Editorial

Abstract

Dear Colleagues, Welcome to our final issue of 2022, which includes six articles and three book reviews, unusually including two independent reviews of the same book. We start with Hayden McDonald and colleagues’ analysis of health promotion activities at eight Australian universities and taxonomy to help implementation. Similarly, we hope our readers are enjoying some of their own health promotion activities over the holiday break. When staff return in 2023, many university managers will face the invidious task of workload allocations. Our second article, by Beth R. Crisp, reviews the literature and reflects on her professional experience administering these complex systems. Developing ‘a shared understanding of what is “good enough”’ is sound advice, particularly in organisations where unpaid overtime is (almost) a norm of professionalism. The relatively long hours of academic researchers are partly due to strong intrinsic motivation, but universities also seek to leverage this through research incentive systems. The motivations of university managers are clear, but how academics view these incentive structures is not. Félix Guerrero-Alba, Fernando Martín-Alcázar and Gonzalo Sánchez-Gardey undertook a mixed-methods study at a Spanish university to investigate this issue. The new year will see many newly minted PhD graduates returning home after completing their studies abroad. The Malaysian government, like many others, strongly encourages PhD graduates to return and bring home their knowledge, skills and connections. But returnees and their institutions face considerable challenges of adjustment, as outlined by Chang Da Wan, Aliya Kuzhabekova and Botagoz Ispambetova We certainly hope that 2023 will not bring another ‘rapid transition to online learning’ during a pandemic, but that does not mean we cannot be prepared by learning from what worked well. Dijana Townsend, Kate Wilson and Marina Harvey reflect on how the transition was achieved by applying a 3S triage process (see, solve and share) at an Australian military academy. In 2018, the Polish higher education sector underwent a series of reforms, including ‘modernising’ institutional governance with greater autonomy, hierarchy, and vertical steering from leadership. Universities also introduced more external stakeholders, counterbalancing and challenging academic and managerial control. Davide Donina and colleagues’ survey of Polish rectors offers insight into the impact of these changes on different institutional types. Sometimes people can independently and concurrently work on the same good idea. This is what happened when Rita Suswati and Shifei Duan each offered their independent perspectives on the same book Universities and regional engagement: from the exceptional to the everyday by Tatiana Lakovleva, Elisa Thomas, Laila Nordstrand Berg, Römulo JOURNAL OF HIGHER EDUCATION POLICY AND MANAGEMENT 2022, VOL. 44, NO. 6, 529–530 https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080X.2022.2136863