A new Collegiality in Collaborative Work and Practice

What is it about?

As part of the Working Lives research this chapter is an account of how a group of people from different backgrounds and institutions with differentiated 'value systems' and norms learned to work together as part of the Working Lives (WL) team which comprised of a cross-HEI (higher education institution) group of five people who were invited to come together for a new piece of research initially in Wales. The 'story' explores how these academics, at very different stages of their academic careers moved towards being a support group and developing a 'new collegiality'. This collaborative group was successful in many of criteria laid down by the Welsh Education Research Network (WERN) and the Economic Social Research Council (ESRC).

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Why is it important?

Wider studies do suggest that lecturers in HE and FE feel that the 'collegial' ethos of their sector has been significantly eroded or even fatally damaged by changes of the last two or three decades. This WL team argued that research revealing some of the more fin-textured aspects of contemporary occupational life are needed, and explored ways of representing and denoting newer forms of academic working, that are cross-organizational and instantiated with collaboration such as this.