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The purpose of this paper is to offer an insight into mental health illness in academia, and its impact on academic identity.

The study adopts an evocative autoethnographic approach, utilising diary entries collected during the author’s three-month absence from her university due to depression and anxiety. A contemporary methodology, autoethnography seeks to use personal experience to provide a deeper understanding of culture. In this personal story, the author explores her decline in mental health and subsequent re-construction of her academic identity in order to enhance understanding of the organisational culture of higher education.

This paper illustrates how, rather than being an achievement, academic identity is an ongoing process of construction. Although mental health illness can contribute to a sense of loss of self, identity can be re-constructed during and after recovery. Autoethnographic explorations of depression and anxiety in higher education provide a deeper understanding of an often stigmatized issue, but researchers should be alive to the political and ethical pitfalls associated with deeply reflexive research.

There is little autoethnographic research on mental health illness in a university setting. This paper offers unique insights into the lived experience of depression and anxiety in the context of academic life, through the lens of academic identity.

The phenomenon of current practitioners moving into academia is generally welcomed in terms addressing recruitment problems and the perceived benefit of bringing practical experience into the academic setting. Yet the individual practitioner may encounter considerable difficulties with this career transition. This paper identifies the different sources and discourses of credibility – management experience versus academic knowledge – as particularly relevant, and considers the ways in which these “emergent management academics” manage their self‐identities in their day‐to‐day interactions.

This paper investigates how academic teachers engage in identity work and make sense of entrepreneurship and academia in an entrepreneurship training programme.

By employing a sensemaking approach, the paper inductively analyses materials from a business idea development camp organised for academic teachers.

In collective sensemaking during the camp, non-academic facilitators strongly influenced the reflection-in-experience via normative ideas of entrepreneurship and their othering of entrepreneurship from academic work. In their post-camp individual essays, the academic teachers reflect-on-experience and draw parallels between entrepreneurship and academic work constructing sameness.

Longitudinal research is needed in identity work and sensemaking among academic teachers in relation to entrepreneurship.

Universities need to offer arenas for teachers and other faculty to support identity work and sensemaking.

This study generates new understanding of how academic teachers engage in identity work and make sense of entrepreneurship in training when interacting with others. It underscores the importance of time needed for reflection-on-action.

The study aims to analyse international studies on the impact that new forms of control and performativity in higher education have on academics’ identity. The aim was threefold, namely, to provide an overview of the main published findings; to establish biases and future lines of research and to offer a starting point to stimulate a debate on the future of universities.

The present study consists of a systematic review aimed at providing an overview of the main professional identities (PIs) described in the literature in the past 10 years. A bibliographic search was conducted on the Web of Science, SCOPUS and Education Resources Information Centre, which yielded a total of 26 articles that were subsequently subjected to thematic analysis.

The study provides an overview of the types of identities developed by academics as a result of the new forms of control. Among the main findings, this study reveals a clear predominance of PIs characterised by submission to the new neoliberal demands. The professional, social and health consequences associated with these identities are also highlighted. Finally, a proposal is made for future research to better understand how these new PIs are constructed and developed.

Because of the chosen filters or databases, the study could have omitted possible articles relevant to this review. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to replicate such a study by expanding, for example, the languages used.

This study helps us to obtain a detailed description of the different identities generated as a consequence of the new governance of higher education. Furthermore, possible implications for mitigating this situation are mentioned.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the under life of Indonesian academics during ongoing implementation of government-driven policy enacted in higher education instititutions in Indonesia. The attention was specifically focused on the new programme of accountability and quality assurance moderated by the implementation of online assessment system to monitor and evaluate the perfromance of lecturers directly and how this system impacted upon the meaning of academic identity perceived by them.

This study was drawn from a qualitative research of case study approach. Semi-structured interviews were utilised to collect data and conducted with 30 academics from three state universities.

This study revealed that academics were grappling to balance their schism between keeping their existing identity tenable and excercising new prescribed roles from external environment. However, academics were still able to practice their preceived identity through their principled personal project that legitimate them to become academics and pursue their success rather than use instrumental means.

The results of this study will be expected to contribute to a better understanding on the dynamics of academics’ world as it is encountered against government-driven policy, and provide indications for policy makers to take into account this issue in the formulation and enactment of their policy.

A new aspect of identity in academic profession was found, that is to say religion.

The purpose of this paper is to synthesize a body of research addressing changes in academic identity brought on by neo-liberal university management while proposing a new interpretation based on the institutional work theory and a relational approach to agency.

The authors analyzed 19 qualitative empirical studies regarding the impact of new public management policies on academic identity within universities from different countries to support a qualitative meta-synthesis.

The meta-synthesis established a classification of work identity and self-identity that reflects variable but globally difficult experiences with the universities’ neo-liberal management. The results also indicate that, paradoxically, academics contribute to the perpetuation of managerialism through protection strategies and institutional maintenance work while acknowledging their painful effects on their identity. Despite the control and monitoring measures put in place by university administrations, academics have assumed a pragmatic approach to identity by using the prevailing spaces of autonomy and engaging in constant self-questioning. Those involved could make better use of these free spaces by adopting projective agency, that is by expanding the areas of support, collaboration and creativity that, by their own admission, make up the academic profession.

This meta-synthesis sheds light on the limits of current academic identity research while advancing studies conducted on institutional work, primarily by highlighting the type of agency used by actors during institutional change; at a practical level, this research promotes discussion on the manner in which academics could use their agency and reflexive skills by pushing their institutional work surrounding identity recreation further.

In this chapter, we review the ways in which scholars have conceptualized and relied on the notion of identity to understand the academic career. We explore the use of identity as a theoretical construct in research about the experience of being an academic. We discuss the individual and organizational factors that scholars have focused on when seeking to understand the role of professional and personal identity in academic careers, as well as recent and emerging shifts in the use of identity within this line of scholarship. Research suggests that if we are to understand the future of the academic career, we must understand the identities of its current and prospective members and, more importantly, how those identities shape goals, behaviors, and outcomes. We close with recommendations for future research and theory development.

The purpose of this self-study is to examine how transformative leadership in student organizations contributes to doctoral students’ professional development in higher education. Drawing from Mezirow’s (1997) notion of transformative learning and Bass’s (1990) theory of transformational leadership, the researchers discuss how an academic student organization, Alpha Upsilon Alpha, provided opportunities for transformative leadership in scholarship and service thus crafted academic identities and re-envisioned student organizations as spaces of transformative professional development.

Using organizational theory as a lens, in this chapter, the author critiques the neoliberal rationality in which the national and international ranking systems take precedence over the institutional missions and visions in institutional operations. The author argues that these essentialized ranking systems overlook the necessary diversity and uniqueness of institutions in the higher education system. The author outlines the potential role of mission statements in setting the institutional priorities, and the unnecessary pressure caused neoliberalism against such priorities. The implications of such imperatives for quality in various academic practices are identified and the unfairness of coercive isomorphism in higher education is illustrated. The author then proposes a spatial approach in which universities, nationally and internationally, can appreciate diversity in identity and work together, drawing from each other’s strengths to strengthen the higher education system that will support students and promote national economies.