Changing academic identities in the context of a Managerial University – Bridging the duality between professions and organizations: Evidence from the U.S. and Europe

Abstract

Reforms focusing on privatization, deregulation, and cutbacks have increasingly drawn professional services into organizational settings. In the higher education sector these reforms have been pronounced since the 1990s. They have centralized university management and sought efficiencies in work processes by performance monitoring and competition. Occupations are seen as threatened by the organizational management under the new managerial regimes. Scholars of the relations between occupations and organizations note the duality between the two. They argue that maintaining the duality between occupations versus organizations needs to be bridged and one needs to find typologies which incorporate the two in a productive way. This paper provides an example of such a duality by focusing on academic profession and university organizational context. It aims to answer the question how the duality between occupations and organizations can be bridged in this particular sector? It does so though studying the changing work roles and identities of academics as they are ultimately the carriers of professional values and norms. Thereby two sub-questions are posed: What kind of dynamics threatens the holistic academic identity? Do organizational managerialism and academic capitalism replace disciplines as the source of identity for academics? Based on the evidence from the most recent studies on changing academic roles and identities on both sides of the Atlantic a typology of the dynamics of change in values in the organizational context is developed. The duality of occupations and organizations in the case of academic profession and universities can be bridged when professionals experience enriching or replacing value dynamics and thereby acquire hybrid identities.