Aims & Scope
Widespread faculty collective bargaining is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of American higher education. This phenomenon has largely paralleled what some have called the rise of the information age. Others have described it as part of a general trend toward business and industrial models of higher education organization and management.
Scholarly inquiry and writing about collective bargaining in the academy were prevalent in the 1970s and into the 1980s as faculty collective bargaining gained momentum in the United States. Since then, however, research and writing about collective bargaining in higher education has waned despite the fact that faculty unions occur in 33 states and the District of Columbia and that almost half of all faculty in the United States are unionized with the majority in four-year colleges and universities and a little less than half in community colleges.
Currently diminished levels of scholarship and writing about collective bargaining in the academy belie its importance as both a possible contributor to and a potential cure for many of the issues confronting higher education in the twenty-first century. Therefore, the purpose of the Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy is to advance research and scholarly thought in academic collective bargaining and to make relevant and pragmatic peer-reviewed research readily accessible to practitioners and to scholars in the field. By invitation and by selection of competitively submitted articles, the editors will endeavor to present perspectives that span the spectrum of scholarly thought about academic collective bargaining past, present, and future. In so doing, controversy will not be seen as something to be avoided but a symptom of something that needs to be studied, explored, and better understood.
