This research discusses the findings from a study undertaken for an exploration of the critical issues around the working conditions, workplace climate, and well-being of business school (predominantly management) academics in Australia and New Zealand. With an ageing workforce, and almost half of the Australian and New Zealand workforce intending to retire, move overseas, or leave the sector within this decade, amidst rising demand in the tertiary education sector, the effective retention of this key skilled workforce is pertinent. With data from a survey conducted in 2017 involving 451 business school academics in Australia and New Zealand, this research note highlights several key issues around the areas of workplace climate and well-being which importantly, are within the control of management. Specifically, these salient workforce issues include work intensification, burnout, and poor work–life balance.

In this paper, the author, a freelance writer and researcher who has worked in this way for over 30 years, draws on his own experience of independent working to present freelancing and well-being as an important yet neglected area of research. The paper is therefore presents a brief overview of the context of freelancing, particularly in the United Kingdom and Europe as this is the working environment of the author. This overview is blended with a review the existing research on the topic of freelancer well-being. The aim is to reveal the questions and issues that the author feels encompass well-being in this context as well as to highlight some recent initiatives where independent workers and their clients have worked together to support key areas of their vulnerability compared with those in full-time employment. Setting this often intensely personal perspective set against the wider context of academic and practitioner research reveals that, in contrast to some the common public opinion that freelance and contract work is ‘second-rate’ option, many independent professionals are happy about the way they work and experience high levels of job satisfaction. However, what does also emerge is that beyond local professional bodies and associations, many feel almost completely unsupported. Of greatest concern were reports of being treated with neglect and even suspicion by policy and law makers. The hope is that this paper heralds the beginnings of a wider research agenda into this important but neglected aspect of the independent professional workforce.

The psychological contract is used to examine the dynamics of the employee–employer exchange relationship. The dominant contract conceptualisation is that it is constituted by beliefs about ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’ promises; however, there is a dearth of conceptual investigation regarding how other research fields understand promising and reconciling this with how the notion has come to be used in psychological contract theory. In particular, the notion of implicit promising remains conceptually and empirically underdeveloped, despite forming a key plank of the contemporary account of the contract. This paper explores these issues by presenting a cross-disciplinary review of promising and applying this to how the notion is used in the contract literature. A conceptual model is also developed to provide avenues to investigate how promise beliefs form in a contract context and their outcomes. Finally, research directions are outlined regarding the roles that beliefs other than promises can play in contract theory.