<p> <b>Background:</b> Advanced nursing education needs to be pursued along the continuum of the nursing career path. This education process is indispensable to the role of the nurse as educator, manager, nurse leader, and researcher who will effect policy changes and assume leadership roles as revolutionary thinkers in addition to implementing paradigmatic shifts. </p><p> <b>Purpose:</b> This grounded theory study sought to unearth the critical factors that motivate nurses to advance academically. The study aimed to gain an understanding of the social processes associated with the decision of diploma and associate degree nurses to advance their nursing education. </p><p> <b>Philosophical Underpinnings:</b> A qualitative methodology in the tradition of grounded theory using the constructivist and interpretivist approach was used to conduct the study. </p><p> <b>Method:</b> Data were collected from two groups of participants using a face-to-face semistructured interview. The first group was diploma and associate degree nurses, and the second group was a focus group comprising of baccalaureate, masters, or doctoral degree nurses who have progressed academically from diploma or associate degree level. </p><p> <b>Results:</b> Emerging from the thick rich data that were collected from the research participants were the following core categories that ground the theory: rewarding, motivating, and supporting for diploma and associate degree nurses to advance academically. </p><p> <b>Conclusions:</b> The study concluded by elucidating that professional advancement was the social process that grounds. Hence, the emergent theory was; <i>The Theory of Professional Advancement.</i></p>

In order to arrive at informed judgments about the quality of research institutions and individual scholars, funding agencies, academic employers and researchers have turned to publication rankings. While such rankings, often based on journal citations, promise a more efficient and transparent funding allocation, individual researchers are at risk of showing adaptive behavior. This paper investigates whether the use of journal rankings in assessing the quality of scholarly research results in the unintended consequence of researchers adapting their research topics to the publishing interests of high-ranked journals. The introduction of the Handelsblatt Ranking (HBR) for economists in German language institutions serves as a quasi-natural experiment, allowing for an examination of research topic dynamics in economics via topic modeling and text classification. It is found that the Handelsblatt Ranking did not cause a significant shift of topics researched by German-affiliated authors in comparison to their international counterparts, even though topic convergence is apparent.

The university sector at the beginning of the 21st Century is shifting in response to national and global changes in the role and purpose of Higher Education. Some universities, including the University of Hertfordshire, have chosen to focus attention on engagement with business and commerce. This practice based research examines the experience of academics in relation to the new challenges posed by this strategic development. There are three threads of investigation; interviews, examination of key concepts and the practitioner dimension. Drawing on a qualitative and constructivist approach, individual interviews with a range of business facing academics explore their experience of engaging with new activities. My perspective, as a manager of business facing academics, provides an important thread and situates the work firmly in the practice context. The implicit expectations arising from strategic positioning as a business facing university are examined. A conceptual framework is established with a focus on the nature of business facing activity, including its relationship with traditional forms of teaching and research, learning through work in the Higher Education setting and the idea of an enabling local context. The research found that amongst those undertaking business facing activity, academic identity is a fluid and multi-faceted construct reconfigured through experience and learning in the workplace; by its nature not easily defined, labelled or bounded. The challenge for universities is to nurture and sustain individuals in the creation and use of academic identities, in order to meet the undoubted challenges to come. This requires a forward looking, inclusive and innovative stance, resisting the temptation to judge current academic identities by the established notions of the past. Management of academics involved in business facing activity requires a more flexible, trusting and individual approach than is traditionally seen in universities.

Hochschulische Lehrkörper als Kategorie beschreibt bisher eine rechnerische Größe zur Erfassung der einzelnen Lehrenden einer jeweiligen Hochschule. Basierend auf der Annahme, dass die Hochschullehrenden vergleichsweise autonom agieren, in ihren Organisationen daher nur lose gekoppelt sind und nicht als soziale*r Akteur*in auftreten. Diese Konzipierung einer solchen ideellen Gemeinschaft trifft aufgrund andauernder Reformprozesse zur Gestaltung von Lehre und Studium jedoch nur noch bedingt zu. Denn als Bearbeitungsmodus der veränderten Anforderungen gehen neue Erwartungen an und Erfahrungen mit Kooperations- und Koordinationsleistungen der Lehrenden untereinander sowie auch mit anderen Akteur*innen einher. Dem Wandel der Formen des Miteinanders Hochschullehrender entsprechend, wird in der vorliegenden Arbeit ein angepasstes Bild hochschulischer Lehrkörper skizziert. Dazu wird mit einem erziehungswissenschaftlichen Blick auf empirische Daten aus Kooperationen von Lehrenden sowie Daten über Kooperationen von Lehrenden und anderen unmittelbar an der Gestaltung von Hochschullehre beteiligten Personen geschaut. Die dabei dokumentierte Interaktionspraxis wird in den einzelnen Forschungsbeiträgen kulturwissenschaftlich perspektiviert und hinsichtlich sozialer Praktiken rekonstruiert. Entlang der dem Material immanenten Differenzen und Differenzierungen wird dabei eine Kooperationspraxis zeigbar, die sich an ambivalenten Anforderungen abarbeitet und daran ausbildet, sowie sie sich ebenso daran bricht. Lehrkörper werden in dieser Arbeit folglich weder als statistische Einheiten noch als statische organisationale Identitäten begriffen, sondern vielmehr als optionale Arenen sozialer Auseinandersetzung im Modus des Widerstreitens und des Mitwerdens diskutiert. / Hochschulische Lehrkörper, what is not the same like faculty, as a category has so far described an arithmetical quantity for recording the individual teachers of a respective university. This is based on the assumption that university teachers act comparatively autonomously, are therefore only loosely coupled in their organizations and do not appear as social actors. However, this conception of such a specific academic community only applies to a limited extent due to ongoing reform processes in the design of teaching and studies. Because as a mode of dealing with the changed demands, new expectations of and experiences with cooperation and coordination services of the teachers among themselves as well as with other actors go hand in hand. In accordance with the change in forms of cooperation among university teachers, this paper outlines an adapted image of hochschulische Lehrkörper. To this end, an educational perspective is applied to empirical data from cooperation between teachers as well as data on cooperation between teachers and other persons directly involved in the design of higher education teaching. The practice of interaction documented in this way will be given a cultural- scientific perspective in the individual research contributions and reconstructed in terms of social practices. Along the differences and differentiations immanent in the material, a practice of cooperation becomes apparent that works through ambivalent demands and develops from them, as well as breaking with them. In this work, hochschulische Lehrkörper are thus understood neither as statistical units nor as static organizational identities, but rather discussed as optional arenas of social examination in the mode of dispute and becoming-with.