Gary Rhoades' Managed Professionals investigates crucial issues preoccupying many of us in higher education: faculty salaries, job security, the increasing use of part-time faculty, the increasing use of electronic technologies, and claims on faculty time and intellectual properties. Rhoades, who is professor at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona, argues that faculty labor has been altered as colleges and universities have become more responsive to markets and as they increasingly focus on efficiency and revenue generation. Although faculty tend to see themselves as autonomous and independent professionals, they are, in fact, "managed professionals" who work in medium and large organizations of hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of employees. While faculty members have responsibility for governance, department and program affairs, and classroom activities, they are still "professional employees who are managed by others"—namely, by administrators and boards. Like physicians working in large HMOs, college and university professors face a large-scale reorganization of their work. "Higher education executives," as Rhoades puts it, are aiming for "greater flexibility in shaping and controlling the configuration, distribution, activity, and output of the academic work force." In other words, "managerial discretion" and "flexibility" are intensifying the hierarchical divisions within the academy.

Instead of offering a highly localized account of his own institution or of speaking in general terms about the trends in higher education, Rhoades offers a specific source of data for understanding the deployment of managerial influence on faculty work: union contracts drawn from the Higher Education Contract Analysis System (HECAS), a CD-ROM database sponsored by the National Education Association. This database includes 212 collective bargaining agreements for faculty in the 1990s, which is about forty-five percent of all faculty contracts. In his close reading of these contracts, Rhoades analyzes "contractual language regarding various terms of faculty labor, concentrating on contracts' themes, rhetorics, specific terminology, and emphases." A sociologist of the professions, Rhoades uses contracts to analyze the "organizational struggle" between professionals and their managers in unionized higher education in the United States. Two major questions guide his examination of this struggle: "First, what measure of professional autonomy do faculty enjoy, and what measure of managerial discretion are they subject to? . . . Second, what are the dimensions and bases of professional stratification? In other words, what are the internal divisions among faculty that are evidenced and built into the contracts?"

We rarely see such a comprehensive study of union policies and practices in the literature on higher education, which tends to ignore unions or construct them as a potential threat or impediment; it is rarer still to see a researcher analyze the balance between "professional autonomy" and "managerial discretion" in such contracts. Some might argue that examining unionized campuses limits the project because most colleges and universities are not unionized. Anticipating this criticism, Rhoades points out that forty-four percent of all full-time faculty are represented by unions at twenty-nine percent of America's colleges and universities. Among that number, it is significant that ninety-four percent of public-sector community college faculty, which is the fastest growing sector of higher education, are represented by bargaining agents. Clearly, unionized campuses are a significant component of American higher education and, as Rhoades contends, all too often they are an ignored feature in the scholarship on higher education. Another advantage of studying unionized campuses is that a public contractual record exists of negotiations between labor and management. At nonunionized campuses, a clear-cut record of such negotiations usually does not exist, thus leading researchers to compose highly localized accounts or to make general statements about trends and patterns without the benefit of wide-ranging data.

Throughout the book's seven chapters, Rhoades presents his analysis of contracts and findings in a clear, readable prose style; however, some readers may find the close readings of contract language, the centerpiece of chapters two through six, tedious. I suggest that readers who grow impatient with the contractual analyses read the introduction to each chapter and then peruse the concluding discussion sections that summarize Rhoades' findings.

After introducing the terms of his study in the opening chapter, Rhoades turns to an examination of faculty salaries in chapter two, "Restructuring Professional Rewards: The Structure, Stratification, and Centrality of Faculty Salaries." He looks at three factors determining faculty salaries—merit, market, and equity—examining how faculty salaries are determined by specific criteria in contracts, who applies those criteria, and what voice faculty have in setting them. Rhoades' study of salary provisions in union contracts yields several surprising findings that may debunk readers' views of the ideology of merit. He finds that seniority, not productivity, is the best indicator of salary in nonunionized settings. Additionally, Rhodes finds that factors such as gender affect salary levels: "The salaries of female faculty and of fields with relatively large percentages of female faculty, are less than those of male faculty and male dominated fields, holding constant measures of merit and market." This proves to be especially true at research universities. He also debunks the view that faculty salaries have been the big ticket item in university personnel budgets, finding that non-professorial faculty account for rising costs.

Chapter three, "Retrenchment and Reorganization: Managing Academic Work(ers) for Productivity," examines retrenchment clauses in union contracts and analyzes how "tenure and retrenchment are interwoven with managerial discretion and reorganization." This chapter demonstrates the true flexibility that managers have in firing tenured faculty through restructuring or through eliminating programs and reallocating resources; it also takes a critical look at the public perception that faculty are highly paid and under utilized. Rhodes makes a particularly important finding in this chapter—namely, that retrenchment clauses tend to protect senior faculty rather than junior faculty and to ignore questions of faculty productivity and revenue generation. Such contractual provisions also have gendered effects. From his research, Rhoades concludes that these policies appear to be "discriminatory toward women (and toward other categories of faculty who have disproportionately large numbers of junior and part-time members)." Rhoades indicates what many of us are now coming to terms with: most faculty—forty-nine percent of full-time faculty (and seventy-five percent of all faculty)—do not have tenure.

As Rhoades' chapter on part-time faculty shows, hiring part-time faculty has been a far less dramatic and controversial way to restructure the university's instructional resources than retrenchment. The very nature of academic work is being transformed by the growing use of part-time faculty, as Rhoades shows in chapter four, "Reorganizing the Faculty Work Force for Flexibility: Part-Time Professional Labor." Yet, ironically, provisions governing the use of part-time faculty in union contracts tend to give managers quite a bit of freedom in employing part-time faculty and do little to control or improve their working conditions. While retrenchment clauses in union contracts tend to build in due process protections for full-time faculty (such as receiving extended notice of lay-off, specifying recall notification, or retraining and reassignment), no such process exists for part-time faculty. Indeed, many colleges and universities have sought to identify part-time faculty as "nonemployees" to prevent their organizing and to resist following state-mandated personnel policies that necessitate paying unemployment compensation and to resist following affirmative action guidelines. In addition, as colleges and universities increase their use of part-time faculty, they increase administrative and nonfaculty professional positions, most of which are full-time (ninety-five and eighty-four percent, respectively), whereas only fifty-seven percent of all faculty members are full-time. Rhoades' analysis of part-time labor will interest those of us concerned with the use of nontenure-track faculty to staff first-year writing courses.

On the issue of part-time labor, Rhoades' chapter on teaching and technology will also prove enlightening. He uses deskilling and enskilling theories of technology to analyze existing contractual statements on technology. In chapter five, "The Production Politics of Teaching and Technology: Deskilling, Enskilling, and Managerial Extension," he looks at how new technologies affect "professional control of pedagogy and curriculum, workload, training and skills, jobs, salaries, and professional evaluation." Rhoades hypothesizes that electronically-driven curricula may "marginalize" tenure-track faculty, while a class of educational workers (specialists and professional staff) arise to address the delivery of a curriculum. Furthermore, Rhoades warns that unions may not be adequately addressing technology issues since they tend to confine technology use "to a periphery of nonacademic, noncredit, nondaytime curricula delivered by part-time faculty." Such a stance is hardly an active one and may contribute to further exploitation of part-time faculty while keeping full-time faculty ignorant of important curricula decisions pertaining to technology. Collective bargaining agents need to assert an active stance toward technology, one that assures faculty training, profit sharing of the revenues generated by technology's purported "efficiency," and participation in decision-making over the university's technological purchases and curricular uses.

The problem of faculty time and ownership of intellectual property is posed in chapter six, "Managerial Domain and Academic Employees: Outside Employment, Intellectual Property, and Faculty's Own Time." Rhoades sketches a useful history of intellectual property rights, pointing out that the 1980 federal patent law allowing colleges and universities to hold patents facilitated a shift in intellectual property rights "as institutions became potential claimants to and direct economic beneficiaries of inventions created by faculty." Furthermore, advances in biotechnology, microcomputing, and educational technology make it profitable for institutions to seek ownership of such faculty "products." The key issue is, of course, faculty time. Can faculty claim such inventions were created on their own time? How do institutions address faculty autonomy and outside employment? Rhoades' analysis of union contractual provisions on intellectual property proves "counterintuitive" to what many perceive to be the case: he finds that faculty at unionized four-year institutions have less ownership of their intellectual property than faculty at unionized two-year institutions, an apparent anomaly that he accounts for in intriguing ways.

The book's seventh and final chapter, "Unionized Faculty: Managing the Restructuring of Professionals and Production Work in Colleges and Universities," reflects on the role of faculty and faculty unions in negotiating the conditions of academic work. Furthermore, it suggests paths for improving union involvement in the future of higher education. Rhoades contends that unions have been most successful in negotiating wages and benefits for faculty; they have been less successful at "negotiating provisions regarding the distribution and configuration of the work force." The future challenge for unions consists in whether they can work as a collectivity to redirect the academy, speak to public interest issues that are articulated in local and state communities, and better organize those at the margins, including nonprofessorial staff or part-time faculty.

We can learn much from Managed Professionals about trends and patterns in academic labor even if we are not employed at a unionized campus or have never been a member of a faculty union. The patterns delineated in this book are representative of all institutions of higher education. Rhoades touches on almost every major issue concerning faculty work and the future of higher education: salaries, the growth of part-time positions, electronic technologies, and intellectual property issues. Furthermore, his study, which is sensitive to issues of diversity, accounts for factors of gender and race in the analyses of academic labor. What I most admire about this book is its refusal to construct relations between faculty and administrators as "one-sided." In other words, Rhoades does not construct faculty members as passive subjects who are pawns in the hands of administrators. As he humorously puts it, faculty are "passive aggressive perhaps. But not submissive." At the same time, Rhodes puts us on notice with this question: can we work collectively across lines of difference to determine the academy's future and to organize others in higher education before we are "reorganized to the margins of the academic enterprise"? This book should be required reading for all new faculty and doctoral students whose futures lie in the reorganized and managed academy of the twenty-first century.