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This article focuses on understanding the evolution of the academic identity of a university academic within the contemporary university context, highlighting the significant influence of professional performance evaluations.

In order to achieve the objectives, a narrative-biographical approach was used, through an in-depth analysis of the life and professional career of a Spanish academic.

The results reveal a progression in identity from a state of naivety to that of a survivor, characterized by a strong adherence to the demands of scientific production, with research assuming a central role. This shift is motivated by an enduring pursuit of stable employment conducive to full professional and personal development. Several factors influence this change, including the context of evaluation, lack of funding, relationship with the thesis supervisor, and job instability, among others. The article concludes by outlining policy implications aimed at enhancing the work and professional standards of university faculty. These recommendations include awareness-raising initiatives, re-evaluating existing evaluation systems, and promoting institutional support, among other measures. Implementing these strategies is expected to optimize the professional growth of academics and, therefore, enhance the quality of services provided by universities.

Although previous research has acknowledged the impact of these evaluations, this study stands out by exploring how academic identity is shaped and reconfigured over the course of a career.

This chapter delves into the evolving identity of professionals within the field of research management and administration (RMA), examining the shifts in their roles and expectations in the changing landscape in higher education. After the introductory section, Section 2 offers a conceptual framework that emphasises identity as a dynamic process rather than a static concept. This framework sheds light on the changing roles and expectations that define the RMA profession. In Section 3, we explore the contextual backdrop of shifting expectations surrounding RMA roles while stressing the importance of recognizing the multiplicity of identities to comprehend the nuances of the RMA profession. Section 4 analyzes empirical data and explore the diverse pathways that lead individuals into the RMA profession. We uncover that a notable proportion of RMAs possess scientific training and research experience and highlight the complexities surrounding the identity of RMAs with doctoral training (DRMAs). Lastly, Section 5 discusses key observations that yield valuable insights for future research on the evolving professional identity of RMAs. We emphasise that, through self-exploration and introspection, practitioners in the field can contribute to a deeper understanding of their roles and actively shape their professional identity.

In this chapter, we explore group counseling interventions for Black males and explain the Achieving Success Everyday (ASE) group model for racial and mathematical development. We use critical race theory (CRT) as a framework to analyze school counseling (SC) and mathematics literature that focuses on Black male students to inform the reconceptualization of the ASE group model for school counselors. We examine the programs and interventions that have been published with Black male participants in school settings within the SC literature. We also examine programs and interventions that have been specially designed to improve Black males' mathematics skills. We specifically focus on gathering findings that provide successful outcomes for Black males in public schools. We examine literature that reflects the role school counselors (SCs) take when supporting Black male students' academic, social, emotional, college, and career identity development. We believe uncovering ideas to capture Black males' experiences in school settings could shed light on how to foster Black excellence. Gaining an understanding of programs and interventions for Black male students through a CRT lens could inform future research, policy, and practice in SC while combating ongoing racism that continues to persist.

In this paper we explore the gendered ways in which academic staff resistance and compliance is configured in a post-1992 University in England, including the emotions implicated in the navigation of neo-liberalisation and research intensification of their academic institution and its associated disciplinarian mechanisms.

We draw on data from an interview study of a diverse sample of 32 academics of different gender, discipline and academic grade. Analysis informed by a feminist post-structuralist framework of power and discourse explored different forms of academic resistance and compliance; how the embodied academic subject was (re)negotiated within gendered discourses of neo-liberal research excellence and managerialism and the gendered emotions generated in processes of resistance and compliance.

Institutional change and expectations to engage with research performativity generated fear, anxiety and anger. Female staff appeared to actively resist the masculinized research subject performing all hours work and individualism in the context of private and institutional gendered relations and labour. Male staff though actively resisted the feminization of higher education and the neo-liberal instrumentalization of caring and therapeutic cultures and ideologically resisted the surveillance mechanisms of higher education including the REF.

Our work contributes to scholarship problematizing the assumed neutrality of resistance and compliance and highlighting women’s symbolic struggle to (dis)identify with a masculine professional norm. In terms of theorising academic resistance to neo-liberalism and identity construction, further attention should be given to the mobilization and symbolic capital of academics and emotions positioned differently due to their gender and intersecting differences.

Our study addresses a gap in the scholarship of academic resistance and compliance by advancing the understanding of gender inequalities and emotions implicated in the process of resistance and compliance against neo-liberalism.

Gender inequality and age discrimination persist in the Higher Education (HE) sectors. The significance of gendered health at middlescence, including peri/menopause, is often negated. This article explores women’s lived experiences of gendered health issues at middlescence in the neoliberal academy through an intersectional lens.

Two female academics engaged in dialogic narrative using duoethnography addressing their experiences of gendered health issues in a UK Higher Education Institution (HEI). They recorded intentional written reflections and met to explore their experiences over a four month period. Thematic analysis was applied to analyse their responses.

Both women considered how they self-advocated for their own care at the stage of middlescence whilst seeking health support and in accessing accommodations in the HE workplace. This process impacted on the construction of their professional identity and on their self-concept as social work academics at the dynamic intersection of age, gender, ethnic, social and professional status.

This article uniquely foregrounds two female academics’ lived experiences of middlescence in a UK HEI conceptualised through an intersectional lens. Their experiences are explored in the context of gendered age discrimination in HE sectors that are perpetuated through masculinized forms of career progression and management. The concept of the ideal academic, a white male, unencumbered by domestic responsibilities, is contested through consideration of care ethics. We acknowledge that forms of epistemic injustice silence women’s narratives in the neoliberal academy but highlight recommendations to enable their stories of gendered health discrimination to be heard.

This chapter provides first insights into identities and communities of educational staff in one of the largest, multi-campus universities in Italy. This group of managers refers to those supporting teaching and learning in the light of emerging demands from the European strategy for universities which is positioning education at the frontline in today’s higher education institutions (HEIs).

These insights are compared with common issues surveyed among research managers and administrators (RMAs) working in the same as well as in other international HEIs using Evans’ ‘restricted’ and ‘extended’ models of professionalism.

Among findings, educational managers (EM) show awareness of their identity only as ‘professionals’ while RMAs may feel like ‘hybrid’ profiles. Unlike RMAs, EM report not having a strong sense of belonging to one community but feeling like they belong to a plethora of groups. In conclusion, there are no dominant ‘extended’ or ‘restricted’ traits for any of the two groups and they have both these attitudes to a certain extent as the results of this chapter will further explain.

In the past decade, against increasing global inequality, higher education has grappled with increased demands for social justice, transformation and decolonisation. While a lot of research in South Africa has focused on the (im)possibilities of fostering racial, gendered, socio-economic and cultural change, the connection of such change to questions of sustainability has been less explored. The purpose of this paper is to specifically explore the agency of academics to foster transformative initiatives for sustainability within the context of institutions historically serving under-represented populations.

Using a qualitative methodology, this paper highlights the importance of considering sustainability in processes of transformation. This paper is specifically interested in how academic faculty and those in assigned leadership positions view their agency in relation to promoting transformation for sustainability at the institutional level. Drawing on data generated from semi-structured interviews with 13 participants at an historically Black university in South Africa, this paper details academics' and leaders’ experiences and perceptions of their agency.

This study reveals the adverse interactional dynamics within higher education institutions, which negatively impact academics’ participation as key agents in change processes. Positional and identity challenges faced reveal the persistence of colonial and apartheid legacies of racism, sexism, Afrophobia and xenophobia – which casts a shadow on possible trajectories of transformation and sustainability. This has serious implications for the common good, given South Africa's regional import for knowledge production and decolonisation within universities; its key role in the African 2063 Agenda; and the wider global Sustainable Development agenda.

This study highlights insufficient engagement with the sustainability of transformation efforts within the context of South Africa. This study also emphasises the relation between transformation imperatives and racial, socio-economic, gender and epistemic justice imperatives of sustainable development.

This study aims to think critically about collaborative working through the practical application of an ethics of care approach. The authors address the following research questions: How can the authors embed an ethics of care into academic collaboration? What are the benefits and challenges of this kind of collaborative approach? The contextual focus also incorporates a collective sense making of academic identities over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors focus on the activities of the “Consumer Research with Impact for Society” collective at and around the 2021 Academy of Marketing conference. The authors draw on the insights and labour of the group in terms of individual and collaborative reflexivity, workshops and the development of a collaborative poem.

First, the authors present the “web of words” as the adopted approach to collaborative writing. Second, the authors consider the broader takeaways that have emerged from the collaboration in relation to blurring of boundaries, care in collaboration and transformations.

The overarching contribution of the paper is to introduce an Ethics of Collective Academic Care. The authors discuss three further contributions that emerged as central in its operationalisation: arts-based research, tensions and conflicts and structural issues. The application of the “web of words” approach also offers a template for an alternative means of engaging with, and representing, those involved in the research.

Personal branding is a strategic tool of marketing and communication to define success in organisations. While it constitutes a conscious attempt to commodify self and audit self, it must be intentionally managed to obtain its optimum results. This study aims to illustrate how personal branding may also pose unintentional and unconscious strategic tool for women academics in academia to help them get wider visibility and increase their chances of getting into leadership positions.

We employed a case study approach and convenience sampling to select our unit of analysis. Three universities in both public and private universities in the eastern regions of Indonesia were purposefully selected, and interviews were held with 30 female leaders occupying and occupied middle and lower leadership hierarchies.

Our research shows that, despite their unintentional, unplanned and poorly designed personal branding, women have been able to advance to their current leadership positions by building their own rooms for practising their own preferred leadership values to get them visible and heard. This way is performed through a gendered networking, previous leadership experience and bureaucratic requirements. The consequence of such a practice may limit the range of visibility to getting noticed as worthy individuals for senior leadership roles. This might be one reason why women are scarcely found in senior leadership positions.

We propose that natural strategies of constructing, narrating and marketing or communicating personal branding in academia through authentic actions can also be helpful for the success of women to get to leadership roles in a smaller and ambient environment.