University work–life balance policies increasingly offer academic workers a range of possible options for managing the competing demands of work, family, and community obligations. Flexible work arrangements, family-friendly hours and campus facilities, physical well-being and mental health programs typify strategies for formally acknowledging the need for employees to balance work with other needs and commitments. This paper draws on examples from Australian university work–life balance policies to consider how the incalculable humanity of academic workers is constructed as posing institutional risks because of the potential ill-effects of an imbalance between work and life. We consider how work–life balance policies anticipate and attempt to manage perceived risks to the institution as a consequence of workers’ utilization of such policies for their own benefit. Informed by poststructuralist theoretical and cultural analyses of risk, affect, and governmentality, we argue that work–life balance policies stage a double maneuver. They offer heavily qualified workplace conditions, benefits, and supports predicated on notions of risk and reciprocity, while simultaneously extending the reach of institutional power to include the bodies, minds, families, and lives of academic workers.
Work-life balance policies have become a ubiquitous feature of university strategies for formally recognising that employees have personal interests, ties and obligations beyond those of the workplace. However, rationales for work-life balance policies and programs in Australian universities predominantly link personal health, well-being and family responsibilities to imperatives for a more productive and competitive tertiary sector. In this paper, we call for an encounter between work-life balance policies, everyday organisational practices and the performativities of academic subjects. Informed by poststructuralist theories of institutionality, governmentality and subjectivity, we draw on personal and policy narratives to argue that ‘well-being’ is a construct through which the risky humanity of academic subjects is not only managed, but also appropriated into normative discourses of obligatory productivity and self-governance. Informed by Sara Ahmed's recent work on the cultural politics of emotion and in particular, what she terms the obligation or ‘duty to happiness’, we consider how academic performativities are implicated in discursive fictions that equate work-life balance with personal and organisational well-being.
Abstract Smart infrastructure is positioned as central to the liveability and viability of rural and regional towns in Australia. The Australian Government's Smart Cities Plan and Regional Connectivity Program includes Smart Investment in regional areas and the New South Wales Government has prioritised connectivity and telecommunications infrastructural development through the Regional Digital Connectivity program. And yet regional and rural communities are typically excluded from the evidence base for smart technologies and services. Local Aboriginal Land Councils are also important stakeholders in managing the digital processes associated with information and infrastructure moving across different Countries. This paper draws on data from the ‘It just works!’: Regional and rural consumer understandings of smart technologies in North West New South Wales project, including over 130 survey responses and interviews with shire councillors, land councillors, and consumers on smart development and Internet infrastructure in the region. In the areas surveyed, smart regional policy is variously emerging, non‐existent, or assembled from existing policy domains and regulation involving the Internet, telecommunications, regional development, First Nations, and local government. We argue that regional and rural understandings of growth and development are experienced through the infrastructuring processes of Internet quality, availability, and speed.
Gamification, a strategy whereby video game logics are applied to real world tasks, is rapidly gaining traction in education discourses, policies, and practices. Gamification advocates are frequent...
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the lived experiences of Australian public library staff during the COVID-19 library closures. The study examines the effect of mandated physical library closures on staff well-being, along with the challenges they faced as library operations moved to a remotely delivered model. The paper includes an examination of staff perceptions of their library's value in the lives of their users. Design/methodology/approach Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 15 Australian library staff from three library networks. A process of inductive coding resulted in a thematic description of the participants' experiences of continuing to work during a period of where their libraries were closed due to COVID-19 restrictions. Findings Australian public library workers experienced many challenges that affected their well-being during the period of library closures. These included challenges relating to moving library programming to a virtual delivery model, managing significant change in their work lives, managing the emotions of self and others, and concern for the well-being of library users. Positive outcomes relating to skill development and innovative thinking were also reported. Originality/value The operational responses to the COVID-19 library closures in Australia and elsewhere have been well reported. This paper takes a different approach by examining the emotional and well-being outcomes for public library staff during these periods of closure.
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