Abstract

Colleges and universities increasingly employ temporary instructors. Researchers in higher education have voiced strong concerns about this trend because of its impact on educational outcomes, operations of academic institutions, and the composition of academic workforce. To enhance our understanding of this employment practice, this article makes three contributions to the research on the growing non-tenured employment in academia. First, we advance the theory by arguing that the value co-creation framework, also referred to as service science, is an appropriate theoretical lens for studying higher education, including faculty employment. Second, we use this framework to analyze operations of a selective undergraduate program in Finland that has been functioning for over 30 years without permanent teaching faculty. Housed at a premier business school, the program relies on an expansive international network of instructors who travel to teach on short-term contracts. Third, we demonstrate that the staffing model used by this Finnish program is distinct from other forms of temporary academic employment, and therefore we label it a networked faculty staffing model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the value co-creation framework is used as a theoretical lens to study employment in higher education. Moreover, this is the first time a networked faculty staffing model is explicitly identified and described. Besides researchers, this article might be of interest to the diverse international audience who are involved in management and policy setting in higher education.

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