiences. Structural aspects—in the figure’s rows—represent the importance of how the group experiences and understands the influence of professionalism in HE. In our study, structural aspects relate to the individual and societal nature of experiences, in which less importance is placed on individual, bounded and internally focussed experiences, with more importance placed on collective, societally focused and externally focussed experiences. Referential aspects—in the figure’s columns—represent the meaningfulness of what the group experiences and understands about the influence of professionalism on HE. For the group in this study, that meaningfulness relates to the increasing contextual significance of the experience.

3.3.1. Academics Making Normative Judgements of Students’ Interactions and Behaviours

The first category of description relates to the group’s conception that professionalism influences their normative judgements about students’ individual interactions and behaviours. In invoking this conception, the participants referred to their own prior work settings—using them as reference points, to make normative judgements of how others might consider the desirability of individual students’ interactions and behaviours.

‘It’s [professionalism] about understanding your fit as a professional person, helping [students] with theirs … our field’s got expectations, language codes, dress codes, being reliable, being punctual, being able to finish a problem … you can’t do what you want, when you want … we should be doing things at [University] to help them get ready …’.

‘… the right thing to do by [students] is help them to adjust … on their first day at real work, they’ll embarrass themselves or get sacked … I’ll have failed them, they need to act and speak and dress professionally, it’s how they’ll be judged as ready … more important than fault diagnosis, Laplace, whatever … how you act and talk and arrive on time’.

3.3.2. Academics Negotiating with Students Their Interactions and Behaviours

The second category of description again refers to normative interactions and behaviours, but this conception involves a shift towards undertaking active negotiations with students, referring to how professional work contributes to societal challenges. The group again referred to their own prior work settings, which informed their arbitration of the desirability of collaborative interactions and behaviours. The quotes exhibit the successively inclusive and hierarchical structure, with the previous category evident and increasing importance placed on societally oriented and complex problems.

‘… the best way to “do” [air quotes] professionalism is to bring it here [campus laboratory] … show what their future teams will work like … we do some things at [University] you wouldn’t do in work … I make sure they know the difference, risks of them being unprofessional … contacts, commercial viability, working in teams, it needs a gear change … a healthy debate to know what’s expected in a professional place of work … the world outside and its challenges, what value work adds to them …’.

‘… we’re arguing, but graciously like we’re at work rather than [campus laboratory] … they’ll ask how are things that different from work now though, will we fit in alright? … we have differences of opinion on what their chartered professional standards mean … we have arguments and “but it’s not fair” [air quotes] before they get into work … to get us talking about what’s professional and unprofessional’.

3.3.3. Academics Critiquing the Purpose and Applicability of Curricula and Activities

The third category reflects a referential shift from normativity about interpersonal interactions towards a critique of curricula and activities. When invoking this conception, the group referred to professionalism and the demands of work, with reference to their appraisal of the purpose and applicability of curricula and activities. The conceptions we describe in this category seek a closer correspondence between work and HE. The following quotes continue to exhibit the successively inclusive and hierarchical structure, with previous categories remaining evident, alongside a referential shift towards criticality.

‘I’ve seen things here [University] that were wrong, immoral, illegal, they’ll [students] get sacked if they end up doing something illegal or unethical and didn’t know they had the obligation to object … we’ve got to get them [students] used to that here … it’s all very well getting a degree, they need to know the professional obligations that come with the [professional institution] tie and the [professional institution] post-nominals, that needs more backwash into here [University] … matching with [the profession’s] real work value and purpose …’.

‘… at least part of being a future professional at [University] is getting yourself work-ready… to get paid a lot of money and have a job at the end … some things are more important than others in the world they’re entering, this place [University] needs to get real … help them work out why, to ask why, to work out why so much of it [HE] just isn’t what you’d do in real life, we’ve got to make this realistic … manage their expectations here, for a realistic education … ’.

3.3.4. Academics Contributing to Changing Curricula and Activities

In the fourth and final category of description, following a further referential shift, professionalism is positioned as justification for the group’s action to change curricula and activities. In the following quotes, participants describe experiences of changing curricula and activities, enacting closer correspondence of work and HE by replicating or imitating work conditions, standards, and resources. The quotes again exhibit successive inclusivity, this time with a shift from critique to contribution.

‘… they [students] need to see the professional lives they’re going into … new projects with proper real-world constraints and stuff … when you’ve faced commercial risk, a board of trustees, 200 protesters … you make them [degrees] relevant, to get them [students] … ready for [chartered registration] … ready for what happens at work, that’s why I changed so much when I came’.

‘…before I rebuilt it [HE programme] with the logbooks … you could scrape a pass in written solitary tests … the labs were stripped of work context, no real-world problems … no relevance for work, awful … I had to tear it up and make it reflect what actually happens out there [work setting], professional projects … align chartership and key competences … it used to be just indefensible as preparation for work, fit for nothing except staying here [University] for life …’.

3.4. Conceptualising the Variation and Relevance of Experiences

As we have already emphasised, the categories of description presented above outline our findings across the group, rather than emphasising differences within it. The phenomenographic approach purposefully occludes distinctions within a group, allowing us to focus on the contextual implications of the whole group’s experiences. Building on our preceding descriptions of four categories,

Table 1. Shifts of variations in experiences, relevance, and illustrative examples.

Category	Variations in Experiences	Relevance of Variations in Experiences	Illustrative Examples of Qualitative Shifts in Experiences
Judgement of interactions and behaviours
	Structural shift in importance, to societal orientation.	Students’ interactions and behaviours; favourability to future work and to society.	From judgements to normative negotiations c.f. ‘a healthy debate to know what’s expected … the world outside … what value work adds’.
Negotiation of interactions and behaviours
	Referential shift in meaningfulness, to critique.	Curricula and activities; seeking to compare HE with needs of work setting.	From negotiating to identifying insufficient correspondence, c.f. ‘it isn’t what you’d do in real life, we’ve got to make this realistic’.
Critiquing curricula and activities
	Referential shift in meaningfulness, to contribution.	Curricula and activities; seeking to align HE with needs of work setting.	From raising concerns of correspondence to enacting change in correspondence, c.f. ‘new projects with proper real-world constraints’.
Contributing to changing curricula and activities

brings together the variations in experiences, which make each conception discrete, describing the relevant variations and examples of qualitative shifts that were established during our phenomenographic analyses of data. As described in Section 2.2, these variations mark the critical features of the group’s experiences and conceptions of professionalism in HE, to discern each of the four successively inclusive categories as they emerge from interview data [10].

Both variation and relevance are important for phenomenographic findings. Variation, in this context, is understood as concerned with the discernment of experiences, ‘changing our ways of seeing things’ [31] (p. 52). Relevance, on the other hand, indicates what each experience ‘is aimed at, where it will lead’ [12] (p. 180).

In moving from the first to the second conception, the group ascribes increasing importance to societal orientation, especially with regard to how students’ interactions and behaviours are likely to be perceived in their future—professional—work settings. The sense of normativity, however, is intended as locally impactful, with the aim being to leave students with defined expectations of their future work in STEM professions; second-career academics, in other words, attempt to convey professional and societal expectations through normative influence.

In moving from the second to the third conception, an increasing meaningfulness is ascribed by the group to critiquing curricula and activities, the aim being to compare the correspondence of HE with the demands of students’ future work in STEM professions. In critiquing that correspondence as insufficient, the group seeks to act on behalf of students, enabling them to see how to act in defence of their own interests, in problematic aspects of professional life such as financial return and ethical obligations.

In moving from the third to the final conception, an increasing meaningfulness is ascribed to changing curricula and activities, such that they move towards supporting a closer correspondence between HE and professional work settings in STEM. The group’s assumption of a role in the professional enculturation of students is highlighted, especially through their pursuit of wage and status gains for students; second-career academics are thereby co-opted into the marketing of STEM professions within HE.

4. Discussion

The findings of our study illustrate that these second-career academics conceive of professionalism in HE as describing judgement, negotiation, critique, and contribution to change. In this section we discuss these categories of description, relating each to the work of other researchers as evinced in current scholarship. It is important to note that our informants earnestly believe that they draw on professionalism in ways that benefit human development, for both students and for wider society, in particular by (1) pursuing advantage for their students in terms of wage and status and (2) easing their transitions into future work, which they see as societally oriented. The variations between conceptions also illustrate that second-career academics conceive themselves as acting in the best interests of their students, as they perceive those best interests to be when moving from judging to negotiating acceptable and favourable interactions and behaviours, towards critiquing the correspondence of HE with the demands of professional work settings, and in enacting changes on behalf of students, that they perceive will enhance future wage and status.

In the following paragraphs, we discuss our contributions, unpacking in turn how each conception relates to current points of emphasis in the literature and, thereby, considering the implications of our study for human development, through professionalism’s influence on HE policy and practice.

4.1. Professionalism and Normativity

In the introduction we described how professions and professional identities are often seen as distanced from societal scrutiny [21,24]. Our findings in the conceptions of second-career academics, by contrast, highlight that normativity is often invoked in pursuit of a societal orientation to professionalism. This is distanced somewhat from institutional approaches such as those examined by Seyfried et al. [7], where normative expectations of the professions influence quality management inside HE. Our participants’ conceptions have more in common with modes of ‘collaborative professionalism’ [14] (p. 458).

An implication is that, where professionalism is invoked normatively by these second-career academics, it is considerably more ‘relational’ than is typically the case in the professions themselves, or by policymakers in HE. On the other hand, our findings seem to dovetail with accounts that advocate that both societal and professional orientations contribute towards enculturation, marketisation, and professional development within HE. Our analysis thus adds further impetus to the concerns of Murphy [26] (p. 684), who discusses professional accountability at the individual level, and the ‘burden of quality assurance’; Muller [33] (p. 410), who critiques the continual supplements to ‘curricula bursting at the seams’; and Beck and Young [24] (p. 189), who deplore the ‘loss of academic autonomy’ for HE lecturers.

The normative conceptions of professionalism that we document seem, furthermore, inimical to academic freedom, which can be constrained by professionalism in ways similar to Buch’s [34] (p. 134) observation that ‘professions in society are regulated through restrictions and allowances’. There are implications here for managing, governing, and organising HE; a normative role implies a political role, which our informants appear to have adopted in unquestioned and well-meaning ways.

4.2. Professionalism and Critique

Critiquing the purpose and applicability of HE features highly in the literature, with many studies examining the instrumentalist benefits of closer correspondence between HE and the professions. Tennant et al. [16] (p. 109), for example, characterise such benefits using the terms ‘employability capital and anticipatory socialization’, while Wilson et al. [23] (p. 1223) emphasise the assumed goal and business gains of ‘graduates functioning effectively in the workplace’.

The participants we studied pursue precisely such closer forms of correspondence, in the name of professionalism, with claims to be brokering students’ financial investments, and critiquing how curricula and activities will enhance students’ wages and status in future work. This vocationalism seems rational and driven by humanistic concerns; it is worth emphasising that we take the group’s accounts at face value, that they are trying to prioritise students’ best interests, as they perceive those best interests to be. Their intentions, at least, contrast with observations, which are common in scholarship [9], that close correspondence of HE and work can result in the subjectivism of learners into work, rather than their socialisation, with the former describing the ability to interpret and navigate power relationships in the practice of work and learning, and the latter describing the ability to confront and influence power relationships in the practice of work and learning.

The impetus for vocationalism and closer correspondence has been described by Saunders and Machell [35] (p. 288) as ‘economic return on expenditure on HE’. Assumptions that all students undertake HE for their own employability carry, however, deleterious implications for society. The unilateral promotion, within our unitary group, of the exchange-value of education, and their critique of HE solely in terms of its inadequacy as preparation for the professions, is not gradual, reflexive or incremental. Instead, it is expressed by our participants as emerging from an endemic, presupposed and a priori duty to their students’ financial wellbeing. Their critique of correspondence between HE and work is clearly meaningful, expressed from an entrenched and deterministic position.

4.3. Professionalism and Change

The notion that professionalism is a vehicle for change in HE is widely reported in the literature. Burns and Chopra [27], for example, examine initiatives that support engagement with professions, suggesting that early professional orientation will enhance students’ confidence, networking, and familiarity with work scenarios. Simons and Ruijters [18] examine changes to curricula where engagement with professions displaces formal learning; ‘it is not the education that is relevant’, they write, ‘but the availability of and access to knowledge’ (p. 960). Such studies, in common with our findings, imply that curricula and activities inside universities should be changed, accessing demanding forms of expertise, which have, historically, been acquired outside HE.

These sentiments are certainly present in the conceptions of our group. Indeed, second-career academics seem to use the time they have spent in professional work settings as a warrant for their desire to change HE; they act as envoys for professions, assuming that students’ future work scenarios, and demands for expertise, will match their own. These assumptions present risks for students, and for second-career academics themselves, whose identities become dependent on sustaining those very assumptions. As a result, second-career academics are co-opted into marketing STEM professions within HE, acting as professional gatekeepers, narrowing the correspondence between HE and ‘graduate experience in an economic or work role’ [35] (p. 289).

Despite the personal satisfaction the group derives from, as they see it, enhancing students’ wages and status, second-career academics risk pervading a sense of professional elitism into HE. In many circumstances this runs the danger of contradicting the best interests of students that they hold dear—especially given that it is a select few who ultimately go on to form the elite cadre of professionals. Compounding negative implications for society, such closer correspondence is refuted by Meisenhelder [21] (p. 296) as a ‘false consciousness of faculty’, which serves to negate the possibility for HE to contribute to genuine and radical social change.

5. Conclusions

Our article has explored second-career academics’ perceptions about professionalism, drawing out implications for human development in ways that we contend can be useful for those who manage, govern, and organise HE. Professionalism is increasingly seen as a vehicle for HE reform across Europe, with a multitude of ongoing discourses ascribing value to both HE and to professions, their intersection is often seen as a vehicle for a neoliberal agenda. We would welcome studies that extend such investigations into other fields of education and into disciplines beyond STEM, in addition to how conceptions of professionalism change over time. In a competitive, globalising market, universities are under increasing pressure to attract students, often on the basis of providing access to high wages and an elite occupational status. Yet those students deserve critical engagement, including reflexive examination of their own education, and second-career academics deserve reflexive examination of the influences, which they discharge in the name of professionalism. Second-career academics, as our account highlights, are deeply embroiled in enculturating students with professional values, increasing the correspondence of HE with work settings, and the marketing of professions inside HE.

This paper has highlighted several ways in which these broad phenomena are manifest by second-career academics. Firstly, second-career academics are influential in shaping local policy and practice; they draw on their prior professional experiences as they seek to influence student interactions and behaviours in normative ways, based on a belief that such influence represents students’ best interests. Secondly, second-career academics are influential in marketing the exchange value of a ‘professional’ education; they do so on the basis of assumptions about their professional duty, to ensure close correspondence between aspects of the programme and the corresponding profession. Thirdly, second-career academics are co-opted into changing curricula and activities to enhance the employability, wage and status of students; in doing so, they risk contributing to a pervading elitism, assuming the valorisation of wage and status and eroding the capability for radical social change to be recognised and nurtured within HE. Through these findings we hope to have contributed to the literature at a time of unprecedented need for dialogue and productive antagonism in HE in Europe.