Professional identity reconstruction: Attempts to match people with new role expectations and environmental demands

Organizations increasingly find themselves in circumstances that generate a need for creating novel identities to deal with novel situations. Through a qualitative study of a professional education programme for military career officers, I explore the reconstruction of professional identities in light of what is perceived as a complex, demanding and changing environment. I found that the programme promoted images and worldviews of an ideal and desired professional identity, which did not match the role transitions and expectations to be enacted by the participants. In addition, the findings show how cultural and organizational dynamics constrained processes of identity reconstruction in the learning context. Implications of the study (e.g. how to theorize and learn from attempts to match people with new role expectations and environmental demands) are discussed. By building bridges across socialization theory, identity work and research on identities in context, and hereby integrating micro- and macro perspectives on professional identity reconstruction, existing theory is elaborated. The article concludes by pointing to the analytical value of exploring how professionals in later stages of their careers struggle to adopt timely and relevant identities and how we better understand the challenges stemming from this identity reconstruction work.

Research productivity of management faculty: job demands-resources approach

Purpose

The main purpose of this study was to examine which job resources are most valuable for research productivity, depending on varying teaching demands.

Design/methodology/approach

Data was collected from 324 management faculty at research, balanced and teaching (i.e. respectively low-, moderate- and high-teaching demands) public universities in the United States.

Findings

Results showed that no single job resource predicted research productivity across all three types of schools. At research schools (i.e. low-teaching demands), productivity was positively associated with job resources including summer compensation, level of protection for untenured faculty and number of research assistant hours, while negatively associated with travel funding. At balanced schools (i.e. moderate-teaching demands), research output was positively associated with time allocated to research, grant money, travel funding and conference attendance, while negatively associated with amount of consulting hours. At teaching schools (i.e. high-teaching demands), the only significant resource was time allocated to research.

Practical implications

This paper can help management faculty and business school leaders understand what resources are most appropriate given the teaching demands associated with the specific institution, and by further helping these institutions attract and retain the best possible faculty.

Originality/value

This study extends prior work on academic research performance by identifying resources that can help faculty publish given different levels of teaching demands. This is important as teaching demands tend to be relatively stable within an institution, while they can vary greatly across types of institutions.

Learning to manage a mental health condition: Caring for the self and ‘normalizing’ identity at work

This article examines the internal and external pressures to ‘normalize’ identity in relation to individuals experiencing mental health conditions (MHCs) at work. The data takes the form of three vignettes extracted from a larger empirical study of 60 interviews. These explore the tensions surrounding identity for individuals experiencing MHCs as well as their interventions to suppress exhibiting the condition. The analysis captures a number of competing meanings surrounding identity in relation to learning to care for the self and managing MHCs. Our contribution is to explore the relationships between learning to care for the self and the performativity of ‘normalizing’ identity in managing MHCs at work. It also provides a potential means of integrating Foucault’s ethics of caring for the self with the literature on identity in ways that can be illuminating for those who manage their MHCs and the demands of work through processes of ‘normalization’. This analysis offers theoretical insights regarding how identity work may be self-defeating in exacerbating MHCs and therefore is of some practical benefit for managers, health professionals and those experiencing MHCs since they often leave individuals with little choice but to intensify their attempts to ‘normalize’ their identities.

Academic identities and sense of place: A collaborative autoethnography in the neoliberal university

Neoliberalism, precarious jobs, and control of work have multiple effects on academic identities as our allegiances to valued social groups and our connections to meaningful locations are challenged. While identities in neoliberal universities have received increasing research attention, sense of place has passed unnoticed in the literature. We engage with collaborative autoethnography and contribute to the literature in two ways. First, we show that while academic identities are put into motion by the neoliberal regime, they are constructed through mundane constellations of places and social entities. Second, we elucidate how academic identities today are characterized by restlessness and how academics use place and time to find meaning for themselves and their work. We propose a form of criticism to neoliberal universities that is sensitive to positionalities and places and offer ideas on how to build shared understandings that help us survive in the face of neoliberal standards of academic “excellence.”

Learning as moments of friction and opportunity: an autoethnography of ECR identities in queer time

In this article, we explore how time and temporality shape the identities of early career researchers as they learn to become academics. We engage in a collaborative autoethnography to reflect on how our shared identities as middle-class women and our divergences in age, ethnicity, familial status and sexuality shaped our embodied experiences of becoming academics. Drawing on the concept of queer time, we reconceptualise the becoming of newcomers as they learn (or do not learn) to belong to academia. We illustrate how queer time interrupts normative ideas of newcomer learning as progress, development and reproduction. We suggest that learning may alternatively be understood as ‘moments of friction’ and ‘moments of opportunity’ in which newcomers to the academy feel out of step, out of place and out of time. We conceptualise these moments as simultaneously painful yet productive of possibilities for learning to become an academic, differently.