211 Book Reviews / Comptes Rendus state of scholarship in that domain. The first article, in particular, is very thorough in its review of several decades of literature, and impressive in the breadth of topics it tackles. It will be of great consolation to those negotiating collective agreements for professors in these times of performance indicators and accountability to learn that even teacher effectiveness researchers believe that student evaluations of instruction "should not be used indiscriminately for summative decisions about teaching effectiveness" (p. 357). At the same time, it must be said that however useful these chapters are in providing an over-view of research on student evaluations of teaching, they, too, lack the critical edge and probing questions one might expect of a collection appearing in the midst of the flurry of post-modern debates about understanding, meaning and method. For those interested in the central content of this volume, I recommend the concluding chapter by Weimer. She thoroughly summarizes the essential content of eleven chapters, covering 400 pages, in less than two dozen pages. By this act, a great deal is inadvertently revealed. Rhoades, G. (1993). Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1998. Pp. x + 3 4 7 . Reviewed by William Bruneau, Faculty of Education, The University of British Columbia. It is a commonplace to say that social "facts" are value-laden, that any one set of them may yield entirely disparate inferences and interpretations, and that explanations of them will depend in part on the academic and political outlook of the explainer. None of these complications releases social scientists from the requirements of ordinary reason, nor does it permit them to ignore the standards of argument and inference of the discipline or disciplines from which they come, nor does it mean they can get away with bad writing. Gary Rhoades' work is satisfactory on a couple of these scores. He reasons carefully and believably, and his arguments draw successfully on the fields of educational sociology and educational administration. On the other hand, he gives his "facts" too narrow an interpretation, he underplays The Canadian Journal ofHigher Education Volume XXIX, No. 2, 3 1999 212 Book Reviews / Comptes Rendus their connections to larger social and political forces, he misses a number of probably-fruitful inferences, and, alas, he does not write well. Rhoades' book will still end up on the desks of many a university administrator and many a faculty association president. Here's why. Rhoades begins well enough. Managing Professionals relies on a computerized file of 212 collective bargaining agreements in American universities and two-year colleges. This collection of bargained agreements, under the aegis of the National Education Association of the United States, covers about 45 percent of all such contracts in 1994. The author persuasively shows that these 212 are representative of arrangements at the 1,057 United States campuses where faculty members in 1994 were represented by bargaining agents. Rhoades relies on the database, and a wealth of secondary published research, to make a picture of salary structures in university and college administrations and professoriates across several years, to describe the effects of decades of "retrenchment," to gauge the advance of technology in teaching and outreach since the 1980s, and to offer selected statistics on how university and college teaching has become a part-time, sessional occupation for more and more graduate students or otherwiseunemployed persons. Gary Rhoades' book will be useful to faculty association presidents and university administrators, not just because it handily summarizes collective agreements on salaries, merit pay, the provision of sabbaticals, intellectual property, tenure/academic freedom, and the rise of the part-time professoriate — but also because of the way he supports his two main inferences: (a) academics are managed professionals and are increasingly so. M a n a g e r i a l discretion is broad and expanding. Professional involvement in decision making is limited, as are professional constraints on managerial discretion; (b) academics are highly stratified professionals and are increasingly so. Managerial flexibility serves to heighten the hierarchy and divisions within the academic profession, which are already considerable, and are growing, (p. 6) Rhoades thinks collective agreements are indicators of the way work is distributed and done in universities. He thinks it makes sense to analyze The Canadian Journal of Higher Education Volume xm, No. 2,3 1999 213 Book Reviews / Comptes Rendus these agreements to find — among other things — what the term "professional" means in working practice; to learn whether professors in research universities, including a few private ones for which Rhoades has evidence, have more or less control of their work lives than do their colleagues in colleges or even in high schools; and to assess whether management has acquired increasing powers in matters of teaching, research, and scholarly communication. Rhoades' main findings appear in the quotation above, but to see how well they stand up, it will be helpful to follow his analysis and discussion of one "data set." I've chosen his discussion of outside employment, intellectual property, and the use of "faculty's own time" in order to give an idea of the book's tone and method. As in each of his five analytic sections, Rhoades introduces this one with a brief study of key definitions: an academic employee, a full-time contract, the "one-day-a-week" rule on outside employment, and so on. He reviews legislative developments on intellectual property, reminding us that since 1980, colleges and universities have acquired the right to hold patents and copyrights resulting from professorial investigations. The copyright question has been given new weight and urgency by the rapid development of technologies whose "science" and whose "applications" are almost indistinguishable. Universities and colleges find it terribly tempting to claim ownership, especially where research for profit-making inventions was carried out on their premises, using their equipment, and on institutional time. Tempting or not, collective agreements show that academic institutions do not "own" either professorial time or professorial minds. To get around this difficulty, institutions have taken to bargaining other restrictions on workload and work practices. The long-term effect of those guidelines and restrictions is to extend managerial discretion, to make it felt where it was once not especially noticeable. Reviewing (pp. 221-225) his database, Rhoades tells us that "only" 42 percent of his contracts (89 of 212) have provisions on outside employment. Still, under most of those provisions, managers can decide (p. 255) "whether there is a conflict of commitment between the outside employment and the faculty member's principal employment activity," and whether the faculty member may use institutional personnel, facilities, and time in her outside work. In ninety-eight "major" universities, The CanadianJournalof Higher Education Volume XXIX, No. 2, 3 1999 214 Book Reviews / Comptes Rendus many of them private, another study has shown that more than 70 percent imposed time allocation limits on outside activity (even in sabbaticals), and required prior approval for outside activity. Once again, Rhoades claims that managerial discretion is on the rise. In large research universities, faculty members find their claims to their own intellectual property are increasingly circumscribed. Intriguingly, elite American universities turn out to be the "most monitored and controlled" (p. 254). Rhoades suggests that professionals are increasingly oriented to the market and increasingly defined by their market and organizational position. The result may be more private sector models of organizational claims on employees, professional or otherwise, (p. 255) In two-year American colleges, where contracts regulate instructional time and work more than in four-year universities or research universities, faculty members are more likely by far to have discretion over "their own time," to own and to profit from their intellectual property, or at the very least, to have an assured way of negotiating these matters. The book encourages the conclusion that unionization is one way to slow the spread of managerialism. However, Rhoades' research on salary structures and retrenchment leads him to a second overall conclusion — he notes how "differentiated" the professoriate has become. University administration jobs have perks that incumbents often keep after their return to the professoriate. Administrators are and remain "different." Meanwhile, promotion and merit pay regulations, laid out under collective agreements in the database, help to ensure professors will work in distinct strata, and will continue to compete for scarce administrative and financial preferment. Given his database, and only his database, it makes social science "sense" to accept a version of Rhoades' theses. The difficulty is that the database is too narrow to support the breadth of those theses. One might ask, for example, why American professors are willing in the 1990s to talk the language of merchant capitalism, and of private entrepreneurialism, in the course of articles of collective agreement? To answer that question, we would have to review the social, political, and usage histories of that language. Although work of this kind has been done well by others, he in the end neglects the politics and the recent history of his The Canadian Journal ofHigher Education Volume XXIX, No. 2, 3 1999 215 Book Reviews / Comptes Rendus subject. To make matters still more dicey, Rhoades pays vanishingly little attention to developments in any country other than the United States. And what if the recent history of the professoriate is simply another version of the broader history of the professions in the developed world? Or another version of labour history? If it is either of these, then we cannot hope to understand the development of collective bargaining in universities without thinking about those other histories. They, too, are largely absent in Managing Professions. Rhoades gives us (p. 279) a tantalizing glimpse at what might have been: In work and occupations, two defining developments of the turn of the twentieth century were the emergence of professions not only to rationalize and serve capitalism, but also to mitigate its excesses. As well, unions grew to protect employees against the discretion and excess of managers. The defining developments of the turn of the twenty-first century are the increased subordination of skilled and professional workers to managerial control, emulating the excesses of capitalism, and the increased use of contingent, part-time employees. Rhoades is most likely right that professors are increasingly marginal to decisions about their work, their time, and their brains. He hints at, but does not ask a still larger question: how can collective bargaining and collective action help the professoriate to redefine the enduring values and goals of higher education? Surely faculty associations and unions are particularly well placed to communicate to the public that management and managerialism serve those values and goals. Rhoades' book goes awry partly for a reason he could and should have remedied: his writing. Because of its peculiar diction, and its repetitious organization, the book makes hard reading. It must have made hard writing, too. With a good copy edit, the manuscript could have been cut by 40 percent. I am filled with Angst at the thought that graduate students may read and imitate this stuff. At p. 30, we have the following paragraph opener: To what extent is merit embedded in contracts as a key criteria shaping unionized faculty's salaries? The Canadian Journal ofHigher Education Volume XXIX, No. 2, 3 1999 216 Book Reviews / Comptes Rendus "Embedded" is the wrong verb, and in the passive mood. "Criteria" should be "criterion." "Faculty's" must mean "faculty members'." And a plain English version might read: How often is merit a deciding factor in salaries of unionized faculty members? Another gem (p. 5): Influence may involve ongoing, proactive efforts within one's program or department to update and reform the subject matter and intellectual work of higher education. I wonder if he means: One may gain influence by helping with curriculum reform. Subject-verb agreement is approximate throughout (see the amazing second paragraph on p. x, if you get the chance). Rhoades' imprecision in the use of ordinary concepts and terms is at some points bothersome, and at others utterly confusing. To give a straightforward example, people are, according to Rhoades, "involved" in things; but in this book, that could mean anything from doing them, to opposing them. Meanwhile we have objects and ideas "speaking to" each other: data "speak to" themes, people "speak to" situations (!), but rarely to each other. And from hundreds of examples, here is a noun turned into a verb (whose imminent demise I forecast): T h e c o n t r a c t of the U n i v e r s i t y of N e b r a s k a , K e a r n e y , recently transitioning f r o m a state college to part of the University System, reveals the pressure to incorporate a similar merit clause. I was not even tempted to "transition" my way to the conclusion of this review. 4ft <4* "fr Westhues, K. (1998). Eliminating Professors: A Guide to the Dismissal Process. Queenston, Lewiston, Lampeter: Kempner Collegium Publications. Pp. x, 218. Reviewed by Sylvia D. Jansen, Executive Director, Faculty Association, The University of Manitoba. The Canadian Journal ofHigher Education Volume XXIX, No. 2, 3 1999