The call for more scholarly work on the professoriate is beginning to sound like the adage that everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it. Anthony Potts' College Academics acknowledges this gap in the study of higher education by asking penetrating questions about the identity of the academic in a specific social, historical, economic, and political milieu.

In the Introduction, academic careers are described as "greedy professions," "fluid" for promoting a flexible work schedule (is an academic's work ever truly confined to "nine-to-five"?) but demanding in their frequently considerable requirement of time and energy. With the growing impossibility of demarcating working and non-working hours and the freedom with which some academics come and go from work, it comes as little surprise that people outside academics regularly see the professorial life as a "soft option."

Early on, Potts sets the tone of tension and accommodation for the book: How do we approach academics as decision-makers, with backgrounds, disciplinary knowledge, experiences before and after being hired, challenges to the constraint of institutional socialization, and perspectives and levels of occupational commitment, often changing but invariably individual? Moreover, what happens when this individual comes to work in a "tightly controlled government institution set up to achieve specific economic and educational aims?" (p. 1).

Because of its ostensibly narrow focus, College Academics might initially scare off potentially interested readers. The time is 1965-1989; the setting is a group of business, science, engineering, and arts academics from the Bendigo College of Advanced Education in Victoria, Australia. The methodological framework for the study is sociological.

The book, however, is presented with cogency, highlighted by logically-ordered chapters, a welcome habit of situating the argument in past sociological and historical literature, brief introductions and conclusions to most subsections and all chapters, and an excellent bibliography. This facilitates quick reading and reflection of the contents.

As most readers will find, the time frame of the study, allowing for proper longitudinal analysis, is germane to perhaps their own experiences. The fundamentally upsetting events of expansion and the most pronounced contraction of the Australian higher education system and Bendigo College rings true to anyone involved in universities and colleges in Canada over the past three decades.

The reader can easily identify with the group of academics, regardless of discipline, as thoughts, attitudes, and perspectives may strike some as all too familiar. One academic admits his fear of job complacency, commenting that "... I may fall into that dangerous category of someone who is very satisfied with where he is and could possibly die from the neck up" (p. 171).

Undoubtedly the most inaccessible part of the book to the sociologically-uninitiated is the vernacular of symbolic interaction theory. For example, a propensity of some academics to support a liberal education dimension in a mostly vocational and utilitarian discipline "... was derived from their own previous socialization experiences that they underwent during their personal tertiary education process and from their individual latent culture" (p. 114).

A careful reading of the first three introductory/methodology chapters, however, makes this hurdle of specialized jargon much less onerous.

Ultimately, issues applicable to academic identity and how academics "adapted to their occupational world" (p. 4) such as educational background, job satisfaction, the role of friends and the "invisible college" of peers, personal considerations of money, power, status, happiness, and prestige, occupational and associational demands, responsibilities to the institution, and the value placed on academic freedom, to name a few, are the gist of this book, elucidated for any interdisciplinary audience.

Among the myriad findings using the sample of more than 50 staff members at the college, gathered from interviews, questionnaires, and documentary research, the either subtle or obvious and at times very deliberate power and control exercised by the individual academic are important underlying themes of the book.

Throughout the chapters which deal with defining the "academic self," College Academics analyses the forces which affect an individual's occupational choice and perspectives on teaching, research, and commitment.

Strikingly, despite sometimes intense peer, occupational, institutional, and system-wide pressures to conform, the individual stands apart as a "player," one who negotiates relationships and surroundings to function according to his or her own occupational Weltanschauung, or as Potts puts it, "to control the nature of their work" and to act "conducive to their definitions of self" (p. 168).

The book revisits this idea of the academic "maintaining a proper sense of identity" (p. 57) time and again, for example in the academic's formulation of a disciplinary perspective ("he or she was not simply passive" when confronted by institutional and occupational socialization ... "In reality there was a two-way interaction between staff and the institution ... " (pp. 117-118)), and in the situational adjustment undergone when deciding teaching assignments in which the academics "were not simply and completely passive" (p. 140) in the face of rigid college policy and occupational norms.

Indeed, individual agency was so pervasive that at times the academics' actions based on their perspective toward research in a mostly teaching institution formed a counter-socialization process, whereby the character of the college itself was changed (p. 154).

The "two-way nature of the socialization process" driven by academics who "formulated their own responses" (p. 179) is perhaps best summed up in the theoretical implications of the socialization of lecturers. Academics "negotiate" their occupational perspectives among themselves, the demands of the occupation itself, and the institution. Potts contends that "academic careers are experienced differently by individuals" (p. 216).

An attractive aspect of the book is the intimately revealing verbatim responses included to support arguments of socialization and perspective. How can an academic not in one way or the other identify with the issue of qualification in the higher education workplace, as respondent No. 16 notes: "I think the stress here may be on paper qualifications -- masters and doctorates. I think they put more emphasis on that than anything ... but I would have to weigh that against ... practical experience ... It is very nice to have a doctorate but it is no good if you can't teach a class of students" (pp. 85-86).

Another faculty member bitterly describes his perspective toward research: "My own feeling is that there are so many academics in the tertiary world now, all of whom are desperately publishing in order not to perish, that there is so much garbage being produced so why should I add to that garbage" (p. 154).

The juxtaposition of personal experience and sociological argument, however, begs the question of differences in perspective, commitment, and activity according to perhaps more suffusive individual considerations, in particular ethnicity, gender, and class.

As an extension to this study, a much larger sample coupled with a necessarily increased provision for anonymity of the respondents could lead to interesting observations on, for example, the institutional socialization of faculty from members of diverse ethnic groups, or intriguingly, the role of reference groups and prior socialization of women academics in comparison to their male counterparts.

As well, does class background have an effect on an academic's disciplinary perspective or commitment to institution? These are a few of the many potentially contentious but compelling questions that could be fully presented for critical discussion in an expanded future study.

A definite strength of College Academics is its Summary and Conclusion chapter which includes both theoretical and management implications of the socialization of academics. Potts itemizes important practical considerations for higher education policy makers who hope for a smooth transition to a unified educational system and maintenance of productive and cost-effective institutions. Administrators and faculty members themselves have to be aware of the "new academic culture with its changed perspectives," especially the process of "situational adjustment" which shapes an academic's self-image (pp. 222-225).

Beyond policy implications, however, College Academics offers much for the serious scholar. Potts challenges others to undertake similar case studies and compare results (p. 216).

As well, the nature and findings of the study could be used quite nicely as a tool for further historical exploration of the professoriate and post-secondary institutions in Canada and internationally. By virtue of the research design and methodology, such study need not be confined to a particular culture or region.

College Academics suggests the university or college in sociological/historical perspective is more than a faceless bureaucratic monolith ensconced in but divorced from the society as a whole; rather, it is a vibrant and intricate web of personal interaction set within changing political, economic, and social circumstances.

Focusing on the professoriate as a primary decision-making agent and on the various related key issues which change over time allows for a clear and intimate historical understanding of higher education and, in a larger sense, state formation. More studies are needed of this kind.

Paul J. Stortz is a PhD candidate in the Department of Theory and Policy Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. For three years, he was editor of Higher Education Perspectives, formerly the Ontario Journal of Higher Education.