In this paper, we explore the developmental challenges facing the academic profession in Europe and especially in some Western Balkan countries, Croatia and Slovenia. First, we look at how the higher education environment determines key changes to the academic profession: expectations to demonstrate professional expertise, internationalisation, segmentation, and precarity. While these processes are mainly considered from the above perspective, we also examine the work of academics from within. Second, we discuss aspects of academic tasks, challenges of synchronising academic work with performance measures, intensification of work and expansion of bureaucratic tasks. Building on these perspectives, we introduce a qualitative pilot study that tests how these general trends described in the literature may be applied to given situations in five countries of former Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, North Macedonia and Kosovo. Although these countries cover a relatively small geographical area, the differences among them with respect to the economy, society and politics are important. Our findings suggest that problems accumulating in academic work in Slovenia and Croatia were in almost all of the surveyed aspects less problematic than in the three other observed countries.

中文翻译：

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西部巴尔干地区发展学术专业的挑战

在本文中，我们探讨了欧洲，尤其是在某些西巴尔干国家，克罗地亚和斯洛文尼亚的学术专业面临的发展挑战。首先，我们看一下高等教育环境如何决定学术专业的关键变化：对展现专业知识，国际化，细分化和不稳定的期望。虽然主要从以上角度考虑这些过程，但我们也从内部研究学者的工作。其次，我们讨论了学术任务的各个方面，将学术工作与绩效指标同步的挑战，工作强度的提高和官僚主义任务的扩展。基于这些观点，我们进行了定性的初步研究，测试了文献中描述的这些总体趋势如何适用于前南斯拉夫五个国家（斯洛文尼亚，克罗地亚，塞尔维亚，北马其顿和科索沃）的特定情况。尽管这些国家的地理区域相对较小，但它们之间在经济，社会和政治方面的差异很重要。我们的研究结果表明，在斯洛文尼亚和克罗地亚的学术工作中积累的问题几乎在所有被调查方面都没有比其他三个观察到的国家成问题。