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Articles

Exploring the ways of studying academic identity as a dynamic discursive performance: the use of diary as a method

Pages 506-521 | Received 04 Sep 2021, Accepted 28 Oct 2021, Published online: 23 Nov 2021

ABSTRACT

As universities are undergoing transformations produced by trends towards marketisation, massification, new public management, and ‘third mission’ of socio-economic impact, higher education (HE) researchers are increasingly concerned with the implications of the HE sector change on academic practice, professional identities, and even wellbeing. This paper is situated within the complex interplay of policy incentives and governance mechanisms that appear to be resulting in the rising bifurcation and precariousness of academic careers and identities. In this context, drawing on a pilot study of ‘third space’ academic identities, and the methodology that combines work diaries and narrative interviews, it discusses the use(fulness) of (inter)action-, positionality-, and affect-driven methods in studying the academic identity construction. It argues that diverse methods that go beyond the usual interview- and questionnaire-based approaches are needed to better understand and support the existing and emergent academic practices and communities.

Introduction

Studies of academic identity have a long and rich tradition. Some of it is bound in questions of how one becomes an academic, and who becomes an academic, rooted in the American sociological tradition of the 1970s (Merton and Gaston Citation1977; Metzger Citation1977). Other facets materialise in accounts of academic ‘cultures’ (Snow Citation2012) and ‘tribes’ (Becher Citation1989), and the mapping of networks and power relationships of and within academic communities (Bourdieu Citation1990). Since around the turn of the millennium, studies of academic identity, whether within a single discipline or spanning many, have become increasingly focused on the (change in the) nature of academic work and identity within the context of a transformed – massified, marketised, neoliberalised, internationalised, externally evaluated – university (see Kehm and Teichler Citation2013; Teichler, Arimoto, and Cummings Citation2013; Henkel Citation2005; Citation2009). Gradually, the diversification of academic work towards research-, teaching-, or management-focused, invited the question of ‘what kind of an academic does one become?’ (Musselin Citation2007; Winter Citation2009; Clegg Citation2008; Macfarlane Citation2016).

In the context of high porousness between academic and non-academic sectors, and of multiple competitions (Krücken Citation2021) within higher education (HE), the question, which effectively queries the consensus around the very meaning of ‘academic’,Footnote1 is a complex one, and requires an expansion of conceptual and methodological tools with which to explore the nature of the ever proliferating ‘academic’ practices, in order to better understand the transformation of the profession. Departing from the normalisation and homogenisation of this term over the geographies and temporalities of its enactment, to designate the holder of the highest degree of study engaged in some form of university-based teaching and discipline-bound scholarship, what Feather (Citation2016) calls ‘badges of office’ that externally and internally proclaim academic identity, I will be addressing and exploring the forms of, and means of pursuing, the conceptual expansion of the term ‘academic’, with theoretical and practical consequences. As such expansion is ongoing, the term will be used throughout this paper in a dual sense – both recognising and problematising the enduring historical signification referred to above.

In offering an example of conceptual expansion, I will be drawing in part on my experience of theoretical and methodological design for a pilot study conducted on a small sample of unusual, but growing type of ‘third space’ academics in the UK, which is the term recently used by authors like Whitchurch (Citation2012, Citation2019) and Watermeyer (Citation2015) to describe academics who draw on other kinds of professional identity and practice in addition to the academic one, in their university employment, ranging from managerial, external partnership building, institutional and policy research, to digital innovation in teaching and learning. I will discuss the importance of studying academic identity/-ies in general as dynamic, discursive, and often emotional performances, and then explore, through an example of a (work) diary, the benefits of methods that allow us to access the richness, complexity, non-linearity, and relational nature of identity-building.

I will argue that the most common method of studying academic identity, namely the (narrative) interview, can occasionally fail to capture the nuance, ambivalence, and ‘ordinariness’ that is part of identity-building but can be omitted in the construction of a linear, coherent, story. I will also argue that the approaches that emphasise individual intention similarly impoverish empirically-driven theoretical developments by insufficiently attending to the dialogical nature of what is often referred to as ‘identity work’ (De Fina Citation2011; Smith et al. Citation2016; Lam Citation2020). Consequently, I will offer some affordances presented by the use of (work) diaries, and demonstrate how this method, still rare in HE research (Cao and Henderson Citation2021), can be productively combined with interviews to enable a better understanding and theorisation of academic identity-building in the contemporary university.

I begin with a brief overview of recent HE sector changes, and attend to the increased porousness between social (professional) fields and discourses, and an increasingly ‘domain’-based (Henkel Citation2009) nature of academic work. I subsequently review dominant approaches to studying academic identity and identify some of their limitations in accurately representing the processes and outcomes of academic identification. Finally, I proceed to outline the conceptualisation of academic identity as a dynamic, multiply-positioning discursive practice (Angermüller Citation2013; Davies and Harré Citation1990) and propose approaches to its study that incorporate performance-, practice-, interaction-, and emotion-based methods. My proposition will be motivated by the argument that in the context of late-modern, ‘supercomplex’ (Barnett Citation2000) university, we require a thoughtful investigation of the local sites and forms of interaction, attachment, validation, affiliation and conflict, to fully appreciate the discursive frameworks within which the contemporary academics (attempt to) construct their professional identities and exercise their agency, and escape the narrow polarities of ‘traditional’, universally shared, academic values under attack from neoliberalism.

The changing conditions of academic work and the consequences for (the study of) academic identity

The transformations that the (global North) universities have been undergoing since the 1980s, including massification, marketisation, neoliberalisation, internationalisation, the rise and multiplication of evaluation and ranking systems, public accountability, and performance-based funding, and their effects on institutions and academic practice, have been widely and comprehensively captured in the literature (see Enders, de Boer, and Weyer Citation2013; Teichler, Arimoto, and Cummings Citation2013; Olssen and Peters Citation2005; Musselin Citation2007; Baćević Citation2019; Harris Citation2005). Authors have noted, for example, an increased commodification of academic work, an emphasis on entrepreneurialism, mobility, and internationalism (Normand Citation2016); increased measuring and monitoring of academic performance and comparable-outcome-based productivity (Huisman, de Weert, and Bartelse Citation2002) in a move from ‘old administration’ to ‘new public management’ (Enders, de Boer, and Weyer Citation2013); and establishing of closer links between academic and non-academic sectors (see Etzkowitz et al. [Citation2000] on the ‘triple helix’ of universities, industry, and the state, and Chubb and Reed [Citation2018] on the rise of the impact agenda in the pioneering UK context), with the focus on ‘mode 2’ knowledge (Gibbons et al. Citation1994) and the social relevance of research.

The core of the change to the academic communityFootnote2 has been observed as the ceding of professional autonomy and peer-conferred status (Bourdieu Citation1990) to professionalism as externally motivated and rewarded (Evetts Citation2011). The individual academic has accordingly moved from being a member of the scholarly community guided by Mertonian and Humbolditan norms of autonomy, disinterestedness, and unity of teaching and research (cf. Holden Citation2015) to a flexible knowledge worker (Clegg Citation2008), whose work is often externally imposed (Hammersley Citation2016) in a shift from ad-hoc and ‘craft’ to organised and ‘mass’ production of outputs (Musselin Citation2007). Precariousness and mobility, meanwhile, especially in the early stages of the career, have become the norm (Carrozza, Giorgi, and Raffini Citation2017; Neumann and Tan Citation2011).

Following the expansion and interaction of governance mechanisms of academic work, the studies of academic identity moved from explorations of the defining traits of scholarly communities (individual autonomy, collegial governance, critique of received wisdom) (Clarke, Hyde, and Drennan Citation2013) and disciplinary tribes (Becher Citation1989), to account for academics’ navigation of matrices of disciplinary and institutional frameworks (Clark Citation1983), with, it must be noted, the continuing dominance of the former on academics’ primary identification (Teichler, Arimoto, and Cummings Citation2013; Altbach Citation1996). While some authors thus noted that recent changes served to only entrench historically relevant, but contemporarily problematic, identification, such as one with the discipline or the abstract ‘scholarly community’ and the norms of the ‘old professionalism’ (for discussion, see Billot Citation2010), more recent theorisations have attempted to capture the change by positing more open-ended and flexible models of academic identity.

Most significantly, Henkel (Citation2005, Citation2009) has offered a model of identity as (re)formed at a nexus of disciplinary and epistemic, organisational and institutional, and personal affiliations, as the previously bounded, self-regulated social category experiences influences from external professional communities affecting its mechanisms of valuation and regulation. In the context of early career researchers’ (ECRs’) academic identity-building, McAlpine’s and colleagues’ (e.g. McAlpine and Turner Citation2012; McAlpine, Amundsen, and Turner Citation2014) work in North America and Europe developed the extremely influential model of intention-based identity-trajectory, the shape of which depends on a variety of social (professional and personal) factors, and the changing ‘horizon of opportunity’. Other recent work that has emphasised the influence on academic identity of multiple social fields within and outside of traditional boundaries of academia, and often conflicting identifications with different roles and groups within these (Smith Citation2017; Feather Citation2016; Hakala Citation2009) includes Ylijoki and Henriksson’s (Citation2017) and Enright and Facer’s (Citation2017) exploration of identity at the intersections of motivation/intentionality, of social groups as focus of duty and commitment, and of spatial and disciplinary movement; Watermeyer’s and Chubb’s (Watermeyer Citation2015; Chubb, Watermeyer, and Wakeling Citation2017) work on new spaces of collective identity-building for ‘third space’ academics engaging with different trans-disciplinary socio-epistemic and moral frameworks; Whitchurch’s (Citation2012; Citation2019) work on the broader concept of ‘third space’ HE professionals’ agentive evasion of boundaries of organisational professional identification; and exploration of the individual experience of purpose vis-à-vis perception of collective value orientation (Hancock, Hughes, and Walsh Citation2017; Djerasimovic and Villani Citation2020).

These studies suggest that as the expansion of spaces of academic work results in a multiplicity of discursive frameworks of identity-development, we will be witnessing more complex professional subjectivities than one of a disinterested, autonomous teacher-researcher oriented towards their disciplinary community as the primary source of validation and identification. In the context of the contemporary university that no longer easily accommodates that cultural ideal, I agree with Billot (Citation2010) that it becomes imperative to study what academics actually do, by employing approaches that help us more accurately map the continuous (re)formation of new academic subjectivities and communities, around entrepreneurial, collaborative, multi-, and inter-disciplinary project-based work, responsive research and the production of mode 2 knowledge, or the increasing bifurcation along the lines of research and teaching, permanent and contracted, engaged/activist and ‘Mertonian’. I suggest that this is a productive line of exploration not only for the study of most overtly precarious and hybrid/third space academics but also those who choose or are compelled to streamline their activities for the sake of forging an academic career (Fochler, Felt, and Müller Citation2016), or senior academics who might be experiencing professional identity schisms (Winter Citation2009), engaged in various forms of organisational and institutional governance, funding, policy, or commercial work (Musselin Citation2007).

(Academic) identity as normative narrativisation of fragments or multiply-positioning performance?

In most of the above literature, the theoretical focus has been on the individual intentionality and the project of self (Giddens Citation1991), where the individual exploration, evolution, and adaptation are paramount (Whitchurch Citation2019). The predominant method of accessing this individual project has been the interview, particularly narrative interview, as a way of ‘demonstrat[ing] the goals and intentions of individuals, mak[ing] connections between events, and show[ing] the influence of the passage of time in carrying action forward’ (Coulter and Smith [2009] in McAlpine and Emmioğlu Citation2015, 1772). I would like to argue that while the narrative is a primary site of sense-making and an interview offers valuable insights into individual motivation, value, and purpose, the post-hoc imposition of form, often immanent to the process of the interview, leaves out the seemingly disconnected aspects of academic experience, and instead (re)interprets actions and events through a plot – or emplotment (Somers Citation1994) – that can correspond to the dominant external account of academic experience, for example, struggle against neoliberalisation, marketisation, and managerialism, pursuit of a linear, ‘successful’ career, or precariousness, potentially delivering narratives that are oversimplified.

As important as emplotment is for the construction of identity – it is what ensures coherence and consistence in context of continuous change (McLean and Price Citation2016) – we risk significant lacunae in empirical knowledge and theoretical construct by failing to capture the inconsistent aspects of experience which are a constant factor in one’s attempt to make sense of their professional identity, their values and motivations, in and beyond the lab/seminar room/archive. Such level of nuance can easily be lost to the depiction of an individual project that assumes a strategic pursuit of resources and capital within the traditional normative frameworks and founding myths of the academic profession, with an interview potentially encouraging venting narratives that may not entirely correspond to the daily reality of academic life in which some opportunities for different professional identity exploration introduced by HE sector changes are actually taken up in meaningful and productive ways. Concomitantly, an aspect of the late-modern identity theory that often implicitly or explicitly underpins studies of the academic project of the self is also neglected.

I refer specifically to the absence of a stable-identity, replaced by a processual and unfinished/-able ‘identification’ (doing, rather than being, after Judith Butler): articulation of, and suturing into, a discourse – never ‘singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions’ (Hall Citation2011, 4). Giddens’s (Citation1991) reflexive self-in-becoming is not only defined by its intention and purpose, but is also communal and communicative (Somers Citation1994), requiring the personal investment of meaning and purpose, and identification with the myth, tradition, and the normative underpinnings (see Taylor Citation1992) of the community/institution that embodies the discourse. As reflexive as it is, this is the work of an inter-subjective self, that constantly performs positioning within a social discourse (Davies and Harré Citation1990; Goffman Citation1954), or multiple discourses (Angermüller Citation2013) in which it enters frameworks and hopes to achieve others’ validations of one’s presented self (Jenkins Citation1996). The narrative is, of course, a part of that work, and should not be neglected in the methodological design – frameworks and validations depend on the stories that assign roles and meanings to characters (Davies and Harré Citation1990), from within a historically constructed inventory incorporating knowledge, values, intentions, and emotions (De Fina Citation2011). Occasionally, however, these polyphonic performances (in/from disciplinary, institutional, national, personal, political discoursesFootnote3) in the construction of academic identity are in tune, but often they can be dissonant, struggling to achieve a coherent narrative, with implications for the individual project’s success and an individual’s wellbeing.

Such complexity demands methodological experimentation and employment of methods that can more accurately invoke/represent/construct these multiple spaces, communities, and discursive frameworks. In my work on ECR ‘hybrids’ in the UK, I combined narrative interviews with work diaries, the exploration of whose usefulness in meeting the empirical and theoretical demands of studying academic identity referred to above will be the focus of the remnant of this paper.

Finding more adequate ways of representing fluidity and multiplicity: the example of a work diary

Although relatively neglected in HE research – an only just published volume on the benefits of diary as a method in researching HE (Cao and Henderson Citation2021) seeks to rectify this by highlighting the potential of diaries in studying students’ experience, and particularly for emancipatory and inclusive research – diaries have had a long use in fields such as applied linguistics (see Rezaei Citation2017; Groves Citation2021). There, the use of the diary reflects this research field’s engagement with fluidity and multiplicity of social identity and the interest in capturing its discursive performance and ‘code switching’. More generally, as suggested by the early advocates of diaries in sociological studies of counter cultures in the US (Zimmerman and Wieder Citation1977), diaries offer access to usually unseen and otherwise inaccessible (Sheble and Wildemuth Citation2009) aspects of participants’ experience and the minimisation of the observer effect in immersive participant observationFootnote4 but also, as mentioned earlier, access to what is often dismissed – in memory and in interview – as insignificant and mundane (Groves Citation2021).

Diaries can capture – in participants’ own discursive repertoires – (inter)actions that are dismissed due to their complexity, ambiguity, and the difficulty of emplotment, but that nevertheless constitute daily instances of relational-performative construction of identity in multiple social spaces in which a Bakhtinian dialogical self (Jasper et al. Citation2011) acts. In combination with interviews, they can capture and highlight the contrast between different temporalities (e.g. duration of patterned daily acts vs. condensed time of a narrative interview) of academic work and represent more accurately the geographies of identity performance: from local, such as a research unit, department, institution, to extra-institutional, national, global, simultaneous, online, public, spaces, and communities of engagement

The design of the diary can vary from unstructured and relatively narrative, to a semi- and fully structured ‘log’ type of a diary that I used in my research to contrast the emplotment of the interview. The latter kind can, depending on the research purpose and the quality of the studied phenomena, be interval-based (completed every day or hour) – which was again my choice – event-based, or signal-based so that it uses certain events or prompts from the researcher to trigger an entry (Sheble and Wildemuth Citation2009).

While emotions were not discussed above as an integral part of the discursive identification theory, I wanted my design to recognise emotions as an inextricable part of performing a normatively consuming, often all-encompassing professional identity/calling (Holden Citation2015; Chubb, Watermeyer, and Wakeling Citation2017), and one in which epistemic emotions (Morton Citation2009) such as worry, anxiety, excitement, or satisfaction, play an important role, especially in virtue epistemology and problem- and engagement-motivated inquiry increasingly directing academic practice (Brun and Kuenzle Citation2008). Other authors (see Mannevuo and Valovirta Citation2019) also emphasise the necessity of acknowledging the academic performance at least in part as emotional labour (Hochschild [1983] in Aitchison and Mowbray Citation2013), the latter inseparable from intellectual labour (Aitchison and Mowbray Citation2013), not as antagonistic to, but deeply implicated in it, as a motivational or a hindering tool for learning and (appropriate/successful) socio-cultural performance of a social role and relationship (Cotterall Citation2013; see also Burford [Citation2021] on diaries and emotions).

Uses of a diary in academic identity study: reflection on practice

The empirical study on which I draw was conducted (in 2016/2017) in the UK context, in which the ‘third mission’ policies of integrating social impact, public engagement, and knowledge exchange with ‘traditional’ academic work, have recently been substantially transforming the social and normative spaces of academic work, even creating ostensibly new types of ‘third space’ (Whitchurch Citation2012; Watermeyer Citation2015) academic roles, with responsibilities for both traditional and third mission academic work. These roles also seemed to appear among ECRs, a population already existing in a liminal and precarious space, thus particularly susceptible to becoming an object for diffraction of different identities. As at the time a hybrid ECR myself, my emic positionality initially motivated the exploration of the grounds for potentially defining a collective hybrid identity, and a degree of emancipatory purpose to this study. As Greene (Citation2014) points out, however, group membership does not automatically confer identification with the group; thus, while my fluid hybrid positioning allowed the sight of the phenomena in the proliferation of academic roles and a level of rapport with the participants, in my reflexive interaction with the data collection and analysis, I observed that I was performing from a positionality of an academic researcher in higher education, which for the most part of this process separated me from the participants and their experiences. This, in turn, invited the generation of data performed without assumptions and unspoken understandings of what might have been shared about our identity.Footnote5 Instead, I sought to employ a methodology that enabled access to the everyday activities and their meaning, and a close examination of the participants’ motivations, values and sense of belonging, and the multiplicities of, and the relationship between, their social positionings within and outside the institution.

The participants (five of them, all humanities and social science ECRs) completed the diary every day during one working week preceding the interview to ensure the ongoing reflection and the chronological proximity (to the interview) of a specific positionality-conflictual event or observation. They were given a protocol asking them to describe the activities in which they engaged, their purpose, duration, other participants involved, professional identification/positionality they felt was invoked by it, and the emotion associated with it. The elements of the diary were then used as either prompts or the focal points of the interview narrative, and later analysed both separately in complementing and confronting the interview data. They were examined as discursive ‘utterances’ (Angermüller Citation2013) compared and contrasted with interview utterances to demonstrate and examine the polyphony of discursive positioning within the academic field, along with the elements of academic identity conceptualisation: in-group and we v other statements; motivation; aspirations; value; choice/intention vs. response.

This methodology significantly increased the richness of the data and provided insight into some inconsistencies of daily identity/-ies performance that may become ‘ironed out’ in the process of narrating, as one seeks resolution of contradictions rather than accepting them as an intrinsic part of personhood (Davies and Harré Citation1990). For example, it provided insight into the sheer diversity of tasks that constitute the participants’ everyday work: in addition to activities traditionally perceived as scholarly ‘badges of office’ (Feather Citation2016) (archive researching, reading, writing, editing, or conference participation), these included, e.g. social media work, website management, project planning and evaluation performing, completing administrative tasks, organising events, mentoring. Multitudinous activities were accompanied by a vast number of positionalities, implicating frequent (daily and hourly) role switching (scholar, researcher, non-academic practitioner, professional, administrator, bureaucrat, teacher, project co-ordinator, PR professional, events planner, social media manager), within and across the diaries, that would have been inaccessible in a narrative interview that charts – or rather, constructs – a linear movement over a long period of time, creating narratives of success, failure, opportunity, and challenge according to the dominant frameworks and a presumed (shared) understandings of what an ‘academic’ is. Diaries thus offered insight into daily performances, their meaning and signification from within different discursive frameworks (disciplinary, managerial, organisational, civic), and their contradictions, that could then be addressed by the interview.

Useful points for probing included questions of value, motivation, choice, reward, and sacrifice within the participant’s specific disciplinary, institutional, personal context – for example, time spent managing the project’s website and social media management that was not spent writing a paper – and who constituted the audiences and validators, real or imagined, of their daily efforts and identifications (e.g. supervisors, research communities, and non-academic partners). Between two ‘engaged researcher’ positionalities, for example, it was possible to observe that a similar activity – for example, engaging in co-production with non-academic partners – could be variously constructed as an academic engaging with non-academics, or a researcher working on a joint activity with collaborators, based on the lines of identification and discursive provenance of positioning (in the first case, adherence to a traditional, bounded professional category; in the second, adherence to a third mission ethos). Another benefit of combining these two methods and probing into the instances of identification was an opportunity to interrogate the degree to which ideas of ‘academic’ were shared.

For example, unlike ‘researcher’ or ‘scholar’, the positionality of ‘academic’ was named extremely rarely in the diaries, indicative perhaps of the difficulty with which these ECRs could identify its qualifying properties. Where it did appear, it was either associated with empirical research, or with participating in an academic conference. Here, and in interviews, it was still predominantly seen in a ‘traditional’ sense, despite the participants’ recognising, in their narratives, the expansion of the academic world to include work such as grant writing, outreach, and engagement. One way of theorising this attachment to the traditional ideal of the academic, despite its being continuously unsettled by scholarship and experience, including this project, is the earlier noted form of resistance vis-a-vis rapid change; another might be the lack of validating communities providing points of identification. Where indications of such community appeared in my data, there was also the emergence of individual’s recognition of there being ‘more than one way to be an academic’.

Another advantage afforded by this methodology was in the observation of the process, not only the result, of narrative integration. For example, one participant reframed in their interview the satisfaction found in engaging with non-academic communities in everyday practice as not constitutive of ‘proper’ research. For another, daily administrative activities noted in the diary, were in the interview positively restructured as valuable, for the participant's research, their understanding of academic work, and as a job-market skill. Such inconsistencies can have valuable implications for studying dynamic relationships between discursive frameworks that guide the construction of the narrative self (the strategic pursuit of the individual project) and one's daily activities. Thus, in the former case, we could witness an adherence to a ‘traditional’ academic ideal that tarnishes positive daily experiences as not good enough to earn academic identification, and in the latter case, an adherence to a more entrepreneurial, even neoliberal, idea of an academic driving acceptance of the not always positive and meaningful everyday experiences as enabling factors in the project of self.

Finally, affective aspects of diaries provided insights into the emotive world of academic work, and some sources of stress, frustration, reward, and satisfaction, but also served as useful interview prompts, or even focal points around which to discuss identity categories. For example, as one participant remarked, it is the enthusiasm with which ‘you go into a subject with a lot of detail [and] develop theory about it’ that makes an ‘academic’. Interestingly, diaries revealed no clear-cut affective distinctions between actions of a researcher/scholar positionality, and other types listed above, challenging the myth of passion and enthusiasm that surrounds all scholarly activity, and dismisses everything else as a cause of dissatisfaction. For some participants, time spent reading or writing could be equally anxiety-inducing as a deadline-driven email correspondence with multiple actors, as boring as personal admin, and time spent engaging in social media management as energising and inspiring as attending an academic conference. In one case, the lack of ‘academic’ (or even researcher/scholar) positionality did not prevent the participant from experiencing daily feelings of motivation and purpose affected by – as explained in the interview – the general idea of knowledge creation, problem-solving, and efficiency, and the presence/absence of similarly motivated others.

These distinct advantages of using a diary as a part of methodology – and in the case of using a (semi)structured, log-type diary, I would always advise combining it with methods that elicit narration and constitute different aspects of identity work – were also accompanied by some challenges, often encountered in the literature. The most common one (e.g. noted by all contributors to Cao and Henderson’s [Citation2021] volume) is the variability of the quantity and quality of data produced due to issues of participants’ time, compliance, and task onerousness (Duke Citation2012), as different participants’ records varied from a single entry to over ten entries per day. This inconsistency can be influenced both by the clarity of briefing and the labour-intensiveness of the technique for an already a very busy participant group. Mittelmeier et al. (Citation2021) emphasise participant engagement, pre-diary interviews, and rapport-building as ways of countering this issue. In addition to focusing on participant preparation, other solutions also include varying the type of record-keeping media to the one most suitable to individual requirements: from a word document (such as I used) to web-based (b)logs, audio records, or photography (Dangeni and MacDiarmid Citation2021; Mathebula and Martinez-Vargas Citation2021). Such variability could present other challenges, most obviously data consistency, but these concerns should in any case always be carefully balanced against the benefits to the participant, not only in terms of avoiding over-burdening, but allowing reflection, self-recognition, and epistemic contribution, particularly in critical and inclusive research that is often the site of diary use (Duke Citation2012; Sabharwal et al. Citation2021; Mathebula and Martinez-Vargas Citation2021).

Concluding reflections and future directions

In this paper, I discussed the value of employing multiple qualitative methods in the study of academic identity/-ies as a dynamic discursive process, and reflected specifically on some of the benefits of solicited, log-type work diaries used in combination with narrative interviews. This methodology allowed recording the ephemeral, ‘insignificant’, and ambiguous (inter)actions and emotions in diaries, and combining and confronting them with the emplotment, or the narrative work of identity integration and meaning-making (Clandinin and Connelly Citation2000), to help better understand some of the processes of contemporary academic identity positioning, and the sites and communities that enable and complicate it. While my insights are based on a pilot study of a highly specific type of academic, probably more common in the Anglo-Saxon context then elsewhere, I suggest that the benefits gained from employing a performative-narrative methodology can be productively transported to other contexts of studying the changing academic profession, whether at the point of entry, such as in the case of ECRs, or in the case of their more senior colleagues.

Some previous work that used the combination of activity logs and interviews in the (longitudinal) study of the academic world, such as that of McAlpine and Turner (Citation2012), demonstrated the resulting richness of related experience – however, its individualist approach and a focus on doctoral students stopped short of a full exploration of everyday practices and their signification of value and affiliation, to help us understand the changing rules and rewards of the academic profession discussed at the beginning of the paper. Going beyond individual motivations and strategies of the ‘projectified’ self, and attending to the socio-normative and emotional context of activities – for example, participating in a conference, preparing a lecture, organising an event, writing a paper, filling out an evaluation form, having an online collaborative meeting with an academic colleague or a non-academic partner from across the world, engaging in a Twitter discussion with other academics or members of the public – provides us with access to discursive polyphony of both individual and collective academic experiences.

Understanding the different spaces of academic work, ownership and function of multiple and diverse activity, disruption of organisational and knowledge boundaries (Lam Citation2020) and the different communities – institutional, disciplinary, the domain-based (Henkel Citation2005), or ethical-epistemic – which this work enacts, can move the study of the change of academic profession beyond reproducing polarities and monitoring imposition/resistance/compliance to top-down policies, and show us new and different alliances, forms and sources of distinction, validation, and authority, and axes of identification that both produce and are produced by the sector change – for example, based around modes of work, ethical and political commitment, employed pedagogies and methodologies (engaged, ‘pure’, mode 2, online). Such approaches can help advance some current movements in theory of universities as assemblages, unbundled and deterritorialised (Baćević Citation2019), with the consequence in the diminishing of formalisation and standardisation, and the proliferation of values, agents, collective identities and available identifications. Practically, theorisations and records of different ways of ‘doing academic’ can more adequately support the training and socialisation of new generations of academics.

It is thus important that we understand, theorise, and validate instability, ephemerality, and fluidity between positionalities and interrupt identity categorisations, such as ‘academic’, that do not serve individual or the group: as in my study’s examples of the problem with academic positionality, or with the ideal-academic-discourse driven inconsistencies between how individuals act and feel in the moment and how they narrate it based on the expectation of a dominant, stable-identity category validation. Other methods (or, as I suggested earlier in response to diary data quality and quantity issue, media) of articulating and recording non-narrative experiences of self can be helpful in this respect: photography and photo-journaling, autoetnograpy, poetry, collaborative experiments (Taylor and Gannon Citation2018; Elliot, Reid, and Baumfield Citation2017), and research that recognises emotive and sensual aspects of academic work (Manathunga, Selkrig, and Baker Citation2018, 172). Common methods can also accommodate unfixity in generating, analysing, and representing data: in writing that recognises and imparts the subjects’ and the author’s disjointedness and polyvocality, the use of vignettes (Churchman and King Citation2009) or collaborative writing (Waitere et al. Citation2011), and interviewing that ensures the articulation of incoherence, change of perspective, spontaneity, and interruption (Kraus Citation2000).

While this paper has advocated for methods that study identity-in-becoming, we should not neglect historical, longitudinal, and comparative perspectives, remembering that we are often representing a change from an idealised past and a collective myth of academia, constructed in a very particular historical-cultural context (Baćević Citation2019), and theorised – in this paper as well – through the perspective built on the Western experience of late modernity. This final caveat is expressed with the expectation that some of the paper’s insights will be valuable to other contexts with different historical trajectories of university/academic profession development, and as an invitation to supplement – and complicate – its suggestions with a plurality of other experiences and perspectives.

Acknowledgements

The author expresses deep gratitude to the Special Issue editors and the anonymous reviewers for the exceptionally supportive and productive feedback received on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sanja Djerasimovic

Sanja Djerasimovic is a research fellow at the University of Exeter, UK, where she studies the interconnected areas of higher education policy, academic identity and practice, particularly among early career academics, and citizenship education. More recently, her work has particularly focused on the so-called ‘impact agenda’ or the ‘third mission’ of university, and the ways in which this discourse communicates with the professional, vocational, and personal notions and practices of responsibility, agency, and citizenship in academic work, especially within humanities and social sciences. She is interested in qualitative and inter-disciplinary approaches to social research, and particularly the use of discourse analysis. Prior to joining Exeter, she has held research and teaching posts at the University of Oxford.

Notes

1 Already questioned by Teichler, Arimoto, and Cummings (Citation2013) in the cross-cultural context of their international study of the profession.

2 The changes discussed here – from self-prescribed, autonomously governed (cf. Collini Citation2012; Ash Citation2006), and internally (e)valuated profession to one intricately linked, via funding and evaluation models, to the economic and epistemic systems and priorities of the governments and the markets (Kehm and Techler Citation2013), are largely based on research conducted in the Anglo-Saxon (UK, North American, Australian, and New Zealand) and European (EU) contexts.

3 Baćević (Citation2019) refers to Baert’s noting that intellectual positioning is either academic or ethico-political, but that, increasingly, different spaces and communities (e.g. online) in which it happens can blur the boundaries between the two.

4 In my arguing for recording the daily experiences, activities, and communal spaces of engagement and interaction, I would advocate, where possible, engaging in ethnographic work as well.

5 Data analysis also involved respondent validation.

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