The changes produced in higher education as a consequence of neoliberal influences have had a considerable impact on the university world. As a consequence, there has been a growing research interest in how such changes have affected academics. However, recent review studies related to this issue are scarce in the literature. Therefore, this…

The re-professionalisation of those who work in education is a common theme explored in the literature. This paper reports on research undertaken at an English Business School that was concerned with how academics responded to external accreditation and the introduction of five categories that demarcated them according to their academic…

Research publication has increasingly turned into academics' top priority around the world. Since researchers' professional survival/growth in the current competitive academic atmosphere hinges upon their research profile, there is a need for investigating how researchers' possible selves may guide their research productivity. Therefore, in this…

This self-reflective article considers the support mechanisms from which new lecturers from a teaching background may benefit upon their entry to academia. The concept of academic identity is explored and the suggestion of a continually evolving professional identity is discussed. Emergent themes of reciprocity and critical friendship, team…

This research explores the experiences of five professional practitioners from disciplines including teaching, youth work, sport and health, who had become lecturers in higher education. Their experiences are considered using interpretative phenomenological analysis and tentative conclusions are reached on the meaning of such experiences for the…

In this paper we share the outcomes of a project that sought to take up Nutbrown's challenge to "push out from the safe(er) boundaries of established methodologies" in early years research. We explore the value of auto-ethnographic storytelling, Lyotard's "petit récit", to the processes of doing and learning about research in…

The aim of this study has been to explore and understand the implementation of PDP as an educational innovation in a single institutional context. Adopting a Sartrean ontology in which the subjective individual takes precedence over the systems within which that same individual exists, an interview process sought to understand the attitudes of…

The problematisation of the professional standards for teachers in the UK lifelong learning sector tends to focus on the discourses that the standards embody: discourses that are posited as being based on a restricted or technicist model of professionalism, that fail sufficiently to recognise the lived experiences of teachers within the sector…

This paper offers an alternative proposition to that of Lewis on identity and professional identity in higher education (HE). The proposition is provided from the narratives of 26 individual interviewees who deliver HE in college-based higher education, a viewpoint not considered by Lewis, who tends to adopt a more generalist view. Where Lewis…

This research aimed to develop and validate a psychometrically sound and convenient measure of the professional identity questionnaire (PIQ) and to determine the level of professional identity among faculty members employed by higher education institutions in Jordan. The PIQ was administered to a sample of 551 faculty members employed by three…

This paper considers the concept of professionalism via perceptions (real or imagined) of lecturers delivering higher education business programmes (HEBPs) in further education colleges in England. The study comprised 26 in-depth interviews conducted in the Yorkshire and Humber region in the UK. The study builds on Perkin's views of a professional…

Locating post-16 professionalism explores the ways in which teachers in the UK and the USA engaged in digitally mediated communication incidentally narrate their professional selves during extended exchanges about the process of post-qualification registration. Drawing on a theoretical framework derived from participatory democracy, the study is…

This research builds on work carried out in England looking at how faculty negotiate their personal and professional identities. It focuses on a sample of full-time faculty in a private secular university in Kenya. Weekly time logs with follow-up individual semi-structured interviews were used as a basis for an examination on how faculty spend…

This paper provides a reflective focus on the concept of change to the professional identity of FE lecturers. Traditional perceptions of FE staff as vocational specialists are contested and the emergence of a new professional with an extended professionality is discussed. The changes analysed deal with the emergence of the HE in FE sector and the…

During the late 1980s and early 1990s further and higher education in the UK and Australia underwent restructuring, bringing institutional mergers and the transformation of institutes of technology and colleges of education into "new" universities. Vocational fields, including the creative arts and industries of design and film, came…