Positioning, similarity and difference: Narratives of individual and organizational identities in an Australian university

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Abstract

This study looks at a large Australian university at a time of reform in the higher education sector to examine how the identities of individuals working within the university, as well as the university itself, were constructed. By examining the narratives that organizational members told, the study shows how academics, senior executives and general staff members constructed identities through different patterns in the interplay of similarity and difference among actors, doings and perceptions, as a result of which positions were ascribed to and taken up by individual and collective actors.

Introduction

Recent changes in the higher education sector around the world have meant that researchers have become increasingly interested in the effects of managerialism and marketization in universities. In particular, studies have examined how managerial practices related to wider sectoral reforms have influenced academics’ identities (e.g., Barry, Berg, & Chandler, 2006; Humphreys & Brown, 2002).The work on universities forms part of the larger body of literature that has investigated how organizational and individual identities are formed, particularly through the complex ways in which people relate themselves to organizational identities (e.g., Holmer-Nadesan, 1996; Larson & Pepper, 2003); as well as how identities are affected by broader changes associated with the rise of the enterprise culture, new public management and marketization (du Gay, 1996; Thomas & Davies, 2002).

This study of a large Australian university, at a time of higher education reform, examines how organizational identities—both individual and organizational—are constructed from the narratives that organizational members tell as they talk about specific events in their organizational life, their experiences and their concerns. In telling these narratives, individuals talk about themselves, the group they belong to, other groups, their organization, other organizations, etc. Our findings show how, through particular interplays of similarity and difference, speakers position themselves in relation to other identities, both individual and collective, as well as the audience being addressed. Through this process, particular individual and organizational identities are formed and different outcomes are achieved.

In carrying out this study, we extend the application of identity studies in higher education to the Australian context. We also provide a comparison of the identity narratives of different groups within the university—academics, senior executives and members of the general staff. Our study also shows how different patterns in interplays of similarity and difference and in positioning can provide a creative space for actors to construct narratives that produce quite different outcomes. Our study thus contributes greater insight into the nuances of the process of identity work, as well as its outcomes.

This paper is organized as follows. We first review the theory on the construction of identity. We then introduce the case study and present an overview of how we collected and analyzed the data. Third, we present our findings. Finally, we discuss the implications.

Section snippets

The construction of identity

The concept of organizational identity has been of considerable interest to researchers over the last 20 years. Albert and Whetten's (1985) work on organizational identity sparked a burgeoning interest among organization scholars. These authors defined organizational identity as the construct that members use to describe what is central, enduring and distinctive about their organization. In this literature, how people relate themselves to the organization's identity is understood in terms of

Methods

This study involves a large Australian university, referred to here as “the University”, which we selected for several reasons. First, as universities have widely acknowledged categories of membership (e.g., academics, administrators, etc.), each of which has a story to tell about themselves, each other and the organization, thus enabling us to look into the complexity of how organizational identities are narrated into existence. In this way, we can compare academics, senior university

Findings

In this section, we discuss the findings. We show six different categories of narrative—as told by academics, senior executives and general staff—and look more closely at the interplays of similarity and difference and the positioning that occurs in each of them.1

Discussion and conclusions

Our research has shown that academics have been impacted by recent educational reforms in Australia in similar ways as those in the UK (Barry et al., 2001; Prichard & Willmott, 1997), Sweden (Barry et al., 2006) and Finland (Ylijoki, 2005). Not surprisingly, we find evidence of two narratives told by academics, which construct a self-identity of a pressured and overworked academic. While academics tended to present themselves as victims, senior executives told narratives in which they were

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