ABSTRACT
There has been no shortage of research or scholarly study of the almost seismic changes that have occurred in the world of higher education and academic research during the past forty years, changes in conceptions of these activities, in the institutions through which they are pursued, in their governance and administration, and in the political, economic, social, technological, and ideological contexts within which they work. The past twenty years have seen growing interest in the implications of these developments for academic faculty, the academic profession, academic careers, academic practices, and academic identities. Important as these are, they are, however, only one dimension of the changes that have occurred in the workforces of higher education institutions, the nature and scale of which have, as Gary Rhoades points out in Chapter 3, remained curiously invisible to both researchers and policymakers but also, in a sense, to the institutions themselves. There is evidence that individual researchers and international bodies in the early 1990s (Kogan et al., 1994) were aware of the needs for new policies and new policy frameworks for the staffing of higher education, but the frameworks have been slow to emerge (El-Khawas, 2008), and the primary concern has remained with academic faculty.
