Gornall Compulsive Working Academic Work

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Higher Education Quarterly, 0951–5224

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2273.2012.00512.x
Volume 66, No. 2, April 2012, pp 135–154
Compulsive Working,
‘Hyperprofessionality’ and
the Unseen Pleasures of
Academic Work hequ_512 135..154
Lynne Gornall, Working Lives Research Group,

research@workinglives.info
and Jane Salisbury, Cardiff University, salisburyj@cardiff.ac.uk
Abstract
The paper applies Hoyle’s notion of ‘extended’ professionality to modern higher
education working. It begins with some of the policy contexts and theoretical
perspectives around the structural and professional change experienced by
academic staff: changes that have been documented in systematic studies of
university life from the 1970s onwards. However, the realisation for academic
staff that, at 45 per cent of the workforce, they were no longer the majority group
in the sector, has added impetus to debates about work, the workplace and the
role of change in scholarly life (Gornall, 2009). The Working Lives team has
been gathering qualitative data on academic experiences of everyday work
between 2007 and 2010, using life history and ethnographic methods. This
paper draws on in-depth interviews with 24 academics and participants in four
focus groups, to consider the propensity in an ‘always-on’ environment for staff
to rarely ‘switch off’.This is explored alongside a set of ‘emic’ notions of working
practices and places that characterise the ‘hyperprofessional’ academic.
Introduction
As academic work changes, the responsibilities and duties placed upon
staff have expanded. Changes in modes of teaching and the expectations
on United Kingdom (UK) scholars are well reported (Malcolm and
Zukas, 2009, Fanghanel 2012) and share similarities with studies of
academics in the United States (US) (Neumann, 2009) and Australia
(McInnis, 2000; Hardy, 2010). Not only has disciplinary restructuring
impacted on academic life in the UK but the intensity of research
competitiveness and attendant performativity pressures have been
© 2012 The Authors. Higher Education Quarterly © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600
Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4, 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
136 Higher Education Quarterly
unrelenting (Bazeley, 2010; Pollard, 2009). To these must be added

enterprise and ‘engagement’ agendas (Bastalich, 2010), burgeoning
administrative workloads and the wider impacts of managerialism
(Deem et al., 2007; Kolsaker, 2008). Together, these make career
realignments inevitable for many academics (Dowd and Kaplan, 2005;
Baruch, 2011; Meyer, 2011). While much research and discussion to
date has explored the impact of policy on higher education employment,
the role of technology in occupational change, together with academics’
own engagement with new technologies, has been under-reported.
This paper discusses everyday and unseen working, together with the
role of technology and routine professional practice in the spaces and
places of contemporary academic work (Cook et al., 2009).The research
was informed theoretically by ethnographic work on university cultures
(Strathern, 2000) and the thinking on ‘professionalism’ by Freidson
(2001). The latter’s writing on autonomy and discretion in professional
life arguably has been a key text in delineating forms of control in these
occupational sectors. Studies in the sociology of labour that theorise the
role of technology in the workplace (Woolgar, 1988, 2002; Brown et al.,
2008; Felstead, 2008) are also adopted, alongside the view of Musselin
(2007), who grounds her commentary in an analysis of the weakening of
professional power in organisations generally, but especially in the public
sector. In this context, the studies of teachers by Ball and Goodson
(1985) and more recently by Jephcote et al. (2008), informed the
approaches to the current work. The research team too, as employees in
higher education, are also embodied and inscribed in its contemporary
practices (Ball, 2010; Salisbury and Gornall, 2011). Autoethnographic
‘insider’ studies of organisations (Ellis and Bochner, 2000) including on
the academy itself thus underpin this discussion (Meneley and Young,
2005; Brennan 2007).
In their work on the nature of professionalism in secondary teachers’
roles, Hoyle (1974) and Hoyle and John (1995) developed a set of
categorisations that are still relevant today. These included ‘restricted’
and ‘extended’ professionalities, the latter denoting the broadening of
professional roles in a period of change.Thus the ‘extended professional’
typically worked widely and extensively. Further, the term pointed to
greater collaboration and participation with other colleagues and bodies
across multiple domains. The research discussed here identifies a more
extreme form of extended professionalism. For this, the notion of ‘hyper-
professional’ working has been developed by the team (Gornall, 2010)
and from the analysis of qualitative interview data collected across two
years of ‘opportunistic’ fieldwork (Honigmann, 1982), typical qualities
© 2012 The Authors. Higher Education Quarterly © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Hyperprofessional Working 137
of ‘hyperprofessionality’ are discussed. The first section below considers

coping with workloads and survival strategies, the second seeks to map
the new workplaces of hyperprofessionality, the third explores the plea-
sures and pains of scholarship and new work technologies, whilst the
fourth section focuses on the relationship between compulsive and com-
pulsory working. Throughout, there is an attention to the forms of
academic work that occur at home and out of view.
Research approaches and methods

The research team comprised academics with differing disciplinary
backgrounds, roles, status and individual career histories. Business
school staff, educational researchers and social scientists collaborated
together in planning the research, collecting data and bringing their
various knowledge and expertise to its analysis. Software tools were
explored to ‘tame the chaos’ of qualitative data (Huber and Garcia,
1993, p. 139).
In this paper, and much of the data gathering, the principles of
ethnographic research (Delamont and Atkinson, 1995; Davies, 1999;
Taylor, 2002), informed the work. Four focus group sessions involving
28 people were convened and 24 individual interviews conducted, with
higher education lecturers and academics in Wales and the UK more
widely. The disciplines of informants spanned humanities, management
schools and the social sciences.
Making peoples’ experiences the starting point for scientific inquiry
(Goodson, 2003) meant that participatory strategies in both individual
and focus-group interviews were essential. Visual elicitation methods
(Stanzak, 2007) used in group discussion, brought the topics under
consideration to life. Reflexivity at all stages of research design, sample
recruitment, data collection and analysis was important (Alvesson and
Sköldberg, 2000; Evans, 2002), as was the anonymisation process. In the
extracts that follow, pseudonyms in place of real names are used
throughout. Post, status and type of institution are retained, as they are
relevant to the discussion.
Coping strategies and survival in contemporary academic life

Tight (2010) has argued that the academic workload of around 55 hours
per week has changed little over the last 15 years—‘it’s not heavier but it
is more burdensome’ was how the Times Higher Education reported it
(Corbin, 2009). For the research informants in the Working Lives study,
it was quite clear that they were putting in a significant weekly shift, with
this 55 hour baseline as a minimum. Below, presented under subhead-
ings, the voices of academics are used to highlight key analytic themes
that have informed the category of ‘hyperprofessionality’. These repre-
sent a set of characteristics, it is argued, that typify certain modes of
academic working and contemporary workplace attributes.
The working week: self-directed time, autonomy and overload

There is no upper limit on the working week for academics and this was
identified as a prominent theme across individual accounts:
I’m in work at 8am and leave around 6pm. Once home, I’ll usually work until
about 8.30 or 9.00pm clearing my email, marking, reading/research. . . . Next
morning, [on campus] in the 8.00–9.00am slot, I look at e-mail left on screen
and use my inbox as an aide memoire—might send myself an email the night
before with notes for the day—make phone calls. So this is every day and
every evening. I try to keep Saturday free as a day for myself, but Sunday I’ll
work from home most of the day.
(Yvette L., Principal Lecturer, Post ’92 university)
In the evenings, I will always work at home. After dinner, I open my Notebook
check the e-mails and answer some of the urgent messages. Actually I have an
international project with France and Germany so we stay in close contact.
. . . There are always things to compare, reports to adjust, comments on
papers. I try not to do that kind of work at night though, but I do Google some
research and this can last until 1.00am in the night . . . so that . . . could be
a [typical] week of work . . .
(Lena A., Senior Lecturer, Post ’92 university)
I work 9.00–5.00 in the office everyday. . . . In a typical week, I do work for
my research two nights a week, so [these] are my research project [evenings].
The other evenings I would probably do two-to-three hours [per night] at
home, and I would probably also do four or five hours on a Sunday.
(Debra S., Reader, Pre ’92 university)
The particular moments of work where informants felt they had the
greatest degree of control were in self-directed and self-managed time.
Self-managed time and a choice of space were highly valued, though
these were also largely periods of work that were outside conventional
hours and away from campus spaces. Comments indicated experiences
of intense and extensive activity:
Every night before I finish, I try to have that white space in the inbox, with
everything dealt with and filed. I don’t delete anything.
E-mail is the single factor that’s impacted and the greatest negative, but the
volume is now ridiculous.
(Ellis G., Senior Lecturer, Post ’92 university)
I have my very small netbook by my bed most nights . . . in case I can’t sleep
and I want to do some extra editing . . .
(Ellen L., Reader, Pre ’92 university)
This is, however, not simply an effect of ‘imposed work’ or greater

pressure from above and outside: the intensity of the pressure and
workload, as indicated by the last informant, is created in part by the
joint engagement with their work of the individual scholar themselves
(Daunton et al., 2008, Thomas et al., 2010). This is the ‘vocation’ aspect
of working in higher education and academic professionalism. Some-
times this is about ‘keeping up’ but it may also be the motivation for
continuous development and drive for improvement that is, colloquially,
part of the academic professional psyche (Gough, 2011). This is also
bound up with notions of ‘autonomy’ and the ability to ‘self-direct’ time
in the extended working week, discussed above.
Meta-logistics of the modern academic workload and workspace

The work of organising the work, denoted as the ‘meta-logistics of the
modern academic workload’, whether via briefcase, laptop or telephone
phone, is a matter rarely articulated. Once elicited, it is a question area
that brings a rich seam of ethnographic data to attention. When discuss-
ing how they manage their day, informants spoke about time and mobil-
ity, including making use of resources, creating backups and copies of
information, accessing and filing, as well as informal organisational
protocols associated with ‘working on the move’:
So if I’ve got a digital pen and access to [computer] keyboard, I can usually
work anywhere. When I leave my office I double-check that I have every-
thing that I will need for the work I’m intending to do at home that evening
or the next day or even the two days either side of the weekend! I generally
have an idea of the work I am trying to complete in any one week but, of
course, things come up that you aren’t expecting. But I am quite an orga-
nised person and when I’m working at home, I am working at home. That’s
quite important and I’ve got into the habit of checking that I’ve got text-
books, reports, student drafts, documents, anything in hard copy that I
cannot access otherwise. I always like ten minutes in my office with the
door shut just before leaving for home to sort out my brief case and
pack.
(Jack M., Senior Lecturer, Pre ’92 Russell Group university)
However, being mobile requires a mindful, hyper-aware state and man-

agement skills; it is not only about technology:
Being mobile: whenever I have a book out of the library I wonder where do I
keep it? What often happens is that I keep it in the boot of the car. If it’s
re-called from the library—and you know you have to take it back or get a
fine, and if I am not going back in—yes it can be very tricky . . .
Neumann (2009) has observed that discussions of ‘the work about the
work’ are rare and are almost never taken into account in the design of
practical workload metrics in institutions. It is an area that colleagues,
managers and other staff may give some consideration to, arising from
these data. Several factors are clearly also in play here. These include the
ramifications of changes to the workplace and educational environments,
increasingly shared and open offices (Felstead et al., 2005; Savin-Baden,
2008), a significant valuing of information technologies, together with a
growing competence or expertise in their use, related to the ubiquitous
availability of and access to systems. Thus a particular focus of interest
in the Working Lives research interviews centred upon logistics of the
‘what, how and where of work’. Notions of the ‘roaming workplace’,
facilitated by digital inter-connectivity, which academics (like private
sector professionals) increasingly inhabit, were evident. These were also
some of the contexts in which the ‘hyperprofessional’ modality was most
obvious and undoubtedly further stimulated by the increased ownership
of personal and pocket mobile technologies.
Technology is also a complicating factor in people’s working lives,
however, as several interviewees pointed out:
I use three computer setups—desktops at home and work, also a laptop—and

I get e-mail on my iphone too (which I try to use to read not reply from). I try
to synchronise between these systems, sometimes with problems!
Again, informants spoke at length about the organisational workload
entailed in using and managing a variety of mobile and desktop
systems (and software) in everyday working life (Keenoy, 2006). Turkle
(2007) suggests that these systems are also our ‘tethering devices’ and
provide forms of navigation outside their primary functionalities. Work-
place boundaries in academic life have traditionally been blurred,
sometimes helpfully, but it does seem that there are also instances
when technology-use may be on the wrong side of exploitative or
intrusive. Thus, today, technology intimately interlinks formerly sepa-
rate areas, for example, between labour and leisure, public and private,
professional and personal spheres and in the very fabric and tools of
everyday working and socialising (Felstead, 2008). Several interviewees
said that they did not use a separate e-mail for friends and family
but most said that they did. This functional and protective
separation, however, makes extra work in the ‘management of infor-

mation’ and device ‘overheads’ discussed above.
Mapping the fluid dynamics of workspace

The role of technology in both the labour and the leisure process at home
(Turkle, 2011) was seen in instances where the same computer (or
laptop or device), was associated with work and or occupational tasks as
well as with personal, general family and household use. Informants
sometimes said that the same space, such as the lounge sofa, could be
used for work-based computer use or for watching television and family
socialising, or all! There was some ambivalence expressed about this: the
mix of pleasure (working on the sofa, watching TV) with misgivings
about work’s intrusion in such familial contexts. By contrast, another
interviewee distinguished what it meant to work from home: ‘I work at
home, but I never work from home’, indicating that home (or even home
office) working, without connectivity and online access, was not like
working from the university building but merely working in a home
space.
Probably, ‘working from home’, while originally seen as part of a
privileged access, may now seem less special: ubiquitous technologies
and networks make it ‘just like work’. Academics may have celebrated
this ‘working from home’ and ‘just like the office’ access at one time but
perhaps there are now reasons to rethink. Several research informants
spoke of returning to campus when no-one was there in order to ‘work
in peace’, away from the constant e-mail inflow or messaging at home (or
perhaps to escape other family intrusion). The research team has devel-
oped a visual ‘mapping’ of this, drawing on Oldenburg’s (1991) notion of
first and second spaces (home and workplace, respectively) and in con-
ceptualisation that also draws on Soja’s (1996) understanding of the
‘microgeographies’ of everyday life (Figure 1).
In the first cell of Figure 1, home and work are separate spheres,
which in the second, becomes or is represented as part of a differentia-
tion of forms of personal and professional or occupational life. In the
third category, for some areas of low-skill occupations during the 20th
century, home became a place for casual or piece work (Felstead et al.,
2005). The home has been a place of paid labour (especially female)
across the centuries, particularly of artisan or craft and family occupa-
tions. Today, it is increasingly a space for professional ‘knowledge’ work
(Felstead et al., 2005) and professional counterparts in other sectors,
working in similar flexible, self-managing ways, now also work as aca-
Figure 1 The evolution and locations of home/work as identified spaces

Source: Working Lives research team.
demics did traditionally. Soja’s radical ‘thirdspace’ notion is used here as

a hybrid bringing together and blurring the boundaries of home and
work, as in cell iii (Figure 1).
Ironically, for academics, this valued work-choice of working from
home is under constant threat in higher education (Attwood 2009) and
just as its merits are extolled by the wider world. Clearly, not all profes-
sional workers have the same affordances for self-management and
autonomy as academics do but technology, mobile devices and access to
networks have generalised the environment in which work can occupy
almost any space, public or private (cell iv, Figure 1). How this time
and working space are managed, and by whom, is a key occupational
and ‘human resources’ issue for organisations. A key finding from the
Working Lives data is of an academic ‘return’ to the conventional work-
place at unconventional hours. Out of hours, the university is perceived
as a zone for peaceful productive activity. It symbolises a return arguably,
but one which is also an evolution or progression, from working at home
to a ‘work-home’ elsewhere. In tribute to the influence of Soja, Olden-
burg and Felstead, in the Working Lives analysis, this is referred to as the
‘fifth space’ (cell v, Figure 1).
Virtual or visible? Working from home is off-site and ‘out of sight’

If ‘hyperprofessional’ attributes were especially identifiable in ‘extended’
and computer-based working, this was nowhere more evident than when
informants were ‘working from home’.Though work may be most inten-

sive here, it is also the least monitored. There are some indicators: the
time and volume of e-mails sent, numbers of articles written or essays
marked.The contents of much of this ‘knowledge work’ (Delanty, 2001),
however, including the processes of its production, are opaque. Interest-
ingly, there were no informant descriptions of ‘working on campus’ that
would match the sort of reports of working practice that took place ‘out
of sight’ at home and generally at night. This ‘conditions of knowledge
work’ scenario (and which was nothing to do with technology) was
typically also unknown to colleagues. Informants revealed, as if for the
first time, their strategies and routines:
I will typically be semi-nocturnal, or even entirely nocturnal. I work until the
early hours of the morning . . .
I am an early morning person. I suddenly realised—here was time! and I

shamelessly, I mean the poor children, encouraged them to sleep as late as
possible. I used to get up at 5 and would work . . . [then] go for a ten minute
run . . . and then . . . come back, I would get them up and that worked.
(Stella M., Professor, Pre ’92 Russell Group university)
Working from home occurs not only during the daytime and on
weekdays, in the evening, or through the night but may well be at
weekends too:
Weekends . . . [if we are away], I usually carry my Notebook and some books
with me and always want to keep on working during the weekend. In term
time, I would say that I rarely work during the weekend—oh well, only
some . . . mechanical work—for instance data transcription. But writing a full
paper or work that requires more concentration, that never happens!
(Lena A., Senior Lecturer, Post ’92 university)
Sunday was often described as a particularly fruitful day. Many saw

Sunday as an informal ‘working day’, but flexible, and with a choice of
activities. The particular informant above did not regard reading and
‘mechanical’ tasks, such as audio transcriptions, as actual ‘work’ despite
the labour involved. Indeed, there was a tangible sense of ‘pleasure’ in
choosing to work when and where this was totally optional. In its support
of scholarship or research, some aspects of working from home may
facilitate types of work in a very high value category indeed. The
suggestion of ‘compulsive working’ however indicates that there are
pressure-based, as well as voluntary or elective components to this activ-
ity; Woods (2006) has also commented on the pressures and pleasures of
lecturers’ work.
‘Productive work’
Despite the amount of time, energy and concentration of efforts on e-mail
correspondence and administrative work (and notwithstanding the notion
of fifth space as the return to campus) many academics said that their most
productive and valuable work could only be done at home, or away from
the institution. Informants clearly distinguished ‘routine administration’
from ‘productive’ work.The latter centred around writing for publication,
reports, fieldwork, transcription, data collection, writing up notes and
reading. Related to this, categories around ‘research’ were slightly more
equivocal. Informants differentiated between research as writing per se or
field-based activity, in contrast with communication about research. The
latter was seen as a broad administrative category. Even data transcription,
a core aspect of empirical research, was classified as routine administra-
tion above. For their ‘productive work’, many cited working from home as
important because of its lack of interruptions, even if the latter could not
be completely relied on:
In my senior management role, I get different types of interruption. Too
many—in my office, people arrive looking for guidance and advice. At home
I have fewer interruptions, though I am a father of two young children, who
sometimes have to come first!
(Brian G., Professor, Post ’92 university).
As is suggested by this informant, much may depend for ‘productive

home work’ on what else is going on there. The nature of this may
influence the ‘return to campus’ imperatives described above. Moreover,
as noted earlier, the specifically ‘gendered’ antecedents of labour forms
in distinct occupational and spatial settings, are complex and factors
such as cultural context, emotions and practical considerations come
into play. The ‘invisibility’ therefore of home working during the day,
despite claims of greater productivity, may mean that for some it has to
be relinquished and traded for ‘appearances’ on campus. These judge-
ments, discretions and decisions provide fascinating insights into the fine
grain and texture of everyday professional and academic work today and
the personal, career and status positions implied.
For most informants, working from home was productive essentially
because it was solitary. Yet solitary work tended to be most linked with
hyper-working. In the four focus groups and individual interviews of the
research, informants’ descriptions were suggestive of a heightened alert-
ness, particularly around their computer-based tasks; answering e-mail,
writing reports, checking documents, preparing presentations, searching
and downloading or transferring information and maintaining files and
systems. Academics generally felt driven by outside forces, with descrip-

tions of constant requests, requirements, information and consultation
processes (with internal and external actors), as well as their own projects
and initiatives to oversee. These elements were all fully present in the
narrative accounts, as were those about student contacts, and increasingly,
electronic pedagogic activity and e-marking loads. It was also clear from
analyses that engagement in particular in these kinds of computer-based
tasks could become excessive. Lecturers’ attention to detail, hyper-
awareness, conscientiousness, their drive to complete work, appeared
related not only to externally driven imperatives (Strathern, 2000; Deem
et al., 2007) but also to individual personalities and core professional
values. Perhaps this is part of the ‘creativity’, scope and variety of the job
of ‘academic work’. In the past and the present, diversity and intensity of
work has provided motivation, curiosity and engagement that has sus-
tained, renewed and retained postholders (Evans, 2011).
In this context, it is of more than passing interest to note that while the
need ‘to concentrate and be free of interruptions’ was raised by many
informant, for a few, interruptions were regarded as welcome. Such
interventions from the outside world when otherwise absorbed in other
detail could be regarded as valuable breaks, which prevented doing any
one thing to excess.
. . . I thought, ‘I need to limit things’. [umm] I think I let things limit one
another . . . the constant interruptions . . . actually put a brake on . . . things.
[working on my laptop] . . . I will flit between [things], as well as constantly
checking e-mail, not because of pressure but because I like to be diverted by
lots of different things [. . .] etc. see who’s getting in touch
These informants showed an awareness of some of the potentially nega-

tive correlates of compulsive-type and hyper-working. Thus, whilst a
dominant narrative about ‘interruptions’ saw these as distracting and
unproductive, the unusual individuals above suggested that it was pos-
sible to be highly focused and able to break on and off without this
detracting from overall concentration or productivity. These findings
emerged from ‘grounded’ data gathering and do not permit wider gen-
eralisation but did indicate a powerful ‘autonomy–accountability’ mix in
play. This revealed itself particularly in consideration of administrative
tasks and activities associated with the academic work of teaching,
research and external engagement. Indeed, these had a propensity to
displace the more highly valued, even ‘prioritised’, kinds of work. The
modes of what informants called ‘responding’ and ‘keeping up to date’,
were seen as compulsive, yet acknowledged as ephemeral. In addition the

states of mind required for these (‘hyper awareness’) were sometimes
seen as inimical to notions of getting on with ‘real work’, defined as
writing at length with focus and concentration for long periods. As one
person commented;
[. . .] it’s usually my research that never gets finished because that’s the last
thing on the agenda
(Clare M., Principal Lecturer, Post ’92 university)
Another said, apropos of working at the computer, ‘but writing is not

research’ emphasising that to really engage in research, one has to
actually get out from behind the desk.While this construction may imply
a particular view of what constitutes research, it is also a reminder that
detailed, focussed concentrated effort, in itself, does not constitute schol-
arly work. Moreover, work of this focussed, concentrated kind, in some
accounts, was taken up by administrative rather than scholarship-related
labour. Personal productivity, facilitated by technologies but driven by
student expansion, diversification and other pressures, also now takes
place arguably in the context of a shift of resources and support away
from staff and towards learners in higher education.
Pleasure, technology, real and virtual relationships

Hughes et al. (2009) and others have commented on notions of pleasure
in academic work and several writers have bemoaned the lack of ‘psy-
chological’ analyses of academic and IT-based working in the extant
literature (Letherby and Cotterall, 2009). The stimulation and close
engagements that many of the study participants exhibited, led to the
consideration of the role of pleasure in these very intense, intensive and,
in some ways, extensive kinds of working. The pleasure of engagement,
of getting things done in a virtual space and using multiple levels or
applications, are part of what Turkle (2007) calls ‘this tethered life’. This
entails experiences of being ‘always on’ and the optimistic sense of
‘hoping someone wants us’! (Turkle, 2011). The language of contact
with the computer may also denote something shared as well as
frustrating. Another approach to the use of technology in academic work
has been that of Lea and Stierer (2009) who argue that writing is such an
expressive and fundamental part of academic identity. They have also
looked at the area of professional writing using a computer and the use
of technology in textual production. It is a rich seam for further inves-
tigation (Thomas et al., 2010).
Both in focus-group discussions and interviews, the warmth of inter-

personal relations at work and values around collegiality were often
evident. Interviewees spoke of working with close peers and teams,
especially within, rather than across, departmental groups. One informant
distinguished between ‘the sort of energy people give you in face-to-face
interactions, which even though exhausting, could help you go on’. This
was contrasted with the sort of energy-sapping activity of electronic
administration. Here, ‘lost or given energy’ in e-mail, for example, was not
replaced or reciprocated because in personal interaction, people give
energy back. It was thus a drain, in the way that live engagement or
telephone conversations were not. Others, like the informant above,
flitting between e-mail-checking and writing or other applications, were
stimulated by the buzz of e-working and dynamic interactions online.
People are part of the pleasure (and pressure) of academic work,
according to Letherby and Cotterall (2009), who discuss the concept of
the ‘good enough academic’ and the strange fascination of academics
with their work. Academics especially value human interpersonal inter-
action, they argue, and indeed many Working Lives interviewees saw
communication technologies as ways of extending this interactional pro-
ductivity (Thomas et al., 2010). All appeared to share a belief in what
Jephcote and Salisbury (2009), in their studies of further education
lecturers, called the ‘transformative capacity of education’ to improve the
lives of those around them. The role of the personal, affective, emotional
and interpersonal in professional work is a growing area of interest (Rees
and Monrouxe, 2011). Yet despite the valuing of the sociable correlates
of academic life, the ‘private life’ of academic work was also nowhere
better highlighted than in the discussions of the private places in which
much ‘real work’ was invisibly taking place in this research.
Colleagues, invisible labour and knowledge processes

Despite knowing colleagues well, interviewees had little real idea of how
even close associates worked, worked from home or worked when away
from site. Informants readily agreed that their own colleagues too prob-
ably had little sense of how they themselves worked or engaged in
different tasks. There were generalised notions of ‘probably like me’ or
‘works from home also’, ‘doesn’t seem to work from home’, ‘sometimes
not there’ and so on. Despite the fact that many academic staff had to be
contactable or to log their whereabouts with managers when working
from home, the content and nature of what was done was largely
unknown. This is an area that would merit further work. Areas could
include investigating ‘academic privacy’ in solo working and in looking at
issues of high trust, productivity or support in management or supervi-

sory relationships around off-campus work. The wider higher education
culture is sometimes unconvinced of the ‘hard labour’ of absent aca-
demic colleagues. From time to time, the matter surfaces as a manage-
ment or employment issue or is constructed as an ‘opposition’ between
staff groups. Those who can and do have the ‘working from home’
affordance are thereby differentiated occupationally from those who do
not or cannot work from home. The Times Higher headline, ‘Edict cur-
tailing freedom to work at home “appalls“ staff’ (02/07/07), indicates the
emotions surrounding this aspect of academic work.
The importance professionally, practically and symbolically of being
able to work from home was emphasised by informants without
exception. It is important symbolically, because traditionally, this was a
privilege of a particular group of staff. Through their distinctive sorts of
tasks, activities and responsibilities, lecturers were able to work ‘any-
where’, or at least did not need to be at a desk or campus in order to
effectively fulfill their duties (Kogan and Hanney, 2000; Thomas et al.,
2010). The argument was that they needed time away from the work-
place to conduct their core duties once face-to-face-lecturing and tutor-
ing or supervision had been met. Other groups of staff may have been
sceptical about this tradition, with its ‘absences’ from public view, but the
data under discussion here highlights just what some of these activities
are and the value and extent of the time (often ‘gifted’) that is actually
spent on them. It is likely too, that academic staff overwork when they are
in charge; they put more in, because their role affords them this
opportunity. In the modern focus on ‘product’, the perhaps messy and
unseen processes of production appear to have remained relatively
undocumented.
Academic home-working may not have been deliberately hidden but
neither was it part of the professional or cultural ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu,
1986) to talk explicitly about it either. The processes of academic labour
and knowledge production were previously of little wider importance.
Though valued in the profession, they were less important than the
highly visible, accounted for and measured activities of teaching, exam-
ining and publishing. However, there is evidence of academic staff from
all types of higher education institutions engaging in hyperworking.What
they are doing in their ‘hypertime’, whether intensive research or inten-
sive administration (which could include student, project or course-
related work), differs according to their university location. Today,
amongst those interviewed, the very invisibility of much valued and
productive academic work is at issue.
Compulsive or compulsory working?

‘Autonomy’ and traditions of trust are important concepts for many
academics and were explicitly included in these descriptions of focused
professional work. There were also clear elements of compulsion or
feeling compelled in some of these reports, however. In the past, job
autonomy, self-management, the flexibility and scope afforded to aca-
demic work have attracted staff to academic roles and posts (Evans,
2011). These occupational features persist but are today under new
pressures (see Waring, 2010), including through, for example, ‘visible’
online diaries that can be filled by others, little or no ‘protected’ or
off-limits time, surveillance and ‘signing in’ cultures, prejudices around
‘presenteeism’ on campus, not just being contactable but being seen.
Turkle (2011) argues for a more empowering engagement with technol-
ogy, shaping it to human purposes. She questions pressures to give up
privacy rights that software such as Facebook may appear to ‘demand’.
She also observes that information technology applications are increas-
ingly part of a crossover between home or personal and employment or
public life. Academics have arguably been at the forefront of the use of
new technology, flexibility and adaptation in professional work. Together
with the special conditions of ‘working from home’, its discretion, self-
direction, self-management and trust, their work can be seen as an
exemplar for a wider new professional practice. This recognition should
also sit alongside debates in academic employment about workload,
‘presenteeism’ (Birkhead, 2008; Jones, 2009), top-down policy changes
(McGettigan, 2011) and divisions of labour, both old and new. In Wales,
there has been some interest from policymakers in this research on
academics’ flexible and mobile working, which is presented as a case
study of, and insight into, modern working life.
There have been several commissioned and research studies of
scholarly working and workloads including Barrett and Barrett, (2007)
and others relating to health issues and work–life balance, such as
Kinman and Jones (2004). While these have contributed to the under-
standing of academic labour, none seem to have looked at the con-
junction of work intensification with administrative increases, uses of
information technology, where work physically takes place and the
unseen nature of much of what academics regard as their key profes-
sional activity. In the data presented here, there was a sense from infor-
mants of being driven by motivations of both an extrinsic and an
intrinsic kind and sometimes of ‘going the extra mile’ in conducting
work and meeting commitments:
I was always very careful of trying to conserve as much of the morning as I could
[umm] if there was a deadline coming up, a kind of frenzy would take me over
and I would suddenly not be able to attend to anything else but get this thing
finished [I did have to do lots of other things but] . . . this frenzy made me
psychologically want to clear everything out of the way until I had finished what
I was doing . . . it was a kind of emotional drive that sort of kept me at it.
Someone else might spend their money on running a car, I would probably
spend it on someone to help me . . . and I do.
(Debra S., Reader, Pre ’92 university)
As much as academics have a sense of ‘giving’, they also work in ‘greedy

institutions’ (Coser, 1974). And in higher education, as Acker (1994,
p. 126) has observed, ‘academic work, like housework, is never done’.
‘Hyperprofessionality’ is thus a new term and a contribution to this discus-
sion, one that aims to capture the alignment between the professional, the
always connected modality of a continuous electronic environment and
research with academics in their important but unseen work. ‘Hyperpro-
fessionality’ is not empty, repetitive behaviour but often highly productive
professional work. The term is an attempt to capture elements of ‘giving
more’, ‘going beyond and above’ in the professional context. This is in
contrast to less nuanced descriptions of dysfunctional ‘overwork’. It is a
fine balance for, as has been noted, the hours of ‘voluntary overtime’ were
described principally as taking place away from the main workplace and
generally invisibly during ‘self directed’ time. The two quotations below
capture some of the compulsory–voluntary: tension–pleasure mix:
I can work anywhere . . . If I am going on a train journey I would read the

papers for the meeting . . . I’ll write a paper in a dull meeting.
(Debra S., Reader, Pre ’92 University)
. . . if we didn’t work at home, we wouldn’t get our jobs done. End of story.
(Clare M., Principal Lecturer, Post ’92 university)
Considerations of ‘ways to survive and get by’ were also discussed
with informants. These included keeping up and preventing overload by
being ‘always on’ (an ironic stance) and having one computer live for
e-mail and another kept e-mail-free for writing. Other strategies applied
(or attempted) included e-mail-free days or times, e-mail ‘contact times’,
house rules for response and turnaround time. As voiced above, some
people also used interruptions positively to limit activity. Further sug-
gestions included having more than one e-mail address or account for
different areas of life or work. Most informants wanted and valued
‘filtering’ and compartmentalising devices like these and were striving to
take control of their own schedule. This included being able to escape to
‘work from home’, or to return to work ‘out of hours’, on campus (the
fifth space), at evenings and weekends, even bank holidays, or other
periods when everything else was quiet, to get on and make headway.
Concluding remarks
The aim of this paper has been to discuss and render visible aspects of
academics’ working lives. In developing and building on Hoyle’s
‘extended professionality’ of teachers, the analysis captures the compul-
sive or compulsory duality of lecturers’ work and the relevance of ‘home’
as a site of productivity. ‘Working from home’ practices are little dis-
cussed in the academic community itself and under-indexed in manage-
ment and ‘human resources’ discussions of academic workload. It is
hoped that the present research will contribute to a more holistic con-
ception of academic labour, recognising both the visible and unseen
forms of working.The paper has also sought to acknowledge the pleasure
that involvement in some of this ‘performativity’ entails. The ‘hyperpro-
fessional’ academic may be someone who, like his or her personal com-
puter, rarely switches off; on the other hand, there are not many
professional jobs you can do in your dressing gown.
Acknowledgements
Our thanks to the CETL Academic Practice 2011 conference partici-
pants (Oxford, 4–6 April) for comments and discussion of the presen-
tation on which this paper is based. We would also like to thank all those
who have read or commented on this article for their helpful suggestions,
as well as members of the Working Lives research team, the interviewee
and focus group participants. The Welsh Education Research Network
(WERN) funding comprising ESRC and HEFCW supported the data
collection and three higher education institutions funded writing and
dissemination: University of Wales Newport, University of Glamorgan
and Cardiff University. Our thanks to colleagues for their encourage-
ment and interest: Professor Sally Power, Professor Alan Felstead, Pro-
fessor John Furlong and Dr. Sue Davies (WERN), Dr. Ron Cobley, Dr.
Alun Hughes, Dr. Linda Evans, Professor Rob Cuthbert, Professor
David Turner, Rebekah Daniel and Dr. Martin Gough and Grace Long.
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Higher Education Quarterly, 0951–5224

Lynne Gornall, Working Lives Research Group,

unrelenting (Bazeley, 2010; Pollard, 2009). To these must be added

of ‘hyperprofessionality’ are discussed. The first section below considers

Research approaches and methods

Coping strategies and survival in contemporary academic life

The working week: self-directed time, autonomy and overload

This is, however, not simply an effect of ‘imposed work’ or greater

Meta-logistics of the modern academic workload and workspace

However, being mobile requires a mindful, hyper-aware state and man-

I use three computer setups—desktops at home and work, also a laptop—and

separation, however, makes extra work in the ‘management of infor-

Mapping the fluid dynamics of workspace

Figure 1 The evolution and locations of home/work as identified spaces

demics did traditionally. Soja’s radical ‘thirdspace’ notion is used here as

Virtual or visible? Working from home is off-site and ‘out of sight’

informants were ‘working from home’.Though work may be most inten-

I am an early morning person. I suddenly realised—here was time! and I

Sunday was often described as a particularly fruitful day. Many saw

As is suggested by this informant, much may depend for ‘productive

systems. Academics generally felt driven by outside forces, with descrip-

These informants showed an awareness of some of the potentially nega-

were seen as compulsive, yet acknowledged as ephemeral. In addition the

Another said, apropos of working at the computer, ‘but writing is not

Pleasure, technology, real and virtual relationships

Both in focus-group discussions and interviews, the warmth of inter-

Colleagues, invisible labour and knowledge processes

issues of high trust, productivity or support in management or supervi-

Compulsive or compulsory working?

As much as academics have a sense of ‘giving’, they also work in ‘greedy

I can work anywhere . . . If I am going on a train journey I would read the

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