Proliferating excellence gold standards in the global academic system tend to obscure the far-reaching diversification of academic missions, practices, ambitions and identities brought by massification. This article approaches this topic by a review of theory on academic scholarship and how it has changed in the wake of academic massification and the development of binary higher education systems. In addition, the article reports on the first results of a study on research groups in "newcomer" higher education institutions in Sweden. By synthesising findings and arguments about institutional constraints and the individual ambitions of researchers, the article offers a few preliminary conclusions. It also calls for more scholarly attention to the existence of an academic labour force that corresponds to a widened or altered definition of academic scholarship and that seems to be predominantly found in newcomer academic institutions.