The Effects of Control on Academic Engagement Work-life Balance and Work-life conflict: Is how we manage and what we measure actually contributing to what we strive to pursue?

There are many factors that can be explored around tensions of academic working-life including work-life balance and work-life conflict. Power has changed, moving from academics owning their own means of production to a management ethos with surveillance processes, bureaucracy, performance audits and judgements. There are key discussions around academic hyperprofessionality and hyper-engagement, new managerialism and performance management based on private sector management practices. Academics, now service providers, are being increasingly scrutinised, managed and judged by surrogate performance measures such as student evaluation of teaching (SET). This chapter further develops some of these discussions and presents on-going research on the value and use of SET data.