well for one managers typically know what their reports are actually doing, and pay them to do it. this kind of corporatespeak has no place in academia
I’ll counter with arguing that department chairs fill exactly the same function as line managers in other organizations—enforcing corporate policies and generally directing their orgs toward a vaguely defined goal
we're a non-profit education and research organization, we don't have corporate policies or even a corporate anything. "line manager" is demeaning to the work of a senior professor leading an intellectual community
I work with a lot of line managers leading intellectual communities of researchers. Their jobs look a lot like department chairs. Academia looks, feels, and operates very much like any other knowledge work organization.
I think that denying that academia is an industry that operates very similarly to most other industries is one of the key pathways that leads academics to be exploited by their their industry and employers.
My managers in non-academic settings have rarely had a clear understanding of the work I do. That comes from being a senior knowledge worker, not academia
hahaha yes. join me in my war to end idiotic jargon in NZ academia (my method: I assertively just use the terms the rest of the world already understands, and watch as others adopt them)
so far I've got numerous people in auckland science to start calling professors 'faculty members' instead of 'academic staff', quite pleased about that one
Have heard it in E Asia, Europe and UK but not uniformly. Main thing for me is distinguishing faculty from staff as they have categorically different roles. Failing to distinguish them leads to all sorts of problems imo
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