Professional Identity in Higher Education

Research in higher education has concentrated on a number of areas, which include the values and collective identities of academic faculty, their role in higher education governance, faculty norms and socialisation processes, and the impact of change in higher education on academic roles (Rhoades 2007). While many authors advocate the types of research methodology that should be used in such investigations, few question how academics come to possess the constructs and ideas that inform their professional identity. Academic identity generally relates to teaching and research activities that are subject or disciplined based (Deem 2006, p. 204). While the academic department (or a sub-unit of it) is usually the main one for academic staff, faculty members also operate within research, curriculum development, or teaching programme teams (Trowler and Knight 2000). Discipline-based cultures are the primary source of faculty members’ identity and expertise and include assumptions about what is to be known and how tasks to be performed, standards for effective performance, patterns of publication, professional interaction, and social and political status (Becher 1989). Each discipline has its own concept of success as a vehicle for prestige. Despite these differences, the academic profession possesses a set of common values across disciplinary and institutional boundaries, such as “academic freedom, the community of scholars, scrutiny of accepted wisdom, truth seeking, collegial governance, individual autonomy, and service to society through the production of knowledge, the transmission of culture, and education of the young” (Kuh and Whitt 1986, p. 76). In the same vein, reward structures in the academic profession across disciplines are based on prestige and symbolic Professional Identity in Higher Education