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In this penultimate chapter, we link the key themes on academic resilience to the changing context of the academic workforce around the world. We provide provocations for individual academics and institutional leaders to reflect on the complexities of the academic landscape and academic identity regardless of contexts and adversities. We include in this chapter powerful reflections for academics and institutions to build academic resilience by tapping into structural or institutional resources, collective solidarities, and personal resources. By offering these reflections, we hope our readers – individuals and institutions – will reflect on strategies to navigate the changing and unstable terrains of academia.

Employing institutional logic and institutional work as its theoretical framework, this study analyzes scholars' reactions to performance measurement systems in academia.

Large datasets were collected over time, combining both quantitative and qualitative elements. The data were gathered from a two-wave survey in 2010 (966 respondents) and 2015 (672 respondents), conducted among scholars performing teaching- and research-oriented tasks in three Finnish universities.

The analysis showed statistically significant changes over time in the ways that the respondents were positioned in three major groups influenced by different institutional logics. This study contributes to the international debate on institutional change in universities by showing that in Finnish universities, emerging business logics and existing professional logics can co-exist and be blended among a growing group of academics. The analysis of qualitative open-ended answers suggests that performance measurement systems have led to changes in institutional logic, which have influenced the scholars participating in institutional work at the microlevel in academia.

While most scholars remain critical of performance measurement systems in universities, the fact that many academics are adapting to performance measurement systems highlights significant changes that are generally occurring in academia.

While most extant studies have focused on field- and organizational-level analyses, this study focuses on understanding how the adoption of performance measurement systems affects institutional logic and institutional work at the microlevel. Moreover, the study's cross-sectional research setting increases society's understanding of institutional evolution in academia.

The digitisation of various parts of society is developing at an increasingly rapid rate, which effects the way people receive services and how familiar they are with new innovations and technological challenges in educational environments. The future members of society must be prepared to participate in the creation of new innovative solutions as well as to support the process of knowledge creation. Despite the fact that rapid development of technologies requires society to immediately respond, even under these circumstances society must be able to make meaningful decisions. These processes put on the forefront of competence have the ability to predict the unpredictable, which means that the educational environment must to a certain extent be able to predict what has not yet existed and cannot be verified. However, it must at the same time involve specialists from different fields who must deal with technologies and technological solutions that have not been tested or proven consistent in the long run, measure their impact and predict what services are up to date and what technologies and skills are required. This section examines the conditions for technology-enhanced learning (TEL) in a higher education (HE) context to understand what technologies and digital solutions have traditionally been used as well as the role of educators in driving TEL. The aim of the research is to conduct a pilot study to identify the most recent trends in the use of technologies in HE, identify the future research directions, predict the future directions of development and collect and analyse the obtained data.

The paper aims to examine the promotion of intra‐organisational collaboration within a university setting.

An ethnographic approach influenced by a phenomenographic framework of analysis was used.

Content analysis of qualitative data resulted in 11 overlapping themes being identified in respect of collaboration. Final analysis led to the identification of four hierarchically inclusive degrees of collaboration.

The research, whilst based within one UK university, raises important conceptual as well as practical questions.

The implications of this paper have relevance for the ways in which universities and other agencies promote intra‐ as well as inter‐departmental (or agency) working.

By using the framework developed it is possible to see parallels across different professional and agency settings.

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.

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.

The experience of “misfit” between individuals’ professional identities and their work roles or work contexts is common in career transitions. In contrast to extant literature that focuses on the identity struggle of these people, this study examines how problematic identity dynamics associated with misfit motivate the shift toward the development of positive identities and induce creativity in meaning-making and change-oriented actions. It builds on the insights of Mead (1934) and Joas (1996) who view creativity as the most significant aspect of human agency, and the identity work literature that highlights the agentic process in identity construction. The study looks at a group of “pracademics” whose career trajectories deviate from the prototypical patterns in academia. It examines the identity work strategies that these people undertake to overcome misfit and shows how identity work liberates them from the limits of a particular identity, and facilitates new activities that alter aspects of their work contexts. The study advances our understanding of identity work as a creative human endeavor and sheds new light on the change-oriented agency of misfits.

This study aims to analyse the impacts of an institutional change process on a specific higher education institution in Europe and the trade-offs between the faculty perceptions of success and the organization image during this process, in light of the identity institutional theory.

The impacts of this institutional change are analysed and discussed based on in-depth interviews conducted with faculty members of the accounting department in which they reflected upon academic success vis-a-vis the career assessment system adopted, followed up by those faculty members’ answering an electronic questionnaire about organizational identity and image perception (Gioia et al., 2000).

Considering the individual perspectives, faculty are concerned about their vocations and aspirations, with feelings of apprehension and insecurity, perceiving the institutional goals as too high and potentially unattainable. By shifting the priority towards research, costs in terms of losing the institutional excellence in teaching might arise, which has been traditionally keen to the institute’s organizational identity and consistent with faculty’s perceptions of academic success.

As in any research endeavour, some limitations might emerge. First, the authors addressed the context of a specific business school, in a European country. It is certainly true that culture plays a role in terms of both organizational and national levels. The authors acknowledge this as a limitation. Nevertheless, this research takes a “local” stance, the logic of academic evaluation and its impacts on institutional and individual identity formation processes is a worldwide phenomenon. Second, in defining the authors’ selection criteria, the authors excluded the possibility of other voices to be heard, both in the department itself and in the business school. Regarding the department, the authors argue that those are the ones who could influence future decisions, considering that they are the only ones eligible for the governing bodies under the institute’s regulations. Regarding the business school, adding other department(s) means adding other discipline(s) to the authors’ analysis with specific and different dynamics of researching, publishing and teaching, which also impacts the expectations regarding career and academic success.

First, before beginning an institutional change process, it is necessary to assess the vocations and aspirations of its members. The solution requires to reanalyse academic career premises and to reconsider the weights given to each academic activity, or furthermore, to offer more than one career path, so as to make it flexible for each faculty to follow their vocations and aspirations or to adapt to life demands. Second, in terms of organizational identity and image, the challenge is to minimize the gap between the construed external image and the internal identity, striving to achieve a balance between teaching, research, outreach and service.

Because of the nature of the academic work, the authors propose that the application of the theory should be preceded by a careful consideration of what is academic success. The misalignments studied and reported here reveal a multilevel phenomenon, wherein individual academic identities are often in conflict with the institutional image. The authors’ study entails a contribution to the application of the identity institutional theory to academic institutions.

Identity exploration is a central mechanism for identity formation that has been found to be associated with intense engagement, positive coping, openness to change, flexible cognition, and meaningful learning. Moreover, identity exploration in school has been associated with adaptive motivation for learning the academic material. Particularly in the fast-changing environment of contemporary society, confidence and skills in identity exploration and self-construction seems to be increasingly important. Therefore, promoting students’ identity exploration in school within the curriculum and in relation to the academic content should be adopted as an important educational goal. The purpose of this paper is to describe a conceptual framework for interventions to promote students’ identity exploration within the curriculum. The framework involves the application of four interrelated principles: (1) promoting self-relevance; (2) triggering exploration; (3) facilitating a sense of safety; and (4) scaffolding exploratory actions.

We begin the paper with a conceptual review of identity exploration. We follow by specifying the conceptual framework for interventions. We then present a methodological-intervention approach for applying this framework and describe three such interventions in middle-school contexts, in the domains of environmental education, literature, and mathematics.

In each intervention, applying the principles contributed to students’ adaptive motivation and engagement in the academic material and also contributed to students’ identity exploration, though not among all students. The findings highlight the contextual, dynamic, and indeterminate nature of identity exploration among early adolescents in educational settings, and the utility of the conceptual framework and approach for conceptualizing and intervening to promote identity exploration among students.

This paper contributes to the conceptual understanding of identity exploration in educational settings, highlights the benefits and the challenges in intervening to promote identity exploration among students, and discusses the future directions in theory, research, and practice concerned with the promotion of identity exploration in educational settings.

This examination of the higher education landscape now shifts to consider the relationship between the university and the teaching profession. The intention of this chapter is to focus on pre-service teacher education to examine how professional identity and university curriculum have become managed. This chapter will introduce the conception of the scholarly blind eye to illustrate how performativity works in the modernised university and three central arguments are forwarded. Firstly, that pre-service teacher education programs are increasingly managed from outside the university. Secondly, that this represents a significant change to higher education. And thirdly, that higher education is contributing to the reworking of teacher identity.