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Copyright © Fiona Cownie 2004
First Published in Web Journal of Current Legal Issues.

I would like to thank Tony Bradney, and participants in staff seminars at the universities of Manchester and Nottingham for their comments on previous versions of this paper, though responsibility for errors remains mine alone. I would also like to thank Alan Burton of De Montfort University for his assistance in locating materials relating to film studies, and Kate Malleson of the LSE for recommending some materials on work-life balance.

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Changes in higher education over the last twenty years have led to a huge increase in the workload of legal academics. At the same time, there are many more choices as to how to spend time outside the workplace. Research shows that academics around the world are finding the maintenance of work-life balance an increasingly difficult issue. This article uses data from a qualitative study of legal academics in the U.K. to illustrate the particular effects of changes in higher education policy on the workload of those working in law schools. While no easy solutions are offered, it is suggested that it is time for legal academics to engage in some Socratian self-examination.

• Introduction
• Work-life balance and Contemporary Legal Academics
• The Empirical Enquiry
• The Context
• Legal Academics and Changes in Higher Education
• Two Jobs
• Not a Real Issue?
• Aspects of the ‘two jobs’
• Two Lives
• And a Funeral?
• Coping With Work-Life Balance
• Where do we go from here?

Bibliography

Four Weddings and a Funeral is apparently a light-hearted romantic comedy about marriage (Four Weddings, 1995). Charles (the Hugh Grant character) has had lots of girlfriends, but the more weddings he attends among his circle of friends the less inclined he is to get married himself, until at one particular wedding he meets Carrie (Andy McDowell). Three more weddings and a funeral later, Charles finally realises he is in love with Carrie and they float off into the sunset together. Despite the misgivings of some critics, who have seen the film merely as a comedy of manners about the British upper classes which fails to place its characters successfully in either a physical or emotional landscape, it is possible to see in this apparently trite treatment of the human longing for romance some much more serious commentary on the human condition.

Combs (1995) takes a particularly critical view of the film, characterising it as lacking ‘...any sense of how to deliver a story that will be a necessary and sufficient home for the characters, that will give their comedy meaning’ (Combs, 1995, p. 54). However, an alternative interpretation characterises Four Weddings as being a film about insecurity, hesitation and failure – about the pain of getting it wrong. The film begins with Charles messing up being the best man at a wedding and then putting his foot in it at the reception. This is the trigger for a series of increasingly embarrassing mistakes, even humiliations, such as having to help choose a wedding dress for the woman he loves to wear when she gets married to someone else. In the end, however, not only does he get his girl, but he also comes through his experiences with some dignity (Williamson, 2001).

 

The latter interpretation of Four Weddings and a Funeral has many resonances for contemporary legal academics, particularly in relation to the problem of work-life balance. Just as for Charles, the problems are immediate, pressing and difficult. They cannot be shelved for later consideration, because life moves on – in the same way as the threat of Carrie’s imminent marriage puts pressure on Charles, legal academics are faced with the immediate prospect of children growing up, partners getting older, ties with friends becoming weaker and opportunities for personal growth being lost. At the same time law schools are making ever-increasing demands upon the time and energy of their staff. It is almost inevitable that when faced with choices about the balance between different strands of their lives individual legal academics will sometimes behave like Charles; they will prevaricate, procrastinate and make mistakes (the latter in itself a potentially humiliating experience for those whose professional life is so intimately bound up with making rational judgements).

In the context of current debates about higher education this article addresses three basic questions: are legal academics really under pressure in terms of work-life balance, if so, to what extent is this a matter of concern, and how can the inevitable choices best be made? Throughout this article, the term ‘work-life balance’ is expressly used to indicate that the issues raised apply to all legal academics, and are not restricted to those with children or who belong to traditional nuclear families. Early work on this issue, even when using the same terminology, tended to conflate ‘life’ with ‘family’, which has resulted in the inevitable (and justifiable) backlash from those excluded from such a narrow definition (see, for example, Doyle, 2000, p. 20).

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There has been an increasing amount of evidence which points to the fact that at the beginning of the twenty-first century, finding a proper balance between time spent at work and time spent on other activities is problematic. The long hours culture prevalent in Britain has been highlighted frequently in the media (see for example, Socialist Review, 1996; Sunday Times, 2000; The Economist, 2004). Despite the implementation of the Working Time Directive in October 1998, a year later 22% of full-time employees in the U.K. usually worked in excess of 48 hours a week (Social Trends, 2000, p. 105). Research carried out for the DTI, published in 2003, drew attention to the fact that U.K. workers now work the longest hours in Europe (Kodz et al, 2003); with this in mind, both the DTI and the European Commission are currently consulting on the operation of the Working Time Directive (DTI, 2004).

It appears that problems of work-life balance are widespread. Britain’s Prime Minister has been reported as being unable to take a proper holiday from work, and as being reluctant to take paternity leave when his fourth child was born (The Times, 2001). His Government has initiated a work-life balance project and published a good practice guide for employers, while the EU Council passed a resolution in June 2000 on the balanced participation of women and men in family and working life, which was the first step in a programme which will also involve the European Commission and all the Member States in addressing this issue and implementing policies designed to improve the existing situation (DFEE, 2000; E.U. 2000). The ESRC’s Future of Work research programme has already revealed that both male and female employees are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the length of their working hours, and that the long hours culture is firmly embedded for those in professional/ higher managerial jobs (www.leeds.ac.uk/esrcfutureofwork). Work-life balance, it seems, is a pressing concern of the twenty first century.

Those who work in the academy are not immune from the general trend. Thorsen (1996, p. 474) discusses a range of studies across the world which have identified a range of stress factors in academic life, including the long hours spent on the job. She comments that long working hours are associated with high levels of stress, yet ‘...for an academic to work less than 40 hours a week is to be underemployed’. Studies in Israel (Perlberg and Keinan, 1986) and the U.S. (Gmelch et al, 1984), as well as Thorsen’s own research in Canada, produce very similar results. Similar factors are reflected in research carried out using data drawn from the large-scale Carnegie survey of the academic profession, which shows that British academics are considerably less satisfied with their jobs than their European contemporaries; many of them are not satisfied with their salaries, and of the countries included in the study (Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S.) there was a higher proportion of British academics than in any other country analysed who would not opt again for academic work (Enders and Teichler, 1994, p. 367). In Britain, Paul Trowler’s qualitative study of academic culture at ‘NewU’ revealed some academics who are sinking under the pressures of contemporary academic life:

[The staff in my department] are all absolutely run into the .....ground. we’re all exhausted, we’re all demoralised...An awful lot of us have lost our enthusiasm and energy...........It really has damaged my health, I’ve been quite ill as a result of having to work far too hard.....That’s why I would like to get out.

(Trowler, 1998, p. 115).

Many of Trowler’s other respondents had been in similar situations at some point in their careers, but they had then developed more active forms of response. Even amongst those academics who were not ‘sinking’, however, there was a large group who had simply developed coping strategies to deal with the demands of contemporary academic life. As Trowler notes, while these strategies helped alleviate stress, they often had negative consequences; some academics had decided to retreat from innovation, others were ‘working to rule’, while another group deliberately made themselves unapproachable to students, and many had started to avoid meetings and refuse to become involved in special projects where once they would have accepted (Trowler, 1998, pp. 122-123). Those who were actively flourishing in the new academic environment created by the policy changes of the late twentieth century were in the minority. Trowler’s findings were foreshadowed in Halsey’s extensive quantitative study of British academia, Decline of Donnish Dominion, in which he concluded that:

We have sadly portrayed deteriorating conditions of academic work. The autonomy of institutions has declined, salaries have fallen, chances of promotion have decreased. The dignity of academic people and their universities and polytechnics has been assailed from without by government and from within by the corrosion of bureaucracy (Halsey, 1992, p. 268).

Commentators have speculated that legal academics face similar pressures, whatever kind of institution they work in; as Roger Brownsword has commented:

...at the top of the hierarchy, staff life will tend to be nasty, brutish (and for the non-productive) short. Competition will be cut-throat and the pressure intense. Academic lawyering further down the order, however, will be even less cosy, with larger classes, weaker students and employment prospects (for both students and staff) shrouded in uncertainty (Brownsword, 1994, p. 539).

However, little is known about the actual nature of work-life balance issues as experienced by contemporary legal academics in the U.K.

 

I have noted elsewhere that finding empirical information about any aspect of what has been called the ‘lived experience’ of contemporary legal academics is not easy (Cownie, 1998, p. 104). There is a small body of empirical work examining various aspects of contemporary British legal academia, but it does not specifically address the question of work-life balance, and only a minority of it is qualitative in nature. Harris and Jones’ survey of law schools (1996), and Leighton et al’s research report on law teachers (1995) are both quantitative surveys, as were the three ‘Wilson’ surveys which preceded them (Wilson, 1966; Wilson and Marsh, 1975; Wilson, 1993); questions of work-life balance are not specifically addressed. Work by McGlynn and Wells, though including qualitative data, is confined to women legal academics (McGlynn, 1998; Wells, 2000, 2001, 2001a, 2002); again, work-life issues are not directly addressed. Similarly, Liz Mytton’s small-scale qualitative study does not address the issue of work-life balance (Mytton, 2003). Tony Becher’s Academic Tribes and Territories (Becher, 1989; Becher and Trowler, 2001) examines a range of academic disciplines (including law), but his original research specifically excluded any exploration of the private lives of his respondents, and the space he is able to devote to them in his second edition is limited. On the other hand, Richard Collier’s recent work, while focusing on work-life balance, does not include any empirical evidence (Collier, 2002). However, it is interesting to examine Collier’s work, because he specifically addresses issues of work-life balance in the course of his argument. Collier argues that the process of change to which universities have been subjected over the last ten years or so has amounted to a process of ‘corporatisation’, which has in turn transformed our understanding of what it means to be a ‘successful’ academic (Collier, 2002, p. 18). The model of academic performativity which emerges is one which is premised on a distinctly masculinised form of labour, situated in a distinctly masculinised culture. This is not the form of masculine culture which has traditionally been found in universities – the paternalistic, ‘liberal’ regime associated with the ‘ivory tower’, in which managerial control was largely by men and of men, but ‘...a new bureaucratic managerialism which, it would seem, continues to be male-dominated [and] fratriarchal in nature’ (Collier, 2002, p. 24). In this context, Collier argues, it is ironic that ‘...at the very moment when many other employment fields are struggling to address issues of work-life balance in a meaningful way, albeit with some difficulty, and often with little success, universities in the United Kingdom increasingly appear to assume they are employers entitled to ‘ideal (academic) workers’ free from family responsibilities, and that both women and men should be expected to perform in a way regardless of any ‘private life’ (Collier, 2002, p. 30). The question here is: is Collier’s thesis borne out by the lived experience of legal academics?

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Faced with the gaps in our knowledge about the empirical reality of being a legal academic, I recently undertook a qualitative empirical study of their ‘lived experience’, aiming to uncover a specific part of what Martin Trow has called the ‘private life’ of universities (Trow, 1975). This article examines the question of work-life balance in considerably more detail than was practicable in my original examination of these issues, using data which it was not possible to include in the book which came out of the project (Cownie, 2004).

 

My interest in legal academics was originally inspired by Tony Becher’s Academic Tribes and Territories (Becher, 1989). Becher’s work explored the nature of knowledge and the characteristics of the academics by whom it is produced in twelve different academic disciplines. He was interested in the ways in which academics perceive themselves, how they organise their professional lives and in all that goes to make up the culture of academia. However, as he himself observed, there is very little similar work, and even in relation to the disciplines he examined, our understanding could be given greater dimensionality and depth by pursuing the type of close observation suggested by Geertz in his prospectus for ‘an ethnography of the disciplines’ (Becher, 1989, p. 179). In fact, the project to create an ethnography of the disciplines is one which has been largely ignored by the majority of higher education researchers, a fact which Becher himself comments on in later work which looks at unexploited opportunities for research on higher education (Becher, 1991, p.123). The most notable contributions to the field, apart from Becher’s work, have been made by Evans, who produced two in-depth studies: English People, looking at the discipline of English, and Language People, looking at Modern Languages (Evans, 1988; 1993). The examination of the culture of legal academia which I am currently undertaking is therefore a contribution to the larger project of creating an ethnography of the disciplines.

The survey itself consisted of a series of semi-structured interviews carried out with 54 legal academics working in a range of university law schools. Interview sites were chosen to reflect variations in institution, while individuals were selected to reflect differing status, experience and gender, since (on the basis of previous research) there were grounds for believing these factors could be significant in relation to the construction of the professional identities of academics and the culture of the law school. (On the importance of institutional variation, see Clark, 1987; Scott, 1995; Henkel, 2000; on the importance of variations in status/experience, see Thorsen, 1996, and on the importance of variations in gender, see Acker, 1994; Brooks 1997). In each institution, the personal characteristics of the individuals selected reflected, as far as possible, the range of such characteristics found among legal academics as a whole uncovered by McGlynn (1998) in her empirical investigation of law schools.

 

Institutional sites included an elite institution in the ‘golden triangle’ of Oxford, Cambridge and London, an old-established civic, a new civic and three former polytechnics, all located in cities of varying sizes. I also took into account the need to include law schools displaying different research orientations, bearing in mind the fact that although there are theoretically three parts to the academic job – teaching, research and administration, it has often been noted that in practice, it is research which is valued within the academic community as a whole (Halsey, 1992, p. 185; Becher and Kogan 1992, p. 112), so that legal academics located in departments with very different research cultures are likely to reflect quite different experiences. The research sites therefore included departments which gained a range of scores in the RAE. As far as the individual academics were concerned, apart from reflecting the variations in status, experience and gender alluded to above, they all worked in academic (as opposed to vocational) law departments.

As with most qualitative studies, I do not make any claims that my sample of respondents is statistically representative of my subject as a whole. Indeed, that is not the point of this research, which aims not to provide quantitative data, but to offer detailed insights into the ways in which academic lawyers think about the discipline, and the ways in which they construct their professional identities. However, the methodology I have used is a kind of theoretical sampling, designed to enable some general conclusions to be drawn. As Finch and Mason (1990) argue, for some degree of generalisation to be possible, it is essential for the sampling process to be carried out systematically, and that was my aim in choosing research sites and respondents. A considerably more detailed discussion of the methodological issues involved in this research can be found in Cownie (2004; chapter 1).

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During the last twenty years the UK higher education system has undergone significant change in a number of different respects. This is a common theme in the literature (see for example, Martin, 1999; Salter and Tapper, 1994; Taylor, 1999). One of the most obvious among these changes has been the move from an elite to a mass system, involving a huge increase in student numbers. Trow, whose work in this field is seminal, defines an elite system as one which enrols up to 15% of the age group; a mass system as one which enrols between 15% and 40%, and a universal system as one which enrols more than 40% (Trow, 1975a). In the UK Kogan and Hanney (2000; p. 67) suggest that higher education became a mass system in the late 1980s. It is impossible to tell at precisely what point law schools started to offer mass legal education, because the Higher Education Statistics Agency does not disaggregate the number of law students from the number of social science students generally, but there is no reason to think that law schools were different to any other part of the academy in this respect. Certainly, Harris and Jones’ 1995 survey recorded a fifty per cent increase in the number of full-time/sandwich undergraduate law students in the U.K. since the similar Wilson survey reported in 1993, which, they comment ‘...is not out of line with the general increase in students in higher education over this period’ (Harris and Jones, 1996, p. 67; Wilson, 1993).

Coupled with the increase in student numbers has been a significant decrease in the resources allocated by Government to the universities. Concern about funding increased throughout the last two decades of the twentieth century and was one of the main factors leading to the establishment in 1996 of the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (the Dearing Committee), which noted in its final report that the level of public funding per student had fallen over the previous twenty years by 40% (Dearing, 1997, para. 3.95). Just as law schools have been affected by the massification of higher education, they have also been affected by the lack of resources experienced by the sector as a whole. In its First Report on Legal Education and Training the (now-defunct) Lord Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Education and Conduct (ACLEC) remarked ‘It would not be an exaggeration to say that many universities, including law schools, are facing their most severe financial crisis since 1945’ (ACLEC, 1996, para. 3.32).

 

The changes experienced by higher education have, however, gone much further than student numbers and units of resource. Since the beginning of the 1980s higher education has been subjected to a number of sweeping policy changes. The sector has experienced fundamental structural change, particularly relating to the existence (and later abolition) of the binary divide between what are now known as old and new universities. The Education Reform Act 1988, which established parallel statutory structures for funding universities and polytechnics, embodied a major change in the relationship between the state and the two sectors:

For the polytechnics, it meant a new level of freedom. It gave them a new status, and a new statement of the relationship between them and the universities. For the universities, it signified the end of a system based on personal relationships, trust, and a shared belief in the value of academic self-regulation on the grounds that the interests of higher education and the state were, if not common, then easily reconcilable.

(Henkel, 2000, p. 40).

The extent of the change in the structure of the sector became even clearer in 1992, when, with the Further and Higher Education Acts, higher education across the U.K. was finally incorporated into a single statutory framework and the Higher Education Funding Councils were established, bringing, amongst other things, a single funding mechanism for the whole sector. In policy terms, the significance of these statutes was that they made explicit the power of the state to impose conditions on the whole of the higher education sector, and signalled a considerable loss of political power, particularly by the old universities.

Central government responded to those interests whose objectives coincided with theirs. Suspicions of local government and ministers’ perceptions of the shortcomings of universities must have persuaded them that these were interests which need not be accommodated....The issue was decided by the interaction of quite closed interests and politics. It was also decided by ministers who lacked the deference to academe of a previous political generation. The Fellows of All Souls were off the educational scene by then, and ministers were the kind of Oxbridge graduate who were au fait with university styles but not believers in its culture.

(Kogan and Hanney, 2000, p. 141).

Along with these structural changes came the increasing influence of ideas of ‘management’. The Thatcher government of the early 1980s was particularly committed to the idea of management and was determined to apply these ideas to universities. Trow is not alone in arguing that Mrs Thatcher and her ministers had a fundamentally different view of universities than the politicians who had preceded them (Trow, 1994, p. 19; see also Henkel, (2000, p. 41) and Kogan and Hanney (2000, p. 57). They perceived universities as backward, self-serving institutions which were among those parts of the establishment which impeded Britain’s economic progress and contributed to Britain’s poor performance in world markets. Universities were incapable of reform from within, so would have to be forced to change. Reformation was to be accomplished by radically cutting budgets, forcing universities to seek new funds outside of government. That in turn would force them to become more efficient and more responsive to the demands of the market, especially to the employment needs of business and industry. Although in the short term the state would still need to fund higher education, it could do so in ways which encouraged reform and did not provide subsidies for a return to the bad old ways (Trow, 1994, pp. 19-21). One of the main policies by which such objectives were to be realised was the abolition of the University Grants Committee (UGC) and its replacement by the Funding Councils. The UGC had been created in 1919 to serve as a buffer between government and universities, to protect their autonomy and independence from political pressure: “Our basic function, as we conceive it, has always been that of a channel of communication between the State and the universities.” (UGC, 1948, p. 8). However, the Funding Councils are quite clearly a creature of Government, in the sense that their members are all appointed by the Secretary of State under the Further and Higher Education Act 1992 section 62(2); Trow argues that they were specifically created to ensure the implementation of government policy (Trow, 1994, p. 21).

In the context of higher education, the Jarrett Report (CVCP,1985) provided a boost to the introduction of managerialism. The Jarrett Committee was set up by the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals (CVCP) as a quid pro quo for some restoration of university funding. In its report, the Committee recommended that Vice Chancellors should adopt the role of chief executives, to whom Deans and Heads of Department would report as line managers (CVCP, 1985, Recommendation 5.5(d), p. 36). This approach concurred with the thinking of Government, which associated notions of management with a number of other values to which it accorded considerable significance, notably public accountability, the efficient and responsible use of resources, and the measurement of performance in terms of similar criteria (Kogan and Hanney, 2000, p. 67).

Yet another related change in the culture of higher education arose from the emphasis on the need for universities to operate in a ‘mixed economy’, involving a reconceptualisation of the boundaries between state and market. All public sector bodies were increasingly under pressure to incorporate the values of the market into their organisations, and to reduce their financial dependence on the state. The strategies employed by Government to drive such policies forward became known as ‘new public management’ (Henkel, 2000, p. 46; on the concept of ‘new public management’, see, for example, Ferlie et al 1996; Minogue et al, 2000). The ideas of new public management were applied to the universities, just as they were to other public-sector institutions. In law schools, the moves to increase private sector funding by engaging in sponsorship deals satisfied the demands emanating from this new policy, as well as ameliorating the decrease in funding (Bradney, 1990; Bright and Sunkin, 1991). The success of the City Solicitors’ Educational Trust in attracting grant applications from law departments can also be seen as a response by law schools and the legal profession to the prevailing market-orientated orthodoxy (see www.cset.org.uk).

The cumulative effect of these developments was to bring about a major change in the relationship between higher education and the state. The state, as paymaster, exerted its power, and by the mid-1990s had established a framework of legal regulation, incentives, rewards and sanctions within which universities had to operate. In terms of individual academics, the emphasis on accountability and quality assurance brought with it the RAE, the QAA and an increasing emphasis on notions of audit. At the same time, the emphasis on efficiency meant that more students were being taught with less resources by proportionally fewer people. The hallmarks of new public management are concerns with ‘quality’ and ‘consumer responsiveness’, with ‘accountability’, efficiency and economy (Pollitt, 1993, p. 189). Higher education was but one area where such changes were implemented (Becher and Kogan, 1992; Kogan and Hanney, 2000); however, its effects on the sector were profound, leading Richard Collier to argue that the processes of corporatisation involved are leading to a significant diminution in autonomy and considerably greater rigidity in the performance of academic labour (Collier, 2002, p. 30).

The effects of the changes which have taken place in higher education have undoubtedly been felt at grass-roots level, in law schools just as much as elsewhere in the academy. One of the questions I asked all the respondents who had been in academic life for more than two years was ‘Has academic life changed since you became an academic?’ All except one of the respondents agreed, without hesitation, that it had. Elaborating on the changes they had noticed, the respondents pointed to four main areas of change: increased student numbers, an increasing emphasis on research and publication, the increasing pressures of academic life and increasing amounts of bureaucracy. There was a significant difference in emphasis between respondents working in old universities and those working in new universities, with respondents in old universities emphasising the increased pressure to research and publish, especially the pressure generated by the R.A.E., while respondents working in new universities placed most emphasis on the increased number of students, and the demands of a very diverse student body, as well as the increasingly bureaucratic nature of academic life, and the increased presence of audit and other monitoring mechanisms.

...yes, it’s become very much more pressured, we have far more students, we have to jump through far more bureaucratic hoops. The RAE has made research relatively more important – I remember in my first post, I don’t think anybody asked me whether I was doing any research. ...I don’t remember my Head of Department ever saying ‘Have you thought of doing some research?’ It just happened that I like writing, so I got on with it. But nowadays, no reputable Head would possibly not know what their young members of staff were working on...there’s a mentor, they’re being reviewed, departmental review, major review, you know, all these people looking at what they’re publishing, always talking to them about what their plans are. So there’s been a huge intensification of emphasis on research – and, of course, on teaching monitoring of various kinds. So you can say it’s been a process of professionalisation, but also of bureaucratisation.

[Professor, female, experienced, old university]

...Research has certainly changed – when I joined, nobody even mentioned the research side of anything – and I didn’t actually write very much, the first few years of being an academic – don’t think I wrote anything at all – nobody suggested I should – it was just off the map, really. I was doing a doctorate, so I did that, but I didn’t see it as a task, really. The task was mastering the teaching stuff. It wasn’t until the 1980s that people started saying ‘What about writing things?’ Suddenly, they dusted things off. Nobody had asked me about research in my interview; I just didn’t even think about it. I enjoyed research, and was doing my doctorate, but it was a personal thing, it wasn’t kind of something you had to do all the time. A lot of people weren’t doing doctorates, and they didn’t do much else – but they all got swept away, mostly. So that’s all changed.

[Senior Lecturer, male, mid-career, old university]

Enormously. The obvious ways, of course, are that class sizes are bigger, and student numbers are greater. That’s what lends itself to that feeling, as I said before, that everything seems to be more driven. If it’s not one RAE round it’s the next RAE round. If it’s not your concern with intakes of students of the right quality, it’s your concern that too many of them don’t fail. It’s the external measure in the league table, be it RAE or other indicators. It’s the intervention from QAA, it’s intervention from HMI. I would be the last person to say, to be honest, that universities should be in such a privileged position that they should be absolutely free from all external constraints, but this is a familiar refrain, isn’t it? The quantity of it at the moment. You get to this stage in a long term, and most colleagues look haggard. I mean not haggard because of the amount of teaching – it’s all the other stuff. That’s changed beyond recognition. But it’s never dramatic. It’s year on year, drip, drip, drip, and then suddenly it’s a very different experience and you look back, and you think ‘That’s what it used to be like’.

[Principal Lecturer, male, mid-career, new university]

It’s changed out of all recognition – we’ve had to become much more professional in every way, and technologically, of course, it’s another world. Numbers – huge numbers of students, and of course student care has gone down as a result. And very little decision-making any more – I mean, we don’t really have any discretion about anything to do with our students any more, that’s all out of our hands, so it’s much more bureaucratic. It’s a very different job..[Principal Lecturer, female, experienced, new university]

This is the context in which the contemporary law school finds itself and within which individual legal academics are working. This is the context in which any discussion of work-life balance in legal academia must be placed. And it is a context which confirms some of Collier’s suggestions about the nature of contemporary academic life.

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Academics working in contemporary law schools are now faced with the consequences of the changes which are outlined above. The emphasis on quality assurance has affected all aspects of their professional lives: teaching, research and administration. The Research Assessment Exercises (RAE) judge their research output, the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) examines their teaching and the relevant Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE, SHEFCE or HEFCW) carries out a programme of academic audit to evaluate their university’s internal mechanisms for monitoring academic standards (Henkel, 2000, chapters 4-6). In addition, legal academics have been faced by continuing demands from the legal professions, which have sought to influence the nature and development of legal education. The combined result of these phenomena is that the workload of individual academics has increased to such an extent that they can be said to be doing significantly more work than their predecessors in the legal academy – a state of affairs for which the ‘two jobs’ in the title of this article provides a convenient shorthand. It is not so much that they are literally performing two jobs where once they did one – it is more the case that the one job they do involves considerably more productivity and is much more highly regulated. It is also the case that a combination of the impact of technology on academic life, combined with decreasing secretarial support, means that most academics are now largely self-servicing (i.e. they manage their own diaries, type up their own documents, whether for teaching or research purposes, and deal with their own correspondence), which is another aspect of their professional lives which has increased the workload.

One response to the points being made about increasing demands of academic life might be that too many academics 30 years ago paid insufficient attention to the quality of their teaching and produced too little research. In terms of administration / management / leadership, it could also be argued that the law schools of the past were significantly lacking, as illustrated by the fact that those leading academic law when the unit of resource for law was decided, were perfectly happy to see law be given a very low unit of resource, apparently taking the short-sighted view that ‘we don’t really need many resources’.

While it may be true to say that previous generations of legal academics were subject to too little pressure, and that this, in the end, did not help the development of the discipline of law (arguably leaving it tied too closely, for too long, to the legal professions), it remains the case that the changes engendered by new public management, although bringing some benefits (which are acknowledged in the discussion below), have also had considerable negative consequences for many individuals, making the question of work-life balance a much more urgent one than it was previously. It also remains the case that for many legal academics the question of work-life balance is one which is difficult to resolve.

The point of this discussion is not to argue that legal academics experience pressures which are greater than those experienced by other academics, or other professionals. It is to provide a particular insight into the lived experience of legal academia, a part of the academy about which we currently have relatively little knowledge. If aspects of that lived experience are similar to the experience of others, that in itself is interesting; before this research was undertaken, we had no way of knowing whether that was the case or not.

The first RAE took place in 1985 (Kogan and Hanney, 2000, p. 75), and periodic research assessment exercises have now become an accepted feature of the academic landscape. Their prime objective is ostensibly to enhance the quality of research, by ‘enabling the higher education funding bodies to distribute public funds for research selectively on the basis of quality’ (www.rae.ac.uk). The result for individual academics, however, has been a constant pressure to produce published research. It is imperative, in a department which wishes to enter as many staff as possible for assessment, that they should all be ‘research active’, publishing at least four pieces of work every four years. Since the RAE assesses research on the basis of ‘units of assessment’, the business of research has become much more overtly collective; one is ‘letting the side down’ if the four pieces are not produced. What is more, it is not enough merely to publish. In a department which wants to do well, the research must be of a type likely to contribute to the attainment of a high grade. Looking at this issue in the specific context of law schools, Campbell et al found that most of their 400 respondents indicated that they were subjected to pressure to change their research and/or the type of publications they produced in order to meet the perceived demands of the RAE (Campbell et all, 1999, p. 476). The same researchers appeared to have little difficulty in uncovering a relatively well-established consensus among academic lawyers about the relative desirability, in RAE terms, of publishing in various academic journals (Campbell et al, 1999, pp. 496-501). In a related piece of research, they also uncovered considerable disquiet (other than among the professoriate) about the negative effects of the RAE. One comment, they argue, ‘...seemed to encapsulate the view of a substantial proportion of non-professorial staff: “the RAE makes for low morale, inter-departmental competition, anxiety and low productivity”. This pattern was repeated in the responses to a question seeking views on the impact of the RAE on relationships within departments.’ (Vick et al, 1998, p. 551).

During the course of my research, I asked all the respondents who said they carried out research (all the respondents in old universities, and two thirds of the respondents in new universities) whether the RAE had affected their research at all. Two thirds of these respondents said that the RAE had affected their research. Nearly all the respondents working in new universities felt this to be the case, but only about half the respondents working in old universities did so. Within old university law schools, early-career academics were three times as likely to say that the RAE had affected their research as respondents at other stages of their career (this finding confirms other research which revealed that early career academics, in particular, feel under pressure to choose research topics to fit in with the perceived preferences of RAE panels, and which will also fit the RAE timescale (Talib, 2001; Henkel, 2000). Women were twice as likely as men to say that their research had been affected buy the existence of the RAE, with virtually all the women regarding their research as having been affected, but only half the men doing so.

The main effects identified were that the RAE affected where respondents published, the type of work they published, and that it provided a constant source of pressure to publish.

In the twelve or thirteen years since I’ve been here, I think my experience is of increased pressure, mainly the pressure on producing research – the RAEs had quite a profound effect on the department, and particularly on colleagues who are not particularly interested in shoving out their statutory four pieces, or those who have difficulty doing that for one reason or another...

[Male, senior lecturer, mid-career, old university]

Well, I think I came into it a bit late this time, although I did manage to get returned with the two articles I had published at that point, which was quite nice...But I am actually quite conscious of the next RAE and, you know, I’m starting to add up in my mind what I might have published by that time. I know – from colleagues – that it causes a lot of conflict – over people not being returned when they think they should be. And then there’s also dissatisfaction the other way, in that people who do give a lot of research and do their share of teaching wonder what some other colleagues are doing when actually at the end of four years they haven’t got four pieces.

[Female, lecturer, early-career, old university]

Marginally. I have had to think very hard about writing in particular ways in particular journals. There are certain things I would no longer do because they just detract in terms of time. I wouldn’t write for anything that wasn’t refereed any more. So you think very hard about the kind of piece. Not necessarily – and this is the worrying thing – you obviously should think carefully about any piece you write – but you think about – the very hard thinking also includes – now hang on, what refereed journal can this go in? Perhaps that it not always a positive thing to be doing.

[Professor, male, experienced, new university]

The effects of the RAE can be extremely invidious; some academics were excluded from the 2001 RAE, despite having produced sufficient work which is arguably of high quality, because their institution decided to operate strategically in second-guessing the RAE assessors and made a decision that certain types of work would not contribute to the corporate research plan (THES, 2001). Knowledge of the existence of this kind of ‘policing’ adds to the pressures of academic life, even for those who are unquestionably ‘research active’.

Yes, because one has to try to make certain that one has four things which are RAE-type work to put in, so the answer is yes...

[Professor, experienced, male, new university]

The pressure is to do with this idea that you’ve got to produce a certain number of pieces for the RAE and therefore that whilst you might have an unproductive year for whatever reason it seems that only the product matters, as opposed to the process or the length or the quality, even though the quality is supposed to be assessed, but what I mean is that perhaps what you produce in one journal would be less well accepted, even though it is a good piece, at least that’s the impression I’ve been given. It matters where you publish it, more than what you say.

[Female; early career; old university]

...I think it’s just a joke. It’s allowed the worst type of academics to gain the most power, and has caused all these distortions towards theory, towards completely pointless articles, to chopping down more rainforests for a million more monographs that no-one will read. And it’s caused an enormous amount of resentment and discomfort within faculties. I find it very difficult to see anything really positive about the RAE.

[Female, early career, lecturer, old university]

To an extent, yes, in that it was done in a nice way, but there was more pressure to write things that were perceived to be capable of being submitted for the RAE, and less support for things that were clearly (or at least in the view of the people making the decision here) non-RAEable...

[Senior Lecturer, early-career, male, new university]

Those involved in managing a department’s RAE submission were also conscious of the pressures to ‘deliver’.

...Obviously, as someone who has a management role, one becomes very conscious of what other people are doing, whether it’s ‘RAE-compliant’ – so it clearly has an impact.

[Male, professor, experienced, old university]

I also asked the respondents what they thought of the RAE system. They were evenly split, between those who saw the RAE in negative terms, and those who, while acknowledging that there are many disadvantages to the RAE system, nevertheless thought that it had brought some benefits. Interestingly, these two sets of respondents were not significantly different in terms of institution-type, gender or experience. One of the main objections of those who saw the effects of the RAE as being negative were that it had not improved the quality of research, but rather had hindered the production of thoughtful work which necessarily takes a long time to produce.

What I am aware is that the research other people have done that I think is of value would not have been achievable within the RAE structure, and I do feel that I am pushed into working in a more short-term, quick-results basis than I would prefer, were I to be given completely free rein. If I had full-blown tenure, guaranteed conditions of employment, and were just told to get on with it, I would not be aiming for four refereed pieces over a four-year period.

[Male, reader, mid-career, male, new university]

Probably the worst feature of it is the pressure that’s placed to ‘deliver’ – so the idea for a book or article which took a long time to come to fruition – and it was probably beneficial that it did, because you needed a lot of thought, a lot of work, the combination of testing out a whole variety of ideas in conference papers before you actually put pen to paper. That kind of almost ‘masterwork’ has no place in an RAE. Whereas some of the most significant contributions to the literature have probably been the result of – not a lifetime’s thought, but much longer than would be allowed in an RAE, where somebody would be saying ‘Why haven’t you got any research coming out in these four or five years?’ So the kind of deep-thinking research has probably been a casualty of the RAE...I don’t think research necessarily flourishes in an atmosphere where there’s pressure to deliver – I think it can be an inhibition, or it can result in things being produced too quickly – so there’s a quality problem – you get the book out, but it’s not as good as it would have been if it had taken two years longer to write.

[Male; senior; old university]

However, just as many respondents thought that, for law as a discipline, the RAE may be said to have had beneficial consequences, in that it has acted as a catalyst for the production of an increasing amount of high-quality academic research in the discipline, and has assisted it in moving away from its vocational roots and nearer to the heart of the academy (Cownie, 2004, p. 139).

...I think there’s no doubt that having it there has made people more professional about doing research, it’s raised the priority for research which for the sector has been a good thing – for the whole sector, because I think it’s probably been good for old universities as well, to have the competition – I mean, when they were competing with each other, they had their own pecking order...but then with the new universities coming along, they probably though ‘My God! We can’t possibly do worse than the new universities – we’ve got to do something or somebody’s going to close us’. So I think it did give a massive boost to research...

[Male, professor, mid-career, new university]

...I think it was very valuable in the first place, in that there was a degree of dead wood in university departments – people who had found – and it is, it’s a very nice niche in life if you can get into it – and they had very much settled into it, and they were teaching – they were perhaps very good teachers – but in a sense they were being paid for more than teaching. Oh my God! I sound terribly much like a Tory Government minister – anyway, in a sense the RAE gave you the opportunity to find out who were the valuable staff and who weren’t, and in a sense I think it reinvigorated legal academia, and promoted things like law and society research.

[Male, lecturer, early career, old university]

Quality assessment is not confined to research, of course. Academics also have the QAA assessing their teaching. Since its introduction by the Further and Higher Education Act 1992, quality assurance of teaching has had a relatively brief but turbulent history. It has become apparent that it has few friends. One of David Blunkett’s last actions as Education Secretary was to tell the QAA that its inspection regime must in future be ‘light touch’ and considerably less expensive (The Independent, 2001). Nor does QAA enjoy unqualified support from academics. In February 2001 King’s College London received a critical institutional audit report which it immediately rejected, saying that ‘we felt that the auditors didn’t understand what we were talking about’; this was followed the next month by the LSE’s decision that it would withdraw from QAA procedures (Bradney, 2001, pp. 430-431). In the context of law schools, one of the first law assessors to be selected, Mike Allen, of Newcastle University, resigned because of his disquiet at the failures of the system which he found when he began his training (Allen, 1993). Reactions to consultation documents about the future shape of the QAA reveal continuing hostility towards that body among academic institutions, their staff and relevant trade unions (THES, 2001a).

After the first round of assessments of law school teaching, legal scholars concerned about legal education expressed deep concerns about the effect of teaching quality audit on the long-term future of legal education (Brownsword, 1994; Bradney, 1998). Tony Bradney has gone on to comment that

...teaching quality audit ... is not just about the measurement of the quality of learning and teaching; it is about changing the nature of that learning and teaching, and of academic work.....Audit invites academics to treat students as future employees and seeks to treat academics as workers on an assembly line (Bradney, 2001, pp. 441-442).

QAA’s controversial history has continued, with the resignation of its high-profile chief executive, John Randall, in protest at the ‘watering down’ of the assessment system (Randall, 2001). For individual legal scholars, the QAA is the source of apparently pointless demands to couch one’s teaching first in terms of ‘aims and objectives’, subsequently in terms of ‘learning objectives’, without any adequate explanation of the rationale behind these demands, let alone the differences between the two approaches involved. A visit to the QAA website and a quick perusal of the ‘benchmark’ for Law provides copious evidence of the expectations placed upon individual law teachers as a result of the existence of the QAA regime, quite apart from the administrative burden faced by those who have to cajole colleagues into producing the vast quantities of paper which seem to be required, despite attempts to reduce the burden imposed (see www.qaa.ac.uk).

In addition to the demands placed upon them by government, legal academics are also subject to demands from the legal profession, in the form of the Bar Council and the Law Society. Periodically, the ‘Joint Statement’ (which sets out the requirements for a law degree which will be recognised by the professional bodies) is negotiated with these bodies. Recently, the requirements laid down for such degrees have significantly decreased, reflecting either a belated acknowledgement by the professional bodies of the professional expertise of legal academics or the superior negotiating skills of the academic negotiators (Joint Statement, 1999). Whatever its source, there is currently an uneasy truce in a relationship which has long been acknowledged to be adversarial (Twining, 1994, Ch. 3). The fragility of the truce, and the potential demands made upon legal academics is reflected in recent remarks made by the Chief Executive of The Law Society, who was reported in the Financial Times as announcing that The Law Society is to check the quality of all undergraduate law degree courses, following mounting concern about their quality (Financial Times, 2001). In July 2002 the professional bodies issued no less than three consultation papers on the academic stage of training for entry to the legal profession (see www.legaleducation.org.uk); in the covering letter which accompanied the paper distributed to heads of law schools the purpose of the consultation procedure was stated as being to explore ‘...the ways by which the professional and statutory regulatory bodies should influence the content, quality and standards of qualifying law degrees’. The professional bodies are still considering what changes they may wish to introduce to the academic stage of legal education. Actions such as this on the part of the professional bodies form part of the background pressures on legal academics, whose conception of the purpose and nature of the law degree may differ considerably from those of the professional lawyer. The fact that the views of the profession are at times quite similar to views emanating from the Lord Chancellor’s Department does nothing to decrease the pressure on legal academics. In a Discussion Paper presented at a meeting of the Standing Conference on Legal Education in May 2000, David Lock, then Parliamentary Under Secretary in the Lord Chancellor’s Department, suggested that law degrees should include a ‘practical element’ (LCD, 2000). While this seemed merely to amount to an ill-thought-out suggestion that law students should inter alia spend part of their law course helping out at the local CAB, it provides yet another example of the demands faced by legal academics.

The changes outlined above have increased the complexity of the professional lives of legal academics enormously. Indeed, media reports about the results of the Research Transparency Exercise (which requires institutions of higher education to identify the proportion of time that staff spend on various activities, including publicly funded teaching and research) suggested that, far from living comfortably in an ivory tower, academics are actually supporting the state’s research infrastructure (THES, 2000).

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At the same time as the demands of the professional life of legal academics are increasing exponentially, it is apparent that the pressures on the social/personal lives of legal academics have also increased enormously. At the beginning of the twenty first century, the opportunities available to the ‘chattering classes’, in terms of leisure/personal development/interpersonal interaction have increased beyond all expectation.

For the first time in 1998, average weekly expenditure on leisure goods and services was the largest single element in British household expenditure (Social Trends, 2000, p. 106). Day trips for leisure purposes are an increasingly popular leisure pursuit, with visits to tourist attractions in general increasing by 15% between 1989 and 2002, and visits to museums and galleries increasing over the same period by 20% (Social Trends 2004, p. 71).

Technological advances have provided new types of leisure activity. DVD, launched in the U.K. in 1998, is the fastest- selling consumer electronics format of all time (Social Trends, 2004, p. 200). The proportion of British households with a home computer almost doubled between 1988 and 1998 from 18% to 34%, while satellite and cable technology now provides a huge increase in the choice of TV channels (Social Trends, 2000, pp. 210-211). The impact of new technology is profound, enabling us to communicate faster, gain access to more information, play more sophisticated games; by 2002/3, over half of all British households had a home computer, and in July 2003, 56% of adults in Great Britain had used the internet in the previous three months (Social Trends 2004, p. 203).

It is not just adults whose lives have been revolutionised by increased choice; middle class children enjoy (endure?) a long whirl of music lessons, after-school clubs and sports of all descriptions; ‘sleepovers’, school trips and so on abound. Enabling all the members of a particular family unit to participate in all their chosen activities requires a degree in logistics. The amount of money available to childless, two-income couples to spend on leisure activities is clearly even greater, as is the case for some members of the gay community.

For women, the pressures produced by these increased opportunities can be particularly onerous. The proportion of economically active women in the U.K. increased between 1971 and 1999 from 56% to 72%. This increase in the female labour force during the 20^th century came about largely as a result of a strong rise in the participation of married/ cohabiting women; 75% of whom were economically active by 1999 (Social Trends, 2000, pp. 67-68). For women academics who have partners in employment, quite apart from those who may also have children, work-life balance is likely to be a particularly significant issue (Basnett, 2000).

There is a substantial body of literature on the growth of ‘time poverty’ in workers’ lives (see, for example, Garhammer, 1998; Fagan, 2001), and, in particular, its effect on women. The work of Arlie Hochschild on ‘the second shift’ of domestic work that women face in addition to their paid work is well-known (Hochschild, 1997), as is her more detailed exploration of the ‘time bind’, and the detrimental effects that longer hours in the workplace have on family relationships (Hochschild, 1997a). Research on the organisation and performance of paid and household work among dual earner couples shows that while increases in economic power for both men and women are associated with doing less household work, even if women achieve high-status, well-paid jobs, they cannot necessarily expect equal sharing of household work (Bond & Sales, 2000, p. 246; Laurie & Gershuny, 2000, p. 47). In the U.K., the issue of work-life balance has become an issue of mainstream interest, with both Government and the Equal Opportunities Commisssion taking it up as a matter of concern (DfEE, 2000; EOC).

The question of increased choice is an interesting one. At first glance, increased choice appears to be wholly beneficial, allowing the possibility of increased personal enjoyment and fulfilment. However, this is not necessarily the case. The work of Barry Schwartz was recently given prominence in the Times Higher (presumably because it was thought to be of interest to academics). Schwartz expressed concern about the tyranny of choice which faces us at the beginning of the twenty first century. His book is an academically-informed populist treatment of his subject, which aims both to analyse the problem and offer suggestions about how to avoid being overwhelmed by choice. He summarises his thesis thus:

When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable. As the number of available choices increases, as it has in or consumer culture, the autonomy, control and liberation this brings are powerful and positive. But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate, until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to tyrannize’

(Schwartz, 2004, p. 2)

During the course of his examination of the reasons why increased choice has become problematic, Schwartz looks at a number of our unfortunate tendencies, from our desire to make absolutely the best choice every time we make a decision, whether important or unimportant (from the best frozen peas to buy for supper on Friday to the best university for our daughter to attend) to our propensity to suffer from what he terms ‘post-decision’ and ‘anticipated’ regret – regretting a decision after we have made it, and worrying in advance about the consequences of a decision (how will it feel if I take this job, only to be offered a better one next week?) Both of these tendencies increase the emotional stakes of decisions and the pressure felt by the individuals making them. Not every legal academic will fall within Schwartz’s analysis, but his views are sufficiently persuasive to add weight to the other evidence gathered here, which suggests that at the beginning of the twenty first century, the life of the majority of legal academics is likely to be highly pressurised. Thus legal academics find themselves not only doing more work within the law school than they might have done twenty years ago, but also facing many more demands in their non-work lives – metaphorically speaking, the ‘two jobs’ and ‘two lives’ signalled in the title of this article.

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For the legal academic, struggling with the demands of the RAE or the QAA, hoping to find time to spend time with friends/partners/children, surf the net or even catch up on the washing, it is easy to see how this excess of activity on the two fronts in question, work and private life, can amount to, if not a funeral, at least a considerable amount of doom and gloom. It would seem reasonable to expect that maintaining a balance between work and private life would be problematic for people faced with so many demands upon their time.

The question I asked my respondents was ‘Do you find it easy to balance the demands of work and the rest of your life?’ Respondents were evenly divided across the two sectors, and between men and women, as between those who had no difficulties with work-life balance, and those who did. However, there were significant differences between respondents who had different lengths of experience of academic life. As the legal academic career progresses, it appears that work-life balance becomes more of a problem. Nearly three-quarters of early-career academics said they found maintaining a work-life balance easy. Mid-career academics were divided on this issue, while more than three-quarters of experienced academics said that they found work-life balance problematic. There were no significant differences in life-situation between these groups, with almost exactly the same spread of family responsibilities occurring in each group. It would appear likely that increasing difficulties with work-life balance are a consequence of increased responsibilities and expectations at work, rather than increased family responsibilities.

Those respondents who did not find work-life balance particularly problematic fell into three categories: about a quarter of this group found it unproblematic because they had decided to prioritise their family:

...You tend to get ‘hot-spots’ – one of which I’m going through now, when all your students hand in 5,000 word essays – that on top of the teaching makes life a bit difficult – but conscious choices are made, and weekends are for family, except in the most extreme circumstances.

[Male, professor, experienced, new university]

I make a cut-off point. I quite often bring books home with me in the evening, but I do that just in case there’s nothing I’d rather do than sit down and read one of my books. But by and large, when I get home in the evening, I draw a line under it and say ‘Right, I’m not going to work now, I’ve finished my working day, I have other responsibilities, other aspects of my life other than academia’...

[Male, lecturer, early career, old university]

For a small but significant group, any talk of ‘balance’ was meaningless, since they did not perceive their lives divided into ‘work’ and ‘life’:

Mark Twain once said that work is whatever the body is obliged to do, and play is whatever the body is not obliged to do. To the extent that my ‘work’ often fills more than eight hours a day, or more than five days a week, an objective outsider simply saying that anything that I do which is connected with academic law must be work would say I find it quite hard to balance the relationship between work and other things. I don’t think I find it difficult to achieve that balance. I think if I sit at home and do academic work on a Sunday afternoon, it’s because I quite enjoy doing it...

[Male, reader, mid-career, new university]

Academia really is my life – it’s perhaps part of the nature of the job that you perhaps don’t need to make such a separation. I have however in recent years been conscious that it can come to dominate too much, and I think it’s important that people have time that isn’t determined by the academic agenda. Some people may disagree about that, but I try to have one day a week that’s my own, in the sense that I don’t do university work, and I do take holidays and I don’t take work on holiday, so to that extent I’ve consciously made sure that there is some time that is entirely removed from the academic agenda.

[Male, professor, experienced, old university].

The largest group who found work-life balance unproblematic attributed this to the flexibility of the academic job:

Well, I feel that in comparison to other people I know doing different types of jobs, either working as a lawyer in the City or working in the media or other standard jobs, I feel I have an advantage, because my time is flexible...I work quite long hours, but I don’t feel that I don’t have a lot of time for my partner or my private life in general. I think what’s crucial to me is the flexibility...

[Female; lecturer, early career; old university]

...that ability to manage your own time is amazing. Although I’m usually in the office five days a week, there is that flexibility, and that’s one of the things about being an academic, that ability to manage your own time...

[Female, senior lecturer, mid-career, new university]

However, within this group, about half of them recognised that although flexibility made work-life balance easier for them, the indeterminacy of the academic job could mean that work was in fact all-pervasive:

...I find it manageable, although it does seem to be getting more out of control as time goes on...

[Male, lecturer, early career, old university]

I think what’s crucial to me is the flexibility...I suppose I could feel that I should work all the time, and maybe that’s a slight disadvantage of the academic life – even though you can organise your time flexibly, you might feel ‘I could be working now’ on a Saturday...

[Female, lecturer, early career, old university]

The control over one’s own time which academics enjoy can become a double-edged sword in this context.

It’s not easy. If I was letting myself go and I tried to do with the same thoroughness every single thing that I would like to do, that I’m asked to do, I would not have a weekend – my job would be just my whole life – I mean, sometimes I’m in a position where I’m so interested in something that time flies and in that sense I feel that because there is some discretion and flexibility in this job, I spill over into the weekend, but in a way I prevent myself from doing it because otherwise it does get over too much of my life and I could not spend time doing other things – even if other things means doing nothing -I don’t mean going mountain-climbing every weekend, I mean doing nothing. So in that sense I find it difficult, and I have to have a certain discipline. I don’t like to be too rigorous about it, but I find that’s the only way I can control it and whilst I don’t do a nine to five job, I try, very recently, more than before, I very much try to say I’m not taking home work at weekends or in the evenings, unless there is a deadline for a lecture or tutorial and the day has been so bad I have to take it home with me, but I try as much as possible not to – it has even meant for articles, for example, where the deadline was Friday, I’ve asked for an extension till today. I could have had it finished by working at the weekend, but I decided not to. But I do find it difficult to do it all and have a personal life.

[Female, early career, old university]

About a quarter of those who found work-life balance unproblematic were people who related this to the fact that their partner had an equally demanding job, and wished to prioritise work to a similar extent.

Well [my partner’s] a postgraduate student, so she’s working very hard at the moment as well – quite often if I say I want to go to the library, she’ll come with me and get on with her work while I look up some cases or whatever...

[Male, early-career, lecturer, old university]

Luckily my partner is equally busy, and I do think that is the key – that our lives have developed at the same time, so it’s not a hardship if at the weekends we go our separate ways and work – but we do have to fight to make space for each other...

(Principal Lecturer, female, experienced, new university]

However, for the vast majority of respondents, life-work balance was a frustrating and continuing unresolved issue. These respondents fell into two halves – those who found the workload so great that it did not allow them to maintain what they regarded as an appropriate balance, and those who found that because of the indeterminacy of the academic job, they worked most of the time.

My partner is not an academic, and that makes it difficult, because if you’re not an academic you’re used to defined times of work and defined times of leisure, and I think the thing with academia – at least, the writing side of it is, you may set yourself defined times for work, but if it doesn’t flow then, but it does flow when it’s a leisure day, then you find yourself writing then...

[Male, senior lecturer, experienced, old university]

It’s difficult – I spend a lot of time at work seeing a lot of people, I leave my door open – so I find I can’t mark when I’m here, because I get disturbed, so in the evenings and at weekends I’m preparing or marking. It’s not healthy – I feel I should use the time better - I’m not comfortable saying no and I’m not comfortable saying I have to work at weekends.

[Female, early career, new university]

No, it’s hugely difficult, you know,...[when I was writing my book] basically I had to clear as much of my other bits of job out of the way so I could do that, and I had to work into the evenings and over weekends for weeks – and especially if you’ve got family commitments that’s extraordinarily difficult to do, I think – it really is quite a test of one’s marriage, frankly, to do that, and it’s totally understandable to me that a lot of academics do come unstuck, because they get the balance wrong, and their partners don’t really perhaps appreciate the demands on them. That is very, very difficult.

[Male, mid-career, old university]

One concern I have is how at the moment the profession rewards those who (and it sounds an awful point to make) perhaps don’t decide to have a family or spend more time with their partners or whatever – you get promotion on the basis of research, and in order to produce masses of good research you have to commit a massive amount of time – but you can’t do that, unless you’re an incredibly good time manager, or you’ve got a photographic memory or something like that – you can only do that at the expense of other commitments or pursuits, and it’s sort of struck me as quite worrying that if you want to progress up the career ladder and at the same time pursue the goal of perhaps getting married and having children – well, that’s going to have an incredible effect upon my career, and I think that’s awful.

[Male, early career, old university]

Commenting upon the difficulties which accompany the indeterminacy of the academic job, Collier argues that the model of academic performativity which now takes precedence in higher education is premised on what can be seen as ‘distinctly masculine forms of labour’ (Collier, 2002, p. 20). This involves, among other things, a focus on achievements which are quantifiable (‘outputs’), and encourages relentless promotion of the self, at the expense of good citizenship. Collier argues that it is in relation to issues of work-life balance that the implications of the masculinisation of legal academia is most marked.

The flexibility of academic work in terms of contracted hours has traditionally been seen to have permitted some leeway around the negotiation of work-life conflict. One result of this, indeed, is that an academic career might have seemed particularly attractive to some women (for example, those leaving the profession) and men who have sought to avoid the ‘time-bind’ and work with some autonomy. Yet the very indeterminacy of academic labour in terms of time and commitment is proving double-edged within the new emotional economy which is being fostered by the corporatised university...

(Collier, 2002, p. 21)

It is not surprising, then, that half of the respondents in my survey identified work-life balance as problematic. The question is, what do we do about it?

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This is a debate about values, about what we think is important in life. Like most decisions of principle, it involves hard choices. If we want a different work-life balance to the one which we have now, we could campaign for change. We could look enviously across the Channel at the thirty five hour working week enjoyed by many workers in France, and we could lobby for similar arrangements to be implemented in the UK. We might also wish to take a more radical stance, and suggest that universities (in common with other employers) need to stop assuming that they are entitled to employ ideal academic workers, who will, in any given situation, always prioritise ‘work’ over ‘life’ (Williams, 2000). This is the approach suggested by Rapaport et al (2002). They argue for a new ‘dual agenda’, linking the goals of increasing gender equity in the workplace, improving work-personal life integration and improved workplace performance. Their work is closely related to ideas of organisational change which attempt to connect humanistic values with the goal of helping people to work more effectively (Rapaport et al, p. 18).

Accepting that gendered assumptions influence both the practice and structure of work, and that many of the implicit ‘rules for success’ are closely aligned with traditional influences of masculinity, such as autonomy, assertiveness, competition and so on, Rapaport et al suggest that uncovering and examining these assumptions is a fundamentally important step in any agenda for change. In most workplaces, for example, ‘...the definition of commitment remains rooted in a traditional concept of the ideal worker as someone for whom work is primary, time to spend at work is unlimited, and the demands of family, community and personal life are secondary’ (p.29). The effect of these gendered assumptions is that people who do not fit this description tend to have limited career opportunities. Conflating idealised masculinity with what it takes to be the ideal worker can also result in the persistence of outdated or ineffective work practices that are routine, regarded as ‘normal’ and rarely questioned (p. 35). Rapaport et al wish to make progress in implementing a ‘dual agenda’ for change, which involves removing the separation between public and private spheres that currently characterises the Western industrial world. This not only involves breaking down the image of the ideal worker as someone who conforms to stereotypical masculine norms in terms of values, attributes and life situation. At the same time it means breaking down the image of the ideal carer as someone whose life is given to care, but whose contribution is assumed to be ‘natural’ and thus not given equal social or economic value. But at the heart of their work lies the oft-repeated observation (based on case-studies in organisations with which the authors have worked) that making changes in work practices that increase gender equity can also increase workplace performance (p. 41). It is not easy to achieve such change; entrenched beliefs, which are bound up with peoples’ sense of identity and self-esteem, present a considerable challenge to the ‘dual agenda’. Rapaport et al have developed a method of working which involves action researchers from outside an organisation working with people inside the organisation to identify assumptions about how work is done, to understand how those assumptions affect people and performance, and to envision new ways of working which eliminate the negative aspects of existing practices (p. 171). Progress is being made, though it is, as yet, incremental. Nevertheless, it is ideas such as these which provide one response to the problems of work-life balance unearthed in my research.

However, until universities start to think in some radically differently way about employment, perhaps by adopting Rapaport’s model, we need to make the best of the situation which currently faces us. In order to do that, we need to think about some difficult questions. What does a successful approach to work-life balance look like? How do we decide what the correct balance is? In order to answer those questions, we need to engage in a fundamental appraisal of our lifestyle and our values. There are hard choices to be made here. Rejecting the long hours culture may mean slower (or no) promotion, reducing the quality or quantity (or both) of our teaching and our research, or on the other hand simply accepting the fact that academic life is, in a very literal sense, an all-consuming passion.

In talking about work-life balance issues as we face them now, I am not assuming that academia is a nine-to-five job, which can be neatly separated off from the private life of its adherents. Far from it; academia is unquestionably a creative vocation, which is lived all the time; it cannot be separated off into a box marked ‘work’. For many, it is part of their ‘essential being’, providing fulfilment, esteem, purpose, and friendship, and forming an important part of their identity (Doyle, 2000, pp. 6-7). However, within that totality, as ‘work’ and ‘life’ are currently constructed, one still has to make choices about how much of one’s time one spends on research, on teaching or on administration, how much time is for reading and thinking and how much is for cooking, eating, drinking, shopping or just doing nothing. The issue here is what has been dubbed ‘time sovereignty’ (Doyle, 2000, p. 16). What I am suggesting is that currently the reasonably conscientious legal academic finds themselves faced by what Currie and Thiele have called ‘the greedy university’ so rapacious that they are in danger of being bulldozed into spending their time engaged too often in short-term activities which they may in the longer term regret (Currie & Thiele, 2000). Decisions about priorities in both our public, ‘work’ lives and our private, ‘home’ lives, are fundamentally personal ones, which each individual must make for themselves.

Perhaps the obvious answer is that we need to engage in some serious philosophical analysis. The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. If our lives are to be worth living, both in Socrates’ sense and at a more pragmatic level, we need to be able to examine our lives and make reasoned choices about how we spend our time. Others within the academy who observe the inhabitants of law schools may consider that a plea to live a fully examined life in the Socratian sense may be a bit of a challenge for the academic lawyer, since doctrinal legal training, at least, provides a poor background for the consideration of values. As a result of the pervasive influence of legal positivism, generations of law students have been taught to see the law in purely technical terms, while its moral content is regarded as irrelevant (Nicolson & Webb, 1999, p. 67). Thornton has referred to the ‘technocentrism’ of the doctrinal tradition, in which law is seen as autonomous, with discernible boundaries between law and morality, as well as between law and other academic disciplines. The pedagogical practice which is found in law schools, she notes “...focuses primarily on legal rules [and] creates a law school environment in which the technocratic is normalized, ...” (Thornton, 1998, p. 372).

This intellectual background does not necessarily equip lawyers to engage in sophisticated philosophical reasoning about work-life balance (or any other forms of sophisticated moral reasoning, for that matter). Granted, there are exceptions within doctrinal law; the study of jurisprudence may involve consideration of moral issues, for instance, but overall, legal positivism is not interested in the analysis of values. Socio-legal and critical legal scholars have, of course, been quick to point this out, and consideration of the values and attitudes subsumed within the law are a main feature of their work. Nevertheless, familiarity with philosophy is not generally a mainstream feature of the legal syllabus, and it is understandable that, in intellectual terms, legal academics have long been regarded with suspicion by other members of the academy Sugarman notes that a need to gain credibility and acceptance from a sceptical academy was one of the top priorities for early legal academics (Sugarman, 1986). Becher’s work suggests that this is still the case; legal academics are regarded by their peers in other disciplines as not really academic, but engaged in unexciting and uncreative activities; typically, they are thought to be ‘...arcane, distant and alien; an appendage to the academic world’ (Becher, 1989, p. 30). Such opinions may bring forth howls of protest from the inhabitants of law schools, but setting them to rest is not the focus of the current argument. The question is, when faced with the problem of work-life balance, can legal academics, despite their somewhat unpromising intellectual background, engage successfully in the critical self-examination which is one of the crucial elements of a cultivated human being? If we, like Charles in Four Weddings and a Funeral continue to prevaricate, we may as Martha Nussbaum suggests, be cultivating humanity in our students – but only at the expense of failing to cultivate our own.

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