Globally, universities are facing complex issues which often leads to transformational change. Among the changes, university governance and accountability management have been noted as areas of reform. The main drivers are globalisation, burgeoning knowledge-based economies, rapidity of new technologies adoption, and global competitiveness. The impact of these drivers and subsequent reform is ultimately reflected in the changing nature of academic work being undertaken by academic staff. Academic staff are inclined to negatively reflect on their experience of the changing nature of their academic work. This paper reports on a study conducted in Australia that explores the lived experiences of sixteen academics working in a range of public universities and experiencing transformational change.
The study adopts a qualitative research approach to support inductive and open generation of new thinking to emerge from the data. The data collection method consists of in-depth, one-on-one, face-to-face interviews. The study utilises an interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) to accomplish a detailed exploration and analysis of the lived experiences of the participants. The findings indicate that the changing nature of university governance and accountability management, which is now influenced by corporate structures, impacts the work of academic staff. The findings of the study have the potential to enable university leaders and managers to better understand the challenges academic staff confront in relation to the changes to university governance and new accountability management systems. Our research also presents participants’ suggestions of ways to create, maintain and sustain work environments in universities today.