Description
Book SynopsisThere is a comforting tale that heads of higher education institutions (HEIs) like to tell each other. "Go around your university or college," they say, "and ask the first ten people who you meet how their morale is. The response will always be 'rock-bottom.' Then ask them what they are working on. The responses will be full of life, of optimism and of enthusiasm for the task in hand." The moral of the story is that the two sets of responses don't compute; that the first is somehow unthinking and ideological, and the second unguarded and sincere.
The thesis of this book is that the contradictory answers may well compute more effectively than is acknowledged: that the culture of higher education and the mesh of psychological contracts, or "deals," that make it up make much of the current discourse about happiness and unhappiness in contemporary life look simplistic and banal.
In particular, the much-vaunted "science of happiness" may not have much to say to us. There is also a
Table of Contents
Foreword by Professor Sir Peter Scott
List of figures and tables
List of acronyms
Introduction: Why Morale?
Higher Education and Our Present Condition
Unhappy Students
Unhappy Staff
Unhappy Stakeholders
Managing Morale
Coda
References
List of websites
Index
