The study drew on in-depth narratives from 33 faculty members at Makerere, using a hermeneutic approach rooted in the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur and anchored in Social Practice Theory. Rather than treating promotion as a technical exercise governed by published criteria, the researchers framed it as an interpretive practice, one whose meaning is constructed by the people moving through it. Their analysis identified three cognitive movements that structure faculty members’ experiences: prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration.

Prefiguration describes the stage before faculty members engage formally with promotion, when their expectations are shaped by what the authors call an institutional shadow text. This is the unwritten companion to the official policy documents, the accumulated lore about how promotion really works, which conditions academics to approach the process with suspicion before they have submitted a single file. The official policy on appointment and promotion of academic staff, first issued in 2006 and reviewed in 2014, exists on paper, but the narratives collected by the researchers suggest that faculty members read the institution through a second, informal document written in rumor and precedent.

Configuration is the stage at which the process is emplotted through narration. As faculty members live through promotion, they assemble the changing criteria, opaque decision-making, and perceived patronage into coherent stories. The study emphasizes that these are perceptions and narratives rather than established institutional facts; the authors deliberately positioned the research as an examination of how Ugandan higher education practitioners understand terms like institutional patronage, not as an audit of whether patronage exists at the research sites. Even so, the stories faculty members told shared a recognizable plot: criteria that shifted over time, decisions that could not be traced to stated standards, and informal influence that seemed to matter as much as formal merit.

Refiguration is the aftermath, the point at which the interpreted experience reorganizes the interpreter. Faculty members who had moved through the process emerged with feelings of cynicism, strategic compliance, and a lack of trust for the institution. Strategic compliance is a particularly telling outcome: rather than open resistance or wholehearted endorsement, academics adopt a pragmatic posture, performing what the system demands while privately disbelieving in it. The disjuncture between policy and practice, the authors argue, is wide enough that compliance becomes a survival strategy rather than an expression of conviction.

The theoretical machinery behind these findings is worth unpacking. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics treats human action as a text to be interpreted, and his account of narrative in Time and Narrative provides the tripartite structure the authors borrow. Prefiguration corresponds to the horizon of expectations that precedes action, configuration to the act of emplotment that gives events a narrative shape, and refiguration to the way the completed narrative transforms the reader’s world. Applied to promotion, this means that faculty members do not simply undergo a procedure; they author an account of it, and that account then governs how they relate to the university thereafter.

Social Practice Theory supplies the second pillar. Practices, in the sense developed by theorists such as Theodore Schatzki, Elizabeth Shove, and Andreas Reckwitz, are routinized doings and sayings that carry meaning, competence, and materiality. Promotion at Makerere is thus analyzed as a social practice whose elements, published criteria, committees, files, informal networks, and stories, are assembled and reassembled by participants. This framing connects the study to a broader literature on audit culture and performativity in universities, including work by Stephen Ball on the terrors of performativity and by Cris Shore and Susan Wright on rankings and the reassembling of society, as well as to scholarship on academic capitalism and metric assemblages such as the h-index.

The Ugandan setting gives the analysis a distinctive Global South dimension. Makerere has been a central institution in East African intellectual life, and its reforms during the neoliberal era were the subject of Mahmood Mamdani’s influential study Scholars in the Marketplace. The new research engages decolonial scholarship as well, citing figures such as Paulin Hountondji, Achille Mbembe, Walter Mignolo, and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni on epistemic freedom and the cognitive empire. In this context, promotion is not merely an administrative bottleneck but a site where questions of recognition, authority, and whose knowledge counts are negotiated in practice.

Methodologically, the study is a qualitative narrative inquiry. The authors collected rich, in-depth narratives across disciplines and career stages, with sample size guided by the concept of information power rather than statistical saturation, following Malterud and colleagues. Thematic analysis was used to identify the cognitive movements that recur across accounts. Ethical safeguards were extensive: approval came from the higher degrees and research committee of the East African School of Higher Education Studies and Development, participants gave informed consent, pseudonyms were assigned, transcripts were anonymized, and quotes were scrutinized to remove identifying information in what the authors describe as an emotionally sensitive institutional environment. The data are not publicly available due to ethical restrictions, though anonymized excerpts appear in the article.

The study’s significance lies less in any single accusation than in its reframing of promotion as an interpretive experience. If faculty members’ trust is built or eroded through the stories they construct about how the institution recognizes merit, then transparency in criteria and decision-making is not just good administration but a condition for institutional legitimacy. The authors present their claims as perceptions and narratives, carefully hedged, yet the pattern they document, suspicion conditioned by a shadow text, emplotment through opacity and perceived patronage, and refiguration into cynicism and strategic compliance, offers a technical vocabulary for a problem familiar to universities far beyond Kampala: the gap between the meritocracy a promotion policy promises and the practice its faculty narrate.

Subject of Research: Faculty perceptions of the academic promotion process at Makerere University

Article Title: From suspicion to cynicism

Article References: Gichuru, E. N., & Rukooko, A. B. (2026). From suspicion to cynicism. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 403. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01693-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01693-1

Keywords: academic promotion, Makerere University, hermeneutics, Ricoeur, Social Practice Theory, faculty experiences, higher education, Uganda, qualitative research, narrative inquiry, Global South, organizational trust

The emotional weight of the finding is captured in the words of one participant, given the pseudonym Jo, who admitted she would never identify herself as an education-focused academic. Her concealment reflected a belief that colleagues would regard her as less legitimate than research-active peers. Far from being exceptional, similar accounts emerged repeatedly across the four universities in the study, which included a research-intensive Group of Eight institution, a member of the Australian Technology Network, an Innovative Research University, and a regional university from the Regional Universities Network. Despite their differences, the experiences reported by education-focused staff were strikingly consistent.

Education-focused roles have expanded rapidly across Australian higher education and now represent the fastest growing segment of the academic workforce. They allow academics to concentrate on teaching, curriculum innovation and educational leadership with little or no expectation of disciplinary research, and in a growing number of universities they provide a promotion pathway to full professor based on educational achievement. Comparable tracks have emerged in the United Kingdom, Canada and Singapore, driven by massification of student enrolments, declining government funding and rising expectations of educational quality. Yet, as the new study shows, formal recognition has not translated into cultural acceptance.

To explain why, the study turns to neo-institutional theory, a framework which holds that organisations are governed by taken-for-granted assumptions about what counts as appropriate and legitimate behaviour. Within higher education, the dominant institutional logic has long been anchored in the teaching-research nexus, the idealised model of the academic as someone who combines teaching with an active disciplinary research profile. Although the empirical relationship between research excellence and teaching quality is weak and historically contingent, research remains the primary marker of academic status, embedded in promotion criteria, workload models, funding systems and informal judgements about academic worth.

Against that backdrop, the study identifies a recurring institutional identity category: the education-focused academic as the ‘failed researcher’. Within this framework, an academic’s focus on teaching and student learning is interpreted not as specialisation but as deviation from the research-active norm. Participants from all four universities described how colleagues assumed that people entered education-focused roles because they could not succeed as traditional researchers. One teaching-and-research academic at a regional university remarked that there were no other roles available and that they did not know anyone who would choose an education-focused appointment, while another described teaching-focused staff as being ‘on a production line smashing out students’, performing standardised repetitive tasks rather than creative intellectual work.

The reality described by the education-focused participants themselves was radically different. They entered their roles through varied pathways, from clinical practice and school teaching to journalism and postdoctoral research, and for varied reasons, including securing continuing employment, passion for teaching, and a desire to prepare the next generation of professionals. One participant spoke of thinking about assessment design while others thought about research while washing dishes; another described the appointment as an alignment of stars, with her classroom serving as her laboratory. This diversity of motivations and expertise, the study argues, directly challenges the empirical validity of the ‘failed researcher’ conception, which reduces a rich spectrum of careers to a single narrative of research failure.

The study shows that the label is not sustained by individual attitudes alone but is enacted through organisational structures and everyday practice. Recognition and reward systems privileged research while rendering educational achievement invisible: one education-focused academic who had won two national awards for university teaching noted that these counted for nothing at her institution, while researchers winning large grants were celebrated on the website banner. Workload arrangements sent similar signals, with teaching relief granted to researchers winning grants implying that teaching was a punishment and research the valued activity. Promotion processes, leadership structures and casual collegial interactions repeatedly communicated that research represented the highest form of academic contribution, even where formal policies recognised education-focused careers.

The consequences extended into daily life and self-perception. Many participants reported reluctance to disclose their education-focused status, and one senior leader recounted that when education-focused staff in a public forum were asked to raise their hands, none did. More overt exclusion was also reported, with one participant told to their face that some colleagues regarded a role without research as belonging to only half an academic. For some, the stigma was internalised: one education-focused senior lecturer described feeling like an illegitimate academic who had never felt like an expert. The study also found a paradox of resistance: education-focused academics who sought legitimacy through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning often succeeded locally, but only by translating their work into terms already recognised by research-centric cultures, leaving broader assumptions largely intact.

The consistency of these accounts across four very different universities points, the author argues, to institutional isomorphism, the process by which organisations in the same field grow alike as they respond to shared norms and sources of legitimacy. Australian universities compete within a sector where research performance, funding, rankings and international benchmarking underwrite organisational prestige, so research-centred understandings of academic value persist not merely as local preference but as a sectoral expectation of what a successful university looks like. Within such a field, treating education-focused academics as fully equal can itself appear counter-normative, meaning the delegitimisation of teaching specialists becomes, in effect, a legitimate organisational response.

Yet the study concludes that the ‘failed researcher’ narrative is becoming impossible to sustain. It is empirically weak, contradicted by the diverse achievements of education-focused staff; conceptually shaky, given the weak link between research performance and teaching quality; and organisationally contradictory, because universities now rely on these academics to deliver core educational missions while simultaneously undermining their legitimacy. The real question, the paper suggests, is no longer whether education-focused academics are legitimate, since universities have already answered that by creating and promoting their career pathways, but whether institutional cultures have adapted to that reality. In many cases, they have not, and the marginalisation of teaching specialists reflects institutional logics that have lagged behind the transformation of academic work itself.

Subject of Research: Institutional construction of perceived illegitimacy and marginalisation among education-focused academics in Australian universities

Article Title: The ‘failed researcher’ – perceptions of illegitimacy and the marginalisation of education focused academics in Australia

Article References: Fleischner, C. (2026). The ‘failed researcher’ – perceptions of illegitimacy and the marginalisation of education focused academics in Australia. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01767-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01767-2

Keywords: education-focused academics, higher education, academic identity, academic legitimacy, teaching-focused roles, neo-institutional theory, Australian universities, academic workforce, marginalisation, teaching-research nexus, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, academic promotion